OK here goes (New Thread View)

Ah there is a bug - Advertiser/Sponsors logo and signatures are not working - Will sort this...... Thanks Eric.

was trying to add a banner , it tells me t hit the add banner button , that dosnt exist . or am I doing something wrong again lol

Eric,

Banners need to go thru Michele so drop her and email or give her a call tomorrow.

I guess thats why the button isnt there lol

cheers mate

Eh - it should be where it was before near the top of the page above the Thread Summary What do you get please send me a Screen Capture in email to david@exploroz.com

I couldn't see your message either.
Just your signature and link to profile
Still can't see it as i type this

Pedro

Weird,

Just hit this thread with FF 2.0.0.4 on Xp and it went strange however other threads seems ok - Can you confirm this for my guys?

Think I have found and fixed the issue - please let me know.

I can see it all now

Pedro

Thanks for the sanity check.

Interesting comment we have significantly more thread text on each page than in the past - Of course I was very wary of this aspect and reducing the wasted space and very blocky headers actually fits around 5 lines more text on a standard page than in the past. But noted the comment - thanks.

on the subject of ads.....

That nice big new blocky ad that appears under the initial post in this new layout is pretty invasive. Neat bit of code to wrap it around the first reply but geez it is annoying!

Many internet sites feature very prominent advertising (for many they only EXIST to advertise!) but for paid up subscribers/members the advertising content is scaled back a bit.

I for one am getting a bit sick of that bloody great 5th wheeler rolling around my screen after seeing it day in day out.

I appreciate the revenue that advertising brings into the site and I appreciate that EO is actually a business. If there were not so many ads the membership price might possibly be higher. A fine balancing act ond one where David has to make the call.

My two bob says that in this new forum view the ads have become just that bit more intrusive as to be annoying.

Cheers

You may have spent plenty of time on it Dave, but it wasnt broken. it was acceptabe before this change with the ads the way they were, up the top and out of the way - everyone saw them there, and those that WANTED to click them could. now they are rammed in your face time and time again.

I think Muddy said pretty much everything about the massive advertising blitz thats taking hold of this place now...

Why do we need a thread summary in the middle of the screen?

Is it just to allow the other 1/2 screen to house a massive advert that we see 823048923049823 times an hour? maybe a few random ads a few times a day, instead of the same ad over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

Losing appeal fast. IMHO its going backwards faster than that video of the fiat tryin to tow that van up the hill that missed a gear...

Hope theres a button to give you the option to see it as it was as well as this way for those that want it...

It looks brilliant when you hit Reply! back to the good old clear simple scheme. Now to figure out how to view each thread as a reply...

Muddy,

As an active supporter of the site I take your comments on board. As for the repetitive ad these are expected to go in the next few days to weeks as we are working on something. One such operation is to redice the ads for members and ramp them up for non members this layout scheme is a test of this facilty with the wrapping of the thread around the ad placement box.

You must also understand the House ads (basically every ad running at the moment apart from some TJM and a few others in the island placement make us zero dollars so these house ads do nothing at all for me as far as the business goes. These mods are all works in progress and the ad slots are being programmed to a much better system being worked on.

So in a nut shell members will get a better viewing - I just need to get the system loaded tested by the masses then I can adapt and adjust as required to give us all the output we are wanting.

However do not forget there are tonnes of new features in this version that no one has yet noticed or found, I will publish this in the next couple of days.

Thanks for the feedback.

No worries David,

Just giving my feedback.

Cheers
Muddy

>> As an active supporter of the site I take your comments on board.

so other opinions are not worth bleep on?

For me, the whole picture thing has been bad since the last change, as it ads a lot more delay to the wait time for us suckers who arent worthy of having access to a broadband service.
But if we go on waiting, the promises that have never come time after time may one day eventuate.
Very poor considering w have a mobile phone tower on the edge of our town, so a wireless setup would work great.
Alas in the meantime EO gets slower and slower.

Cheers Pesty

Pesty,

I am very interested in this feedback. The byte size of each of the view pages is down by around 17KB so the actual draw time to display the screen on the page should be quicker. There is a server caching issue - which will go tomorrow when I get back to development, however I would not think that you would even see this so you should see the reduced byte size as a quicker draw time for the thread view, I also reduced some of the images down to ensure performance come up.

The forum index has a little more data then before but this depends on how many threads you elect to view per page, if performance is low go to 25 as this is around 30K less then the older page. I am also working on dropping the data size in the tabs based on when you open them so no download if you do not open the tabs, I wish I had more hours in the day as it is I do this stuff all day and most nights to try to keep up. Thanks for your feedback I will see what else I can do however the new view is smaller than the old even when your add the ad we are about the same if not a little less. I will keep working on it.

David,
I cant say that there is much difference from this change, but was a noticable difference when the last change happened, opening threads became much slower.
Guess I was blowing off some steam about the lack of rural broadband services.
Sorry to involve you, keep up the good work David.

Cheers Pesty

Us non paying forums users have to stick together and as I result I have to agree with Truckster. When I hit the reply button the reply thread appeard and I thought it's so much easier on the eyes than that orange on white background.

And David I also hope you do take non member opinions into consideration. The site wouldn't be where it is today otherwise.

Leroy

Leroy,

Never said I did not take non members opinions just validated a response to a long term member and person whom always seems to send constructive feedback.

There has been no background colour change at all - in fact there was a full white section in the old page view - the new view is fully setup as a non white background as it was in the past. I think the major difference is the reduction in the solid background sections diverted down to a text colour and borders. I will later enable this page to be viewed in both modes and I think you will find that there are very few changes - the Reply and Followup submissions pages do not reflect the old view page much as they have different border colours and sizes. So I will turn on a view of this page in both modes and you can check for yourself.

I will post a new thread when this is working. Thanks for the feedbacks and as per the other I have disabled the Replies By based on feedback, not that I still agree with this as it will impact an email change I was working on but I will look at this again later after logon management and page caching of this view are complete.

Norm,

Thanks for the feedback. One reason that no one understands is system performance and server resources. The old code was killing the system and I had to keep uping the hardware investment to keep the system running, so was forced to a code re-write (this has been happeninf over the whole site for several months). I did the forum index a couple of weeks ago and since then have been working on thread view and some backend facilities. So this is the primary reason.

Thread Summary should be ok tested to threads upto 20 respondants and seems functional - if not I will get rid of it. What screen resolution are you running in terms of the 50% comment - just interested?

User friendly - I do not think I changed it that much and certainly have not moved or changed any of the operational buttons, if you see a problem in this respect please let me know - we can only move forward with feedback and this is how we work.

As most of you know this is a full time business operation with several staff developing and managing the system so we are actively working on it every day, so if there are issues then we love to know about them. Thanks for your comments.

David, knowing there are good reasons (even without fully understanding the technicalities) is helpful. Though I never thought you did all the work for 'something to do'.

Also, your post above that the intention is to give a slightly different view to members (less ads) and visitors is helpful. Or do you mean more ads for visitors, not less for members?

My reference to user friendly was more a comment on the ability to scroll through the thread and pretty quickly get a drift of what is happening. This may be a matter of familiarity. Also, have you changed the colours a little, or is this just perception? As I said before, only time will tell.

Since you have mentioned before that there are other changes planned, perhaps we need to see the package, while helping you with trouble shooting along the way.

Found the function via the summary to click on a posters name and go to their post. Neat, but not sure that I'll use it often. When one person has posted more than once in the thread, it seems to take you to the first post, but not sure yet due to lack of data. If so, I'm not yet sure what it adds. But I'm just one, and again time wil tell. Might be handy on some of the more technical threads when you have developed confidence in the answers of one or two posters over others and you are in a hurry??

Resolution on my screens was 1152x864. Have now changed both to 1024x768 which seems to optimize your site (on the post follow up screen at least). Not sure how it will be with other (sorry, but more important) applications I use on a daily basis (which were fine before). Will see as I use them over the next couple of days.

My reference to a perception of 50% ads on the opening page of a thread counts the top banner, both sides of the page and the big 5th Wheeler ad all as advertising. The usable buttons across the top and the thread 'seem' to be only about 50% of the page.

My mind is open, just giving feedback as I see it as things develop.

David, I just had a good look at the your weather link for the first time. Looks good. One feature from BoM that we use a bit that does not seem to be available is 'Live Radar'. We use it a lot when there are storms around. Not sure if you have access to it. Just though I'd mention it. It would pretty much make ExploreOZ a 'one stop shop' for most of our weather info.
mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR663.shtml
Link is for Brisbane. Very clear when I looked, but surprising how well storms show up when they are about, particularly when you choose the 'loop' option.

Also, when I tried to make this follow up, the screen I'm posting into would not come up initially. Just got my initial response and your follow up, which had some 'not enough memory' error messages at the bottom of it. Had to try 3 times before it did. Perhaps I hit follow up a bit quickly after my previous one (about 3 or 4 minutes I'd guess) and your server was still 'thinking'?

I was using the bottom follow up button in the answer 5 of 10 box. Not the one immediatly under my initial response.

Norm the image on the Weather page has live radar (the MSLP analysis is not working at the moment BOM issue) but the live radars are running - hit the View 1024x768 link and you should see them if there is rain about.

Yes the not enough memory error is one of the reasons for all this site development - The older .asp code is killing the system hence the new pages are using the .aspx extension - if you are interested this is how you can tell the old from the new .asp - old : .aspx - new. Thanks again let me know if you can see the radars - they are working right now with rain over Tas and Vic plus a little along the QLD coastline.

Thanks David. Clicking on the 1024x768 link gives me a full map of Australia with superimposed radar image.
The image I'm talking about is much more detailed. This link is to the Mt Stapylton radar, about 15 KM North of me. On it, you can choose a 64KM, 128KM or 256 KM view from the radar. Storms can be viewed in detail as they move across suburbs.
mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR664.shtml
You can also put the view on a loop and see how the storms have moved over the past 4 radar images, so gives an idea of where they might go.
Also at the bottom of the page, you can choose what you see on the image. User can select to see roads, railways, rivers,lakes, etc.

If you have a link to this, I can't currently identify it.
We get some pretty good storms around here in the Summer, so use the site quite a bit.

Motherhen,

Please work with it for a coupe of days and let me know. I ask this because any change takes time to adapt and we spend days trying different layouts and options to standardise and modernise the output. I would be really happy to hear back in a couple of day if you can bear with it in the mean time. The ads slots will be changing and I do still have a few refinements however this is the bulk of the update. I will post again in a few days to gauge comments. Thanks for your feedback thus far.

Adrain,

As per the post above, please stick with it for a few days and come back to me. The major change in the layout is astetic. as for the Summary etc - we had most of this chunked in the header before - Of course the respondant list was no there before however the bookmarking we are doing will be better utilised when the email systems are updated to direct you back to the exact comments for the email you have received (ie: you will be sent back to the exact reply of the comment instead of having to page down the results). There are as I mentioned loads of changes in the background and I will let you all know anout these when I get a chance to document them.

Thanks for the feedback and please let me know in a few days how you feel about things and we can go from there.

Hi David,

Now that the thread has grown longer, the new format is fine. When I first posted there were only a couple of posts and the first post/summary/ad was a very significant part of the thread and therefore cluttering the view.

All the best

Adrian

Yes and No,

I like early feedback however I do wish people would give it a go first. In any case all feedback is welcome and all gets put into the development bucket sometimes what comes out may not appeal to all but we will get there in the end.

Also is it normal for WA time to be used on thread headers?
Ian

WA time if you have setup WA as your state of origin in your profile! If not please let me know - you can access this via the Edit button in the top line where your name is.

As for 44 Million hits last month I can confirm 100% that this is the case and in fact is a little down on the month before. If youwere not aware ExplorOz rates in the top 100-200 websites of all Australian sites visited by Australians.

Where did you click on View Stats - as the link is wrong it should be www.exploroz.com/statspage.aspx

I have always had EST displayed. Now its WA time. I done nothing!!!!

Clicked on View Stats top left "latest News" box

Site Stats
Unique Browsers/mth
120,000 (Jan 07)
Sessions / mth
677,040 (Jun 07)
Hits / mth
44,634,291 (Jun 07)
Page Views / mth
9,124,783 (Jun 07)
View Stats
********

My profile definately says VIC.
Ian

Thanks I will have a good look at this - I will logon as you later and work out what is going on. Thanks.

Captain,

There is only one more ad placed on the screen and I am hoping to remove it for members (however like anything no point removing it till people understand it is there - I would hear the call again - there are no benifits for members stuff again). So I let you all see it for a week or so and then remove it from the members view (this is a system I have built into the new re-write of the site). PS the island ad will not be smaller it will not appear for members (at least on the view page)!

Please explain busy for me - I understand the tabs on the index can take a while but the view was designed to be far cleaner and removing the block reverse coloured blocks. I am happy to receive feedback I just need to fully understand the details so that I can attend to it.

PS: I dropped the replies by in Thread Summary just a second ago to see what this does. Personally I liked it as it lined up nicley with the forum update emails that the system send. Anyway will work some more on this area. Thanks for the feedback

Hi David,

By busy I mean the amount of clutter (ads etc) on both sides of the forum. Go to a long thread and after scrolling down for a screen view or two, it all drops off and you have an "uncluttered" page of forum posts. Another good example is the input page for threads, there is no ads etc on the RHS and its doesn't look as busy due to the expanse of blank space on the RHS

I think we all understand the need for ads so the fact you plan to have members not seeing them is a real bonus for being a member. May get up some of the long time non-members noses but hey, we all now you need cash to run this so you can either pay direct to you in the form of membership or indirectly by looking at paid ads - cannot have it both ways because as much as the geeks believe the inetrnet is "free", they need a reality check!!!

Keep up the good work

Cheers

Captain

Leroy,

Dropped the Replies by part see how that is.

Edit is not part of the view page - Edit is part of the Post, Answer and Followup pages - These are on the schedule after the view is finished and the new logon system is installed which I am hoping the get a start on today (the logon system is effecting performance). Thanks for the feedback.

I can see having the 'Replies by' handy but you need to include also the 'Followed up by' users as well. I think this would make the feature more useful. Like I said above if you were looking for a particular post you could quickly browse the 'Replies by/Follow ups' for a user you remembered made a post on the topic.

Leroy

The forum view is toggling between the new view and the old view. Also the time stamps in the new view are the same. Old view time stamps are ok.

Leroy

actually the time stamps are the current time (my local time) in the new forum view.

Leroy

I agree with you - I did just make a slight change to the layout with a background graident - looks heaps better again I think. Anyway I will see how I go with the Replies By section and may put it back one - I must get onto the disk caching function as I can see a performance issue starting. Thanks for you feedback.