Must say I'm not really loving the new site but will be patient and await the full upgrade and try to move on with the site. Never did quite understand IT and forums and the need to upgrade to new formats, I sure there are positive reasons but to the average punter it never is obvious
Is it possible for the text to be larger. Im lucky that I still have good eyes but the current size is like reading the get out clause in the fine print of a contract
Also previously when checking in you could see your name at the top right and also notifications that you had a message, a thread you commented on had been added to and any likes etc. this function seems to have disapeared
For some context to help here is a bit more info on the decisions behind the scenes.
Firstly I should also state this is the full update of the software.
The changes coming later on relate to branding not software.
To answer your question about “why” the need to upgrade.
The old version of the software prior to the upgrade had been inhibiting us for a fair while things as simple as adding a logo, changing text and branding the site took a fair amount of time.
On top of this pretty much every extra bit of modification we did on the site prior to the upgrade cost us money.
And not a small amount either we were running about 10 add ons to run the site at a cost of anywhere between $20 and $100 per year per addon this also doesn't including hosting.
The upgraded software we are now on is the same brand and company they simply upgraded the software from series one to series two, and did a few important things with this upgrade:
1) Feature parity - They made the new software upgrade equal to the old software from a functionality perspective so everything should be the same nothing has been lost. But it may be slightly different, look different or be improved
2) They incorporated the most required modifications into the core software so it keeps costs down for forum owners
3) They made an infrastructure software backend that is easier and much more rapid to be able to be developed which keeps the site current and also cheaper if you choose to develop custom add ons.
To put that into perspective the Christmas decorations added today took a few days and a fair bit of trickery to get done in the past. It was that difficult we often didnt take the time to do it.
To do it today on the new software it took an hour end to end.
This is a huge improvement for just one thing and it all adds up.
The final bit is the look and feel; this has been changed to make it more accessible to mobile / tablet devices.
Have a look at the stats below, you can see over 60% of our visitors to the site come from a tablet or mobi device.
With this in mind the look and feel was based of material which is Googles research into what makes a friendly and interactive website across platforms.
https://material.io/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=1001467 | Material.IO | Global | en | Hybrid | Text | BKWS&utm_term={keyword}&gclid=CjwKCAiAx57RBRBkEiwA8yZdUK9l4-HnQjIUSTF6MoPNSf1jb_AYvwQ2pn_tsfnm661smd_rEHr6fhoCnkAQAvD_BwE
On top of this we have designed a new Forum logo and matched the site style to the logo.
This new identity logo will unlock some cool new stuff which I'll be discussing in the new year.
But other than my crayon attempt at a logo in the past it's the first time in nearly 8 years we will have a true brand identity and site to match.
So there is a few changes all roled up into one.
But technically from a day to day perspective posting, alerts etc should all be the same.
All said and done I hope this provides some background that some thought goes into these things and it wasn’t a small decision and it's taken the better part of the year to implement.
But I understand change is change so let me know of any bug bears and I’ll do my best.
Thanks for listening.