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

[DaveH]

Huge improvements!

Thank You Bryan!!!
It seems like you've created a sustainable path forward here.


LFG

[vanilladuck]

Thanks Dave and Jackie! *LFG* indeed

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

I don't think a faster site and forum is what attracts sailors to singlehanding.

Jackie, I think you read my statement differently from how I intended it. Being "interested in singlehanding" is an attribute of sailors we want to attract, and not a causal result of our website or forum being highly available and reliable.

Story time -- I told this as part of the presentation at the last SSS in-person meeting.

Once upon a time during COVID, there was a sailor who bought a boat with the intent of single-handing. It was COVID times and not many people he knew were up for getting together yet. Plus, the light had been lit in his head to sail to Hawaii solo. He didn't even know there was such a thing as the SHTP. Our main character wasn't interested in making such a voyage competitive.

Our sailor took ownership and began to refit his 1985 32' sloop. He would make occasional excursions into the bay alone. He was curious how to learn more about solo sailing and searched online for any groups who might be able to aid in his discovery. Google quickly returned a result for sfbaysss.org. What's that? A "society" of singlehanding sailors? And they're in San Francisco? He clicked on the link with enthusiasm and waited for the site to load.

And waited.

Alas, after 10 or 12 seconds the page did not load.

"The site may not be maintained anymore," he pondered. The web is flush with dead links and sites which are no longer maintained. He moved on to other resources which were less local, like YouTube or an occasional Yachting Monthly article.

It would be more than three years until I found out from a friend that the SSS was a functioning club with regular races, meetings and the SHTP -- a race which is celebrated as much for its spirit of comradery and club support as it is for the competitive side. Each time I would see the links online I would just ignore them because I thought the site was defunct.

Just think: in a sport where there are so few participants--such a unique subsection of the sailing population which is already relatively small compared to other sports--three years went by with one less solo skipper in our society. In today's day and age, online presence is everything. Regardless of how humans connect, the initial contact is usually made in an online search, site, or app.

I wonder how many other sailors were looking for us and either gave up like I did, or became frustrated at the speed of the site/forum and moved on? Or how many current members are disengaged online who could be contributing to discussions and experiences in our forums? (which is actually the mission of our society)

So, yes, I do dream. I've dreamed for over 100 hours while working our site. That dream is built on facts and statistics watching other sites and online services improve their presentation, reliability, and accessibility and seeing user interaction trend up and to the right. And, those were revenue-generating services. We give this stuff away for free