I would focus on the site performance and search quality, before changing the look which is pretty usable.

I still occasionally give up on RCU because it is too slow.

Arnaud

when progress ends....erosion begins....bring on the new fun stuff......

Thanks for all the hard work all you RC universe guys

Brian : )

LOL……you wanted improvements but the only way to do it would be to migrate to a different platform as explained by the RCAdmin. What we have now is like running DOS or WIN95 and asking for XP and above OS speed and capabilities. I remember it just like yesterday when we first got the current look we have. Everybody was *****ing.

This migration would improve the speed and overall capabilities of RCU. Just indulge RCU during this time of migration and together we can make it better than what we currently have. JMOHO and take it FWIW.

My main concern above all is speed. Looks can be easily tweaked if there are readability issues. INterface can bet tweaked too if usability issues. However my goal is/was to introduce new features and performance.

The software you saw was merely the upgraded version of what we already have. we were using a 2.4 version and this was a 3.2 version. The biggest visual change was just the "skin" which we can always tweak or alter themes and give users skin choices.

We are looking at where the issues were and we'll see if we can address them. If not we can slowly look to improve what we have here with our own home grown code. If we do that the shock to everyone in terms of "change" will be incremental and therefore the "shock" effect will be close to nil

I'll take slow, over the new format.
It may bother admin, but not me.
bob

what happened i had new then it went back to the old?

Marc
RCU Site Admin

Thanks for the feedback, I'm not used to a stable flying jet, so I look for stability in the RCUniverse software. I'm sure you and all the other code writers will get it worked out somehow.

MACE

All I can say is if you like how RCU is TODAY then you have to have faith that we will always get things right even if we stumble a bit along the way. When we launched this very forum that many prefer we do not change at all we had users saying all the say things about THIS forum and how bad it looked, how bad the colors are, how hard it is to read. Amazing what you adapt to once it becomes familiar.

Anyway if we do migrate we will of course address performance as well as aesthetic and usability issues as they come forth and as always we do it in a fast manner. Our company was named 24-7 RC, LLC because when we need to we do work 24-7 to get things done.

Yes, people CAN adapt, but I think the point is that as most people's feedback shows, they don't want to have to adapt unnecessarily.

If a change addresses a particular shortcoming in the prior system, and people can see why the change was made, then they are more accepting of it ; if it seems someone was just bored and decided to change things just for the sake of change, the acceptance is much lower.

IMO, Microsoft Office 2007 is a prime example of how NOT to change things. Nothing is where it used to be, including the HELP … when people can't figure out how to do what used to be so easy, and they can't even find the Help menu anymore to allow them to look up the new method, many people get so disgusted that they give up and refuse to use the product anymore. A year and a half after my company made everyone change versions of Office, a lot of people are simply boycotting the MS tools altogether rather than deal with the hassle.

Gordon,

You of course know I value your opinion as well as those of the members who use the site. As an RC'er myself I also use the site as a member. What I was trying to accomplish was to bring many of the features found on other sites that I found useful & that are generally very popular. It was with the upgrade that I was trying to bring those features forth as well as more usability from the current platform. Upgrades are difficult especially with a new look, different navigation cues and functionality changes. They are painful at times to adapt to but one must measure if the learning curve is worth it.

The launch which didn't go smoothly for several technical reasons didn't really give anyone a good first impression. Throw in some broken images, slow loading times, performance issues, login issues and such and I would expect nothing short of some people resisting.

Anyway I guess it is flattering that after the launch of THIS forum years ago and everyone's massive complaints about the dreadful functionality, terrible design, etc that everyone enjoys it today where changing is now considered a path of more resistance.

All that said I am concerned about the new software performance (this was an upgrade of our 2.x version to 3.x of the same forum package) for our users. I had a few reports of peoples computers being pegged at 100% cpu while others reported their computer did not break a sweat. There is a lot more code behind the scenes and on the pages of the new forum software and I am unsure if some of the lower end laptops or desktops can deal with it.

We will put the upgrade on the back burner for now and I'll look into making some tweaks to what we have here in the meantime. I think a wysiwyg editor, embeddable videos and a few other features at minimum would be nice to have.

Kind of reminds me of the MS Vista introduction and the response from former XP users. [8D] The only difference is that RCU recognized they had a screwed up system and are dedicated to fixing the problem.

My thoughts EXACTLY!!!....

Marc...The new format was VERY hard for me to read...When you guys went through this before and we hated it didn't you learn anything from that???...At least you changed from the hideous color scheme and went back to the easy on the eyes blue format...Why change just for the sake of changing???....If you want to change anything, please do a number on the search function as it is terrible...Yes, we hated when you changed before as it was very hard to read and hard on the eyes but at least you fixed that...The print fonts that you pick are hard on the eyes..

The current format is great...don't screw with it!!!...Can you not make your upgrades without messing with the current format???

Kevin

Regarding the numerous comments about the search function - have you guys tried using the advanced search features in Google, and entering the RCU domain there ?

I regularly give up on RCU's built-in search and use Google instead as I personally find it to be far superior. Such is life - RCU can't be the best at everything

I'm not sure if it ever got addressed, but the problems that drove me to Google in the past included the fact that RCU's search seemed to be lexeme based rather than being a simple pattern match. As a result, if you did a search for 'tire' the results would not include posts that contained "tires" because 'tire' and 'tires' were not the same. I also got tired of being told that I was not allowed to perform 2 searches in rapid succession if the first search drew a blank and I tried to modify it. Google takes care of all of those issues.

Marc - I certainly understand that you are simply trying to improve the site, and I do appreciate that you want to do that rather than rest on your laurels [8D] I'm simply adding to the feedback that you try to avoid (or at least minimize) any unnecessary changes. Of course, if such changes come as part & parcel of a new version of the software that you are trying to use, then it can be harder for you to do that since you too are a then basically victim of unnecessary change.

All in all though, the sun will still rise tomorrow regardless of what colors & fonts RCU uses and whether we can find the posts we want to

Gordon

Thank God!!


Nobody was happy with this "upgrade" - it works, it make sense, newbies still coming.

The only reason to make a change would be financial related - right?

I just added embed youtube videos here. Some features I gotta have. Use the youtube button in the editor to get the simple tags.

Also on OUR search page I have a google field there you can search rcu with. It AUTOMATICALLY limits results to rcu. Just the search button and you will see the google searchbox near the top of the search page above the forums native search section.

enjoy

Marc,

Thank you for all your effort in providing this FREE service for us. I don’t think people realize how much time goes into running and supporting a website like this. I’m sure you’ll get the new software worked out and everyone will love it after they use it for awhile.

tsk...looks like we here in America get used to anything ......after awhile....[&:]

Hey Ghost, I did not mean this as a criticism but rather a suggestion regarding priorities. RCU is awesome and I spend probably 20mn or more on it every day. I'm in the software industry myself and suspect that there are many options to make RCU faster withing changing the software.

Viewed from here, it appears that RCU is IO bound at the limit. Sometimes, an HTTP request can take more than 1mn to be served. RCU probably needs more web servers and web servers need to be configured to deny traffic sooner to avoid having everyone wait for a very long time. An easy way to do this would be to decrease the number of connection that the web servers accepts. If you do this some people won't go through until you add web servers but at least whoever getting through will have a good experience.

Arnaud

Arnaud,

Actually we have overkill in terms of web servers. We have five (5) front end web servers all well within their load limits. We can actually lose a pair of those and the remaining 3 wont' break a sweat. We have 2 dedicated db servers. Cisco firewall and cisco load balancer to keep traffic even across the bank of servers. We also have dedicated mail server. Dedicated ad servers. Private GB networks for all back talk on our server farm. Extremely robust hardware. The slowdowns will typically be in certain operations in our software. Some queries may need further optimization as we are around 8 million records and queries and proper indexing and statistics are critical. Sometimes you may be seeing a slowdown when our ad server updates or when we do a db backup dump. These things can stall the site for 30 seconds or a minute or two depending on the exact time of the day and week.

If you see a slowdown or hang in the forum though do this. Open a new browser window and try to hit the homepage of the site. Most likely it will load instantly unless the update is the ad server which does a 30 second to 1.5 minute recalculation every 2 hours.

The new forum does give me some performance concerns we saw on launch so we are tabling it right now and going to look at adding some features to this codebase and see how far we can get. Obviously the shock value with small changes and the same skin here will be far lower then the new skin everyone saw.

marc

umm, I didn't see the new format so i can't comment. But most human do not like change, espcially if it has just been thrusted upon them.

Now i didn't see any and i am on RCU most days and that's not to say that it wasn't done, but maybe if it was announced so that people at least can mentally prepare for the change?

other han that, i look forwards to seeing what new features are available and how they can better help us get around this great RC forum!!!
thanks

dave

I like the present format, but change is a must in order for new features to be brought forward. As long as the fonts and overall CSS remains similar, it should remain an easy read. The ONLY thing that I find annoying is that now, when I am reading a long thread, the refresh on the ads loading becomes verrry annoying. Why can't one ad be enough per page view?

Dan

Dan - the ad view calls I put in place I am testing. First the new call is going to be faster and won't hold up page loads because of the way it is delivered. Even if our ad server is "hung up" the rest of the page will load immediately. I am only testing this on the thread pages themselves to see how it works. Also the ads only reload after a minute so depending how this works (and it is actually cool that you noticed it!) we may look to reduce the ad count on the page. Also just so everyone knows I have been pushing my ad sales rep for some time now to have all vendors reduce the height of the large sponsor ads and the large ads on our forum homepage. Currently the large ads on the main topic pages are 200 to 250 pixels in height and I am pushing to bring them down to 150 max. The forum homepage ads are 350x300 and my push is to cut the height down to 200 max. This is less scrolling and I know you can make just as effective an ad in that space and give a better end user experience.

On the advice of Arnaud I did some testing on one of the products he noted to me and so far it looks pretty good. If we can get our whole index completed I can roll out a beta of the new search shortly alongside our current search. Think google on steroids is all I gotta say

Way to go Arnaud !!

Thanks Marc, for keeping trying [8D]

Gordon

Marc, I'm glad it works for you. PM me if you have any question.

Arnaud