New website, emailing responses and old URLs

Joe,

I love to see that you're going to do an upgrade to the MRH forum. From a feature, maintenance and security point of view it was way overdue. I hope you'll setup some sane defaults with regards to chat availability and other features.

The email response feature: I'm thinking that this is going to be a potential source of off-putting problems: does the system prune the email responses so quoted text doesn't get included? If not, we'll get tons of replies that include hundreds of duplicate "quoted" lines. How does the system know I'm not a spammer responding to the forum? How does the forum prevent spammers that gain access to someones email inbox from re-using those links to spam the forum?

With regards to the old URLs being broken afterwards. This doesn't have to be the way. There is no reason your import process can't create a translation "table" which can then be used by a URL re-director configured on mrhmag.com/model-railroad-hobbyist.com using a "HTTP 301 permanently moved" response to fix this.

Maybe the second and onward pages or direct links to specific comments from the current forum might not be fixable, but a redirect for those URLs to page 1 of the converted post should at least be do-able with such a translation table/URL re-director and is better than nothing. It will also save your site from taking a massive hit in your SEO rankings.

At first the amount of hits against the re-director would be massive, but over time, this should drop off as search engines expire the old links and people update their bookmarks and links to your site from theirs.

Looks good! Hope links can be saved

The upgrade looks great, and the new features should make the forum even more user-friendly.  I’m not a web designer, so Yaron may have answered this already, but I have bookmarked quite a few threads that have interesting or useful content....will those links still work?  I have enough treads bookmarked that it would an onerous chore to have go back and re-bookmark them all.

I’m looking forward to the new forum!

Looks great.....

...But please, Please, PLEASE provide those of us with less than perfect eyesight with the option to use high-contrast (for example bold, white or yellow on black) text to make it easier to read. Black on white can be difficult, and a delicate grey on white font (as is so common on "modern" websites) can be *%*&*% near impossible. I've come aroee web sites that don't allow custom hi-contrast web site colors. Don't be that guy.

Great news

Great thing to hear. Looking forward to trying it out.

Jack

Blogs

A bit more clarification on Blogs in the new site.

In the current site, a blog groups a whole series of topics in one "folder" if you will.  If you look at my blog, you will see all my blog entries.

It sounds like in the future state that organization is not going to be there.  If I look at the category of blobs, all blog entries will be in that category.    Just like if I look at the  "ezine" category, all the ezine entries from multiple issues are in there.  Is this correct?

Will there still be a way to have multiple topics in the same blog?

Will there be a way to follow a specific person's blog?

Comment URLs

This all sounds fantastic!  I am looking forward to the new site and forums.

About the existing comment buttons not working, does that mean you are not retaining the old domain (so links to MRH from other sites won't work anymore either without being updated?)

If you are/were retaining the old domain, had you considered URL rewrites or automatic redirects to make it work? Given your background in software plus your developers, I am guessing there is an impediment to that, but I was just curious.

-Ed

Overall good

Sounds like a major improvement all around.

The old bookmarked urls not workingis going to be anoying though - it’s not just old back issues that have links to threads, plenty of us have bookmarked specific threads and posts over the years to be able to find them easily.  I realize it may be necessary though, the cost of maintaining the old domain with a url rewriting redirecter to the new forums will add up over time and become maintenance headache.  And I’d imagine it’s use will taper off over time to the point where it would no longer make sense to keep it.  I guess you might as well pull off the band aid now.

A thought - perhaps you could have a utility somewhere on the new forum where we could paste in a url to the old forum and would give us the rewritten url to the new forum that could be copied to replace our old bookmarks and stashed links as we find them.

I share Dave’s concern about the blogs loosing organization.  I suspect that change will nudge people who like organization to move their blogs elsewhere.

Overall though sounds like a big improvement, and the tradeoffs are totally worth it.

Kudos

Kudos to Joe and the MRH team for modernizing and improving the MRH experience despite the current challenges we all face!  Looking forward to it.  And glad to see there is no Facebook integration.

jeff

Blogs ??

Hi Joe,

I would like to see the answers and explanation to Dave Husman's questions.

Relegating blogs to the mushball of ongoing topics is potentially... extremely unfortunate. How, exactly, will blog's be handled? Is the ownership of blogs changed too? How about the linking to the specific modeler's blog, and to individual blog entries? If a blog article is just another topic, why put it here instead of just announcing and  linking to it, as some modelers are already doing?

Have fun! 
Best regards,
Geoff Bunza

Great

This looks promising. Can't wait to see it. 

Whatever it takes to keep the magazine and forum going

I really have no problem with the existing site though. I come, I see, I enjoy......DaveB

Blogs

We have a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation with blogs and a move to a new modern forum site.

WE NEED TO GET OFF DRUPAL
First, we do not want to simply upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 (the most robust of the latest Drupal versions). Since we began using Drupal in 2009, it has become a very popular enterprise level option and as a result, robust modern Drupal hosting for a high traffic site like ours is expensive and complex. Also, migration to Drupal 8 would require very expensive programmers.

So I went looking for something less expensive that has rich modern features and that offered affordable data migration from Drupal 6. I also know we want to move to subdomain hosting so we can more easily get best-of-class hosting for each functional area of our website.

OUR BEST BLOG FEATURE: RECENT POSTS
Currently one of the best features of our blogs is the fact every blog post shows in recent posts. If we moved to a separate sub-domain blogs.mrhmag.com, then we could offer more unique blog posting features, but then blog entries would be elsewhere and regular readership of blogs would fall off a cliff.

When I explained that we treat our blogs more like a special forum category, our new forum hosting provider asked how many blogs we host and when I told them well over 1000 blogs, they about fell over. I had first suggested each blog be it’s own subcategory and they responded that their preloading algorithm (aimed at keeping the site snappy) would tank the servers to preload 1000 subcategories.

So the best we can do if we want blogs to remain on the recent posts listing is to make blogs their own forum category and leave it at that. We would moderate the blog category differently, giving the one who started a given thread ownership of the topic, as it were.

THE OTHER OPTION: BLOG SUBDOMAIN
The other option as mentioned would be to find best-in-class blog hosting that’s affordable, but then the likelihood that we would all frequent a new blogs subdomain as much as the forums subdomain would be small. So we’re down to a choice: more blog functionality and far fewer readers or less blog functionality and maintain the high blog readership.

Many of our blogs, because the posts list in recent posts, have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views. To those of you who blog independently, do you have 10,000 - 100,000+ views of your blog posts?

So that’s the challenge. We need to reduce costs and part of that involves getting off the Drupal train. Drupal is the only website building tool that treats blogs as gloried personal forum entries.

By moving to something less costly for us and maintain the strongest feature of blogs — the fact they intermingle with forum entries on recent posts, then blogs become even more forum-like and less something tied to your userid.

One more blog thought

Blogs

I think you made the right choices Joe, there are always tradeoffs when making a big change like this.

So how close is it possible to get to the current blog layout with the new site? A blog currently is sort of like a thread, with each post in the thread linking to a separate thread.  On the new site I suppose it would be possible to create a sort of master blog thread that had no actual content, just each post had a short summary and a link to the blog thread for that post.  With the email notification feature people could subscribe to the master thread to find out when any new blog thread was created for the particular blog.  Might work pretty well.

And with the subdomain approach (absolutely the right way to go by the way) you can always add specialized blogging later if you change your mind.

personal journeys

yes

doing anything that might limit views would be catastrophic to the forum as a whole. even as it is I feel that we are losing important members. too many crickets recently.

Blog to Personal Journey Index

Hi Joe,

Is there some non-obvious reason why the first Personal Journey (PJ) post for a modeler could not be an index, with titles and links to the rest of the modeler's Personal Journey entries, similar to the opening page for a modeler's blog currently?

It would be the responsibility of the modeler to update his/her/its PJ index... or not.

It would be nice if comments could be disabled for the PJ index. (Initial entry only allowed w/ editing.)

Seems like a near equivalent to the old blog for your new environment.

Have fun! 
Best regards,
Geoff

Right choice

I agree.  This seems the right choice.  As for crickets, I can only speak for myself.  I admittedly seldom post to my blog here anymore, primarily focusing on a different site.  That's not because of anything negative here, simply the fact that I get a clear sense there that there are folks who read and appreciate that I am journaling progress. Crickets works both ways - lack of any feedback whatsoever leading to less posting.

With the fact that the new site will support some other features such as "likes", I will definitely start journaling here again to get a sense of whether anyone likes what I am posting.  If so, it is worth posting  If not, then I figure why clutter the site.  There are also many posts of others that I know I will use the 'likes' feature with, but that I don't have something to add to post a reply.

The other reason I am convinced Joe is making the right choice also comes from my experience elsewhere.  The other site has a separate blogs feature, but no one uses it.  They journal in a forum topic for the obvious reason that those get read and blogs there pretty much don't.  Having a separate blogs site here would probably experience the same effect of journals not getting put into the blogs, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to separate it.

-Ed

Crickets

I have looked at the number of reads as an indicator of interest.  One reason why I have cut back on my blog postings (its been months since I updated anything).  I had been mulling over options regarding documenting my layout (MRH blog vs. other methods or other sites.)  This will just help move me in one direction or the other.

@geoffb Blog posts index page

@Joef Works for Me!

Hi Joe,

I think that a Personal Journey Index is quite equivalent to the current personal blog page. One can direct people to a stable URL that can be updated. No additional "feature" or site programming needed.

That works for me!

Have fun! 
Best regards,
Geoff

I hope...

..you still will be an active member on the forum Dave.  Your insights and historical knowledge of many prototypes is very valuable and I hope we don't lose it! 

Ken L

RMWEB Just Upgraded Last Week

Andy York is still chasing some bugs 4 days later.  They use the Invision Community forum software. 

However, the end result is a very clean look that works for both browser and phone/tablet and yet is effective in putting enough information on an HTMx page.  

I am always amused that they use US software and servers.

Editor

As I never really understood how the blog feature worked here, it isn't a big loss for me. I will keep my main thread of my blog as my main thread.

What I would like to have is a better editor. It should remain compatible with external website (I always share my Flickr photo and insert the HTML code here, Flickr also support BBCode).

But the big feature currently missing is a spell checker. Firefox would happily do it, but the current editor blocks the Firefox context menu (where I can change the language of the spell check, and select the correct spell). The editor show an useless context menu for paste!

And for PJ and other thread with one main author, it would be easier to read if the author had a more visible background color, just a different gray shade, or a lite color tint. If you read from the end a thread with a lot of comments, it can be hard to see who is the main author.

Also, a way to follow a thread would indeed be a nice feature.

Pierre-Yann

https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/micro-toma-narrow-gauge-turntable-and-engine-shed-12210444

Spell Check

Hold the ctrl key when you right click to get the browser spell check.