📢 announcement Forum Upgrades

[Mike 424]

36 minutes ago, irishwavend said:

I’m gonna be honest.  Incredibly frustrated with the overhaul.  I have a much longer post, but the simplicity of DD is what made it attractive.  This is not more user friendly on an ipad or iphone.  That’s the only way I access the site.  This is more like IrishEnvy which I shunned 15 years ago due to layout.  The monetization is a joke too.  If you want to monetize, create a tab for a shop with some Amazon affiliate links.  Get the other crap outta here.  If you insist, though, please give us the old files for the old layout so we can go rebuild what we had before someone fvcked with it and pretended it was an “upgrade.”  It isn’t...you’re talking to someone who knows sites and SEO pretty well...you’re killing your market and devaluing your investment.  There are a lot of books out there on cultural changes to groups and you’re hitting every landmine you can...

minor changes are “upgrades”...not this.

 

This was an overhaul of a 13 year old version of vbulletin and a website running Joomla 1.0. It wasn't a minor upgrade and it was a major overhaul that took dozens and dozens of hours and brought everything up to current standards. Using forum software that doesn't even have meta descriptions or page titles, and hasn't been supported in over a decade is not how you grow a brand. have already been doing SEO full time for over a decade, and I will be transparent in my intentions / goals. Number 1 rule for SEO is too have a mobile friendly experience as rank is determined via the mobile rendering of a webpage.

• Outside of the forums, I have put about another grand into upgrading the forums. I had to buy the vbulletin software upgrade, and choose to buy invision power to transfer instead of just upgrading to the newest version like IE did. I did not need to incur double the cost, but I wanted to give the users what I thought was the best experience possible of the major message boards (vbulletin, xenforo, IPS)
• I am working with invision power to try and fix embeds that didn't transfer properly
• I plan on using the blog for monetization purposes. Right now I'm in the hole about $5k and if I can get a little bit of that back, I'm going to try. Figured it was better than asking for donations (which Irish Envy has done and raised over $2k by their userbase which has been supportive). I am not trying to put that on the members of the forum.
• I am doing everything in my power to make this place look and feel like the place for Notre Dame fans.

So no, it wasn't a minor upgrade, but a major overhaul that was absolutely necessary to avoid getting hit by the upcoming Core Web Vitals Google algorithm update coming this spring. Without the update, there's a big chance much of the organic traffic would be lost. Hence the rush job since you want Google to see it's been updated before that update drops, and they have a chance to crawl all your major pages.

I'm sorry you feel the way you do about the changes. I am aiming to make this place more lively and doing everything in my power to get there, while being true to the members here.

[BAgate 16]

I like the dark theme, but embedded tweets are unreadable in it.  Black text on black background.  Any way to change that?

[Mike 424]

26 minutes ago, BAgate said:

I like the dark theme, but embedded tweets are unreadable in it.  Black text on black background.  Any way to change that?

Odd. They should be loading like this. I'll take a look next time I'm at the computer and see if there's a change I can make. Any chance you can drop a screenshot?

 

[BAgate 16]

On desktop.

Edited March 30, 2021 by BAgate

[Mike 424]

9 minutes ago, BAgate said:

On desktop.

Thank you. I'll take a look at it as soon as I can.

[Baldy 307]

I really like the upgrades!  I think it’s so much easier to navigate, read, and post on my iPhone.

[Mike 424]

2 hours ago, BAgate said:

On desktop.

Following up on this, but can you check and see if there's an improvement? I switched to Cloudflare and enabled some caching options to try and speed up the loading of Tweets. But I might need to buy a more expensive hosting plan.

Thanks again for helping me debug this.

[BAgate 16]

2 hours ago, Mike said:

Following up on this, but can you check and see if there's an improvement? I switched to Cloudflare and enabled some caching options to try and speed up the loading of Tweets. But I might need to buy a more expensive hosting plan.

Thanks again for helping me debug this.

No improvement.  And thank you for taking our concerns seriously.

[DamshaBua 38]

I like the look. It's definitely cleaner. The prior iteration looked like something from the days of GeoCities or AOL. This is easier on the eyes aesthetically. 

[BAgate 16]

Is there any way that when you go to a page with new posts you are sent to the new posts automatically rather than having to scroll down to them? Or am I missing something?

[Mike 424]

10 minutes ago, BAgate said:

Is there any way that when you go to a page with new posts you are sent to the new posts automatically rather than having to scroll down to them? Or am I missing something?

Yup! It's very easy, actually. Just click the '# Minutes Ago / # Hours Ago" by the username, and you'll jump to the most recent posts

Also, made some more changes to how Tweets load. They might take an additional second or two when there's a lot on the page, but I think it's resolved -- at least it's working better on my end.

[BAgate 16]

Thx for the tip.
No improvement for the tweets, in fact there is now a ton of empty space around them.

[Mike 424]

45 minutes ago, BAgate said:

Thx for the tip.
No improvement for the tweets, in fact there is now a ton of empty space around them.

What browser are you using?

[BAgate 16]

Firefox, latest.

[Mike 424]

14 minutes ago, BAgate said:

Firefox, latest.

I'm sorry that it's been such a hassle for you. I have read similar issues when researching, specifically with Firefox, which is why I asked. It may be impossible to fix from my end, but would you mind trying this and see if it solves the problem?

Sorry again. If it is related to the browser, I'm hoping that this fixes it. If it doesn't, let me know and I will escalate it with the forum developers, but I'm expecting them to say it's a browser or Twitter issue.