Announcement Platform upgrades and new features

[Nik]

So I've been holding off for a little while on features whilst working on feature compatibility with our forthcoming platform upgrade. Happy to say that the day is getting closer.

Not many visual changes with this upgrade but lots of under the hood stuff in no particular order:

• Native push notifications on supported devices/browsers - if you use a recent Android device or supported modern browser you will have the opportunity to receive near real time push notifications for alerts (so the things you get emails for today may also be pushed to your browser). You no longer need the CCF app for this however the current implementation does not support nor will it ever support Apple devices due to restrictions on their end (sorry).
• Editor buttons - we will re-organize our editor a little to make more used buttons higher priority
• Enhanced editor integration and advanced BB code option syntax
• Markdown support - techie term, if you know what it is you will have it, if you don't, no worries
• Tables - you can create and insert tables now in posts (bet you didn't know you couldn't do that)
• Reactions - our reaction system is getting an overhaul
• URL unfurling - hmmm.... basically when you insert a link to an external website we will attempt to unfurl or create a short preview of the content (so you know if it's worth clicking)
• Emoji enhancements including an improved smilie menu with easy emoji access
• Video uploads
• Performance improvements
• Content bookmarking and sharing
• BB code and rich text editing for profile posts and comments

I expect to be rolling this out in the next week or two with minimal downtime.

 

[YFCvii]

... our reaction system is getting an overhaul ...

I am ready when you are ready

 

[Nik]

I am ready when you are ready
View attachment 23399

Coming hard and fast... Doing last minute breakages.

 

[Nik]

We naturally had a plethora of setbacks but I feel I'm very close with the upgrade, hopefully within the next few days. The forum may go up and down frequently during the upgrade process and features may disappear for a short period of time. It is a relatively major undertaking. Be patient and check our twitter page for major announcement if any, like if I move to Panama suddenly.

 

[YFCvii]

... harnessing the energy and letting the future begin ...
... as it still takes no credit card to ride this train ...

 

[Nik]

OK finally have some time to work on this. On track to kick off the upgrade in the next few hours. Note the forum will be fully down during this process. I'm hoping to wrap it up within an hour or less if all goes according to plan. Follow the twitter page for status updates.

We also acquired new bigger dedicated hardware so right after the upgrade (early next week) the forum will be packed up and sent on its merry way to another data center to play on a significantly bigger box. Huge thanks to all of our donors as they helped a lot with the funding for this. More on this topic in a separate thread.

Outage notices will go up shortly before we take the forum offline for the upgrades.

 

[Nik]

Alrighty,

Upgrade done and dusted. I'm gradually re-enabling some features that were disabled.

There's a couple of issues right now with our reactions meaning you can only Like content but bear with me whilst I fix.

Rest is mostly ok. Mobile app will be re-enabled shortly also.

 

[Nik]

Alright got our new reactions back though there are still issue with them and our mobile app is back up and running now.

Done for the day.

Tomorrow with any hope will do our HW migration so we can start working on adding the cool new features.