So, 4.0 sucks balls... we know.


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Broken or not, the forums as they are now are still the best in the biz, so id say dont apologize and just get on with being the best in the biz. :)

This is undeniably true. Neowin still has one of the most popular forums on the web today. That's an accolade worth keeping in mind without a doubt.

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We fully acknowledge that 4.0 broke Neowin forums, no amount of help from IPS themselves could fix it either, a lot of mistakes were made in regard to large databases for sites like Neowin with the 4.0 release that were seemingly not accounted for, in a sense we were a 'test bed' for other large forums (who deferred their upgrades due to the problems we had) all of those related fixes made it into 4.1, which we are testing against (and using a live copy of) the live forum db.

I really hope that when we can upgrade to 4.1 all of the current issues will be resolved, but this does not include the subscription manager, which the creator has seemingly given up on. :/ So we will need to look for a solution there too with 4.1, or be happy with the 'donate' add-on.

As a co-owner of Neowin, I hope some of our longer term members can put themselves in my position, and how I feel about it, unhappy would be an understatement, so lighten up and know that I have not given up, nor have the other co-owners and more importantly the developers too ;)

 

1 word: Xenforo. Much, much better. I visit a huge forum that runs on it, and it's smooth sailing with tons of great features, plug-ins, and customization. They also went from IPS to them because of all the problems.  

https://xenforo.com/

  • Like 2

We fully acknowledge that 4.0 broke Neowin forums, no amount of help from IPS themselves could fix it either, a lot of mistakes were made in regard to large databases for sites like Neowin with the 4.0 release that were seemingly not accounted for, in a sense we were a 'test bed' for other large forums (who deferred their upgrades due to the problems we had) all of those related fixes made it into 4.1, which we are testing against (and using a live copy of) the live forum db.

I really hope that when we can upgrade to 4.1 all of the current issues will be resolved, but this does not include the subscription manager, which the creator has seemingly given up on. :/ So we will need to look for a solution there too with 4.1, or be happy with the 'donate' add-on.

As a co-owner of Neowin, I hope some of our longer term members can put themselves in my position, and how I feel about it, unhappy would be an understatement, so lighten up and know that I have not given up, nor have the other co-owners and more importantly the developers too ;)

Well, if you give out your password so we can have some fun, I mean, insight, on what really goes on on neowin :devil: , then you're good  :shifty:   Come to think of it,  that is a good idea! get to know the long running staff and MVCs! in an editorial! Ok, I will let you NOT give me your password if you consider this :p

I would suggest taking all the complaining about the new upgrade as a bit of a compliment to the popularity of this site Steven.

At least you know people are using it to get frustrated by it, I see more and more users that have stuck around for around a decade, that's impressive in any measure. 

Users appreciate you posting to explain the current situation, I'm sure in time it will be resolved, until then we just need to be patient. :) the editor can be a touch annoying these days, but in grand scheme its a small niggle (seems worse on my G3s chrome browser than windows/chrome)

 

  • Like 2

 

1 word: Xenforo. Much, much better. I visit a huge forum that runs on it, and it's smooth sailing with tons of great features, plug-ins, and customization. They also went from IPS to them because of all the problems.  

https://xenforo.com/

You know... I used to live and die by IPS but I would fully support a move to XenForo for sure. It's still only version 1.5 but contains all of the features of it's competitors and often handled in a much better way.

Complications would arise between the integration of the frontpage and the community forum but I would actually quite enjoy a XenForo board on Neowin.

A lot of it comes down to "I can live with this set back but it annoying"

like fast internet is "good" and no internet connection is "livable" but slow internet is "why the ###### can't you load a ######## page?!"

I don't know about you _Alexander but I'll take a slow annoying Internet connection over none at all. Unless I'm on vacation or pretending to be a recluse, of course.

I'm all for looking to switch to XenForo as well.

I wasn't sure of XenForo the first time I saw it but another community I'm apart of switched to it a couple years ago and it's turned into a great forum software.

 

You should try reading about modern web design and user experience some time. Also, it's not that hard to use your mouse and click.

Modern web design isn't about going backwards. making everything scripted isn't going forward. you can have actual web pages or virtual web pages and still have scripted dynamic pages. and avoid annoying hover popups everywhere. 

I use my mouse to go back as well, on mylaptop I click back on the browser. there's a reason you have a back button, it brings you back where you where. clicing back to the page number you where on the forum has several disadvantages

1. first you need to know what page you where on to start with. 

2. it brings you back to the top of that page, NOT back to where you were. 

making web sites harder to use and not supporting basic browser and browsing functionality isn't "modern web design" it's backwards web design. kind of like web sites that needs a loading bare before the page can be used. 

Certainly feel your frustration mate...

Keep in contact with your stakeholders (that's us too!) with regular updates, and here's hoping the next update will fix all these issues.

 

 

I miss that theme, clean and functional :happy: 

Gosh, what next... 3D buttons, drop shadows and blurred transparency? Get out of here with your future thinking! :p

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For me, it's the issues with comments on the front page that hurt me the most. It just seems really clunky right now.

Exactly!

About the only things I read are what are on the front page. Very seldom go browsing the different parts of the forums.

Nice to hear there may be a fix coming soon! :)

I hope you're getting something worthwhile out of that arrangement?

Well, we don't have the 'paid support' option but we definitely got it, they have also said they want to assist and be on hand for the 4.1 upgrade. We still need to restore much of the old posts (no idea how that will work, but it has to work).

I think it's good to have these issues actually addressed by the bodies up top. I know there's a certain sense of ease when threads like this come to the forefront and let us know that we're all seeing eye to eye.

Is there something wrong with building a custom payment system or is it more of a time constraint over anything? Not against the donation manager but not really a fan of it either, a subscription basis seems more of an appropriate term for Neowin given that it's news and feed reading.

Yeah again, it's the time it takes along with all the other projects, you already know that the comments system is being rebuilt from Dave's reply in this thread.. although it's looking like it will be better to just do it ourselves, yeah. Will be discussing this face-to face with a small team from Neowin in Amsterdam next week.

 

Will full Spy be returning?

No, it is not needed when the 'activity stream' will finally work properly, it is essentially the same thing really! (even if we have to tweak it to do our bidding!)

I'm guessing you don't have a dev environment to test this stuff?

We do, but testing a forum on a single web server dev environment does not equate to a multi-server setup with a ton of active users online, we are getting there though. A test upgrade has already taken  place and it went "smoothly" (devs own words) :p

Thanks for all the replies chaps. There are many basic features still broke in 4.0, no timezone settings in account controls for example, which should all get fixed with the upgrade.

You know... I used to live and die by IPS but I would fully support a move to XenForo for sure. It's still only version 1.5 but contains all of the features of it's competitors and often handled in a much better way.

Complications would arise between the integration of the frontpage and the community forum but I would actually quite enjoy a XenForo board on Neowin.

Same here, IPS used to be great. I think I remember reading that at one point the company was bought by another one and then moved the development over to India because it's cheaper. Cheaper, but worse. 

As for the front page, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plug-in for that available, and if not, it wouldn't be too difficult to implement by a competent web developer.

The problem with moving to another forum system is that they never do exactly what we want, we have a lot of custom code in IP.Board, as well as all the connections to the CMS. We looked at XenForo at 1.3 I think and decided it would be too much of a major undertaking to convert.

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