Forum Update Today

We have plenty of new members and even though the “likes” don’t count for much (other than it is nice to get one) I am not sure why historical ones matter much.
I see the “like” option as a polite “thank you”. So I am not sure what purpose the number of likes serve?

Steve B

Merely that, an historical reference and forum continuity. I'm personally not concerned either way and it would save young Ben some work if the consensus was not to migrate.
 
Merely that, an historical reference and forum continuity. I'm personally not concerned either way and it would save young Ben some work if the consensus was not to migrate.
We could suggest that members click”like” to indicate their preference. (Just a bit of fun)
If they click on “like” in your post that I quoted here that means they would like them to be migrated from the old site. If they like this one it means “don’t bother, save Ben some work”

As I say just a bit of fun.

Steve B
 
Thanks to all who've replied for engaging with the issues I highlighted. Life often has priorities higher than A2OC, but it's great that there's a collective desire to get things right as time allows.

I don't understand the argument that the 'likes' should be reset due to there being lots of new members, or how not doing so could amount to being unfair. There are always lots of new members joining the club and it happens gradually over time. Everyone starts at zero when they join, meaning nobody gets a head start. We wouldn't think to reset them again at an arbitrary point in the future when there undoubtedly would be even more members.
Personally, like them or loathe them, I think the 'likes' are an integral part of the history of the forum's content. They show something that the text alone doesn't. To my mind, there's a level of user participation that is lost if we don't restore them.

Cheers,

Tom
 
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem either way, it is just that it is extra effort to copy them across and I didn't know why it would be worth it?

I certainly don't mind having the 5,000 or so "likes" reinstated, but I genuinely don't know why the number of likes means anything?

I was a very strong supporter for NOT getting rid of the "likes" altogether a while back when it was proposed.
I see the "like" button being a good way to say thanks without clogging up the thread with more posts. So I do like the likes, but the total number each person has received can surely not be of value?

Just thinking of Ben having time to do more urgent things (or better still have a break from things for a while.

Steve B
 
I certainly don't mind having the 5,000 or so "likes" reinstated, but I genuinely don't know why the number of likes means anything?

...the total number each person has received can surely not be of value?

It has nothing to do with total number of 'likes' accumulated by any one individual. It's to do with the posts, who interacted with those posts and in what ways.

Whilst I appreciate that it keeps an item on Ben's to-do list, I feel they're used in many circumstances to say an awful lot more than 'thanks' and that, without them, there's a layer missing.

Cheers,

Tom
 
Hey Tom. Thanks for the feedback.
  1. I should be able to sort out the link redirects from the old site. I’ll use your examples to help.
  2. The above fix should sort out the Google links. However one of the side effects of the new user upgrade policy is that Google bots probably won’t have access to new content. I’ll need to investigate further to determine if we can enable read only access to the bots. But may be a reason to discuss with the admin team.
  3. All the old likes are still available, but I need to write a tool to migrate them to the new software. Unfortunately the previous like mechanism was not core vBulletin functionality. So, the content importer didn’t pull them in. And the way the new software stores likes is encoded on each DB post entry. It’ll have to wait until I have a spare afternoon. I’m travelling to Kiev next week, so have a couple of 4 hour flights to do some work.
Ben

Quick set of updates:
  1. This should now be resolved. Please let me know if you see any other links that don't resolve.
  2. As Andrew points out, this looks like a Google indexing issue. I'm not clear why Google has indexed the wrong thread. We did have a beta of the new forum up for a couple of weeks with different IDs - but this was under a different URL altogether. So, I would be surprised if Google has mixed up the 2 old sites. I'll keep investigating though. As discussed above, I've confirmed that we cannot provide read-only access to the site for Google Bots. This would break Google's policy of only indexing publicly accessible content. So right now, it's actually pretty hard to force Google to reindex content. Awaiting feedback from the admin team...
  3. I will resolve this, just give me a little extra time.
Thanks
 
Do you ahve to rejoin tapatalk?
sorry if its been asked before
We re-registered the site when we switched software. So it's the same name as before, but yes you may have to search for it again.

If you don't need Tapatalk's notification system, I'd recommend using the native forum web interface on mobile phones. It's much better than the old software.
 
Quick set of updates:
  1. This should now be resolved. Please let me know if you see any other links that don't resolve.
  2. As Andrew points out, this looks like a Google indexing issue. I'm not clear why Google has indexed the wrong thread. We did have a beta of the new forum up for a couple of weeks with different IDs - but this was under a different URL altogether. So, I would be surprised if Google has mixed up the 2 old sites. I'll keep investigating though. As discussed above, I've confirmed that we cannot provide read-only access to the site for Google Bots. This would break Google's policy of only indexing publicly accessible content. So right now, it's actually pretty hard to force Google to reindex content. Awaiting feedback from the admin team...
  3. I will resolve this, just give me a little extra time.
Thanks

Thank you, Ben. Links within threads to other threads all appear to be working perfectly. Much appreciated. :)
 
3) Whilst this seems like a minor issue, we appear to have lost almost all the 'likes' from posts made prior to the forum software upgrade. Is it possible for these to be carried across? I know some people won't care, but I used to get a great sense of satsifaction from posting something that was heavily 'liked', even if it didn't garner much written response; it was nice to know that my contribution was appreciated.

This should now be resolved. Please let me know if you spot any gaps, as I had to hand-craft a script to migrate the likes across from the old system.
 
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