FAQ for those who migrated from the vBulletin version of LFGSS

What happened to the groups, I can't find them?

So can people now start threads that other users can't see into? I knew that some the forum beers had officially died out, instead they were being organised on closed Facebook groups.

Can individuals be singled out to not see threads?

i received a private message before it all changed, how can i see it now?

Search is a bit odd. Search for coffee and a few posts that mention coffee appear before the thread with coffee in the title. Bit slow too.

I've changed the ranking algorithm and it performs better for that search and a few others I tried.

Speed is determined by number of search results... it needs to sort them all and rank them all even though it's only showing the first 10.

"bottom bracket" takes way longer than "sks bottom bracket". Greater specificity reduces the resultset which speeds it up.

I'm thinking of making search "titles only" by default to make it super fast for finding threads, and then optionally slower for searching comments.

Comparison:

Search results for: coffee
13,714 matches. Search took 0.885 seconds.

Search results for: coffee inTitle:true
51 matches. Search took 0.198 seconds

It's also true that presently our Postgres server needs moar RAM (it's already on 8GB) as there are edge cases in which the server will prioritise what is in RAM... and at times the search index is not. So first searches that push the search index back into RAM might take 6 seconds rather than 0.8 seconds.

Postgres full text search is actually a stop-gap. Eventually we'll be using Elastic Search, but using Postgres helps us to define the ES configuration we'd need and the feature set (which things to put in the search schema).

Anyhow, search is now better, but we can tweak more in future.

Birthdays - how can we tell whose birthday it is?

It's one of the little things that can mean quite a lot to the sense of community.

If the massive font size is intentional for readability, then why is the text in a squished up serif font that is very difficult to read on a non-retina screen? It's too narrow and closely spaced undoes the good that the open line-height does. A nice sans serif with wider characters and greater letter spacing would be better.
I think you need to bring back the resizing thing too. Whatever that guy says about font sizing is his opinion only, and it's wrong. We scan-read text in blocks and process words and passages as familiar shapes, rather than reading the letters every time. Making fonts too large breaks this. What constitutes too large is different for different people.
Also with the extra scrolling necessary, this breaks the idea of 'conversations' that you are trying to achieve, because context gets totally lost as posts get pushed off the screen.

I had started to build this into the database and site functionality. But it occurred to me, why do I need to know it? It's personally identifying information that isn't required for site functionality and yet is covered by various privacy laws.

I decided that if we had it, it would be optional. But then... when testing and showing that information to people... no-one filled it in.

People only ever filled it in:

1. When they were forced to
   
2. Out of habit, betraying their identity
   
   

Interestingly, I'll reveal that this was one of the signals I used in vBulletin to detect aliases. People would go to great lengths to use an anonymous VPN, set up new email, choose a random but plausible username, run their language through Google translate (English > Spanish > English... then fix a few things)... and yet they'd out of habit enter their birthday when presented with a form like that.

Whilst that helped me detect aliases, it showed me that it really does betray identity. We'd like to do things right... and if we don't need to store personally identifying information we prefer not to. If we made it optional, very few people would use it.

I can make it optional. But would anyone use it?

Question...this clearly is not me. How does one reclaim previous account under new email sign in?

I would, plus you could include it in the edit profile page but not the registration page so it wouldn't be mistaken as compulsory ?

I think the birthdays list contributed to our sense of knowing each other, perhaps the dates should only be visible to other registered users.

Of course it should be an optional thing to fill in.

I'm heading in to work now, but stopped doing the username stuff around 8pm last night.

I'll pick them up when I'm in the office.

Essence:

1. PM me
   
2. Include the email address you signed in with (the one you're signed in now with)
   
3. Include the old username you used to have (along with some guess at what email address you used to use)
   
4. Be clear about what email address you want to use with your old username
   
   

i.e. something like this:

I used to be Velocio, I think my old email was david@buro9.com , I've logged in with david.kitchen@gmail.com and I'd like to use that email with the Velocio username.

That's enough information for me to find your old and new users, verify the email of the old account, and then swap the emails around so you can sign out and then sign in using your new email, but access your old account.

.

New Posts link down the bottom. This scrolling is getting ridic

Yes yes yes yes

I feat that the forum may suffer considerable from the change. I've seen over the years a number of bicycle, resp. hobby oriented, forums loose their critical mass following similarly massive changes--- more than a few, unfortunately, never overcame their fall. For a forum to survive it must overcome a basic threshold of traffic in individual threads. In this light, I think, its quite important to try to increase traffic and activity as soon as possible--- even if that means stooges (a number of sites do use shills to inflate a sense of activity!).

Congratulations Velocio: it's now official. The changes are good.

^^Mustn't feed the....

surely a to-be-frequently-asked-question: could the 'Compass Drinks' link be returned to its prominent place please?!

I really want to tidy up my Following page. Do I really to follow a thread just because I looked at it? And how do I stop following it? I like things tidy. My Following page is upsetting me.

Things are a bit cluttered at the moment but as I understand it the ability to ignore threads and forums, like we used to, will be added as things progress.

Good to know. I am finding it very limited when it comes to re-ordering threads, actually I don't think you can at all. I'm sure things will come together.

Agree

On vBulletin lfgss, we could post publicly-visible messages on people's profiles. Have these been migrated across and put somewhere? Can't find the ones from my profile and there was some info in the most recent one that I need.

Oi, everyone, stop changing your usernames, it's confusing enough.

+1 to the loss of context and everything feeling a little bit large.

We've gone all Smashing Magazine, but I don't think our content is read in quite the same way as theirs.

The mobile site feels better to me, probably because with small screens there's always a slight loss of context - you just can't fit much into a small space.

Mebe there should be a greater distinction between small screen and large screen styles?

Yeah, that's going to get annoying really quickly. If you change your name do all previous posts change to your current name?