New website & forum!

[vanilladuck]

Ahoy SSS!

At last night's in-person meeting, hosted at Oakland YC, we introduced the shiny new SSS website and forum. I've been working over the last few months to identify improvements needed and building a new site. The site is built on new improved hosting infrastructure and has a fresh layout. Check out the preview here:

Website: preview.sfbaysss.org

Forum: forum.preview.sfbaysss.org (also linked on the website)

Look, test, play, log into the preview forum (your current forum credentials should work). Treat it like a sandbox -- because it is! Anything done on the preview forum/site will be erased prior to our final migration.

Feedback from You!
You'll notice there is a form on the landing page for feedback. Please use this to provide us any comments, suggestions, things you see are broken, etc. Don't be afraid to submit it multiple times. Anything is fair game. We want this site and the forums to work for YOU

Here's the presentation from last night:
https://docs.google.com/presentation...e&delayms=3000

What's Next?

• After we collect and integrate feedback, we'll schedule a migration.
• The migration will take place at a scheduled time. The forums and site will be down during the migration.
• After the migration and the new site is up, we'll continue indexing historical information, photos, etc.

Questions? Fire away or DM me here in the forum,
- Bryan

[breezetrees]

Great work! Way faster. Forum images are no longer gigantic, with thumbnails you can click on!

Suggestions: Still limited to a pretty small image file size on forum uploads, can it resize for us? I do prefer the font on the old forum header but maybe that is just nostalgia.

[Philpott]

Sat in the bar with Bryan and Greg Ashby a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about this.

I said, "I hate change".
Bryan and Greg at the same time: "I know".

Big sigh. I agree that this site is slow. This Forum is slow. I guess I'll just have to adapt to these new fangled ways. Thank you, Vanilladuck.

[vanilladuck]

Great work! Way faster. Forum images are no longer gigantic, with thumbnails you can click on!

Suggestions: Still limited to a pretty small image file size on forum uploads, can it resize for us? I do prefer the font on the old forum header but maybe that is just nostalgia.

Glad you like it! I was impressed at xenForo's migration tool and happy about the photos carrying over. It was definitely the best out of all the forum/board software I tested (vBulletin, MyPHP, MyBB, bbPress). We can definitely increase the attachment size. But we want to be careful not to make them too large. I'll do some light research and see if we can get the forum software to automatically down sample to a reasonable viewing size.

The speed improvements are particularly tasty. I added some monitoring to our old shared server and the new dedicated cloud server for load times:

Current site, sfbaysss.org:


New preview site, preview.sfbaysss.org:


My hope is that a faster site and forum will attract more sailors interested in singlehanding
- Bryan

[vanilladuck]

Sat in the bar with Bryan and Greg Ashby a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about this.

I said, "I hate change".
Bryan and Greg at the same time: "I know".

Big sigh. I agree that this site is slow. This Forum is slow. I guess I'll just have to adapt to these new fangled ways. Thank you, Vanilladuck.

Jackie, if it makes you feel any better.. all the content on the new site is the same, just formatted differently

[Philpott]

"My hope is that a faster site and forum will attract more sailors interested in singlehanding"
- Bryan

I guess a fella can dream, but I don't think a faster site and forum is what attracts sailors to singlehanding. I think it is a certain type of person who chooses to singlehand. Some people like it, some people don't. It really is solo sailing.

Just last week a nice woman on my dock told me she would like to talk with me about singlehanding. In the next sentence she told me that her boat is too big to singlehand. It is a 37' Express. I said, well, that would certainly be too big for me to singlehand. I asked whether she wanted to buy a smaller boat? Well, not really. She likes her boat. I wasn't surprised. It's a nice boat, beautifully maintained. You see the issues? People who want to solo sail? They need the right boat with which to do that.

I don't think most people buy a boat in order to singlehand it. This crowd does, but it is a self selecting crowd. They know what they need. I think most other people like sailing for the social interactions it offers. Those are good reasons to sail, but not a reason to solo sail. Cuz solo sailing isn't social sailing.

That said, this forum has offered a wealth of information for the solo sailor, and if you can help sift and winnow that stuff into a more readable format, you will have offered up a truly valuable gift to the SSS. Thank you again, Bryan. Jackie