It was with bated breath that I sat in front of my PC last Sunday evening, while the long awaited vBulletin upgrade took place 2,600km away at Melbourne HQ.
Thanks to the skills (and careful planning) of a couple of talented guys, everything went smoothly and the SitePoint forums are now running vBulletin 3.8.5. If you happened to log in during that couple of hours, you would have seen these entertaining web cam images of Kevin Yank, our CTO, as he and his team undertook the upgrade. Now that we have that out of the way, we’re going to begin implementing a few minor aesthetic improvements as well as a change to the process of reporting posts. More on those as they happen.
I mentioned last week that I emailed forum members asking for feedback. The response was fantastic and it has given us plenty to think about. Some of your suggestions were already on the cards so we have started taking action on those. You can read about the changes in the way we deal with forum signatures here. It is important to note that we are still a no-follow forum, so you won’t get a back-link from your signature.
One of our major projects at present is sorting out the sticky FAQ threads at the top of each forum. Those threads are there so that you can search for help before asking. It may be that your question has been asked many times before. The Programming Team would like to hear what it is that they can do to make those threads more useful. So if you’re into Classic ASP, JSP, Javascript, ColdFusion, PHP, PHP Application Design, or .NET, drop into one of these threads and let them know what you think.
Regular readers (you qualify as a regular reader if you’ve read the other two posts I’ve written) will notice that I have a snazzy new image on display this week. That image is thanks to forum member roberts126 aka Chris Roberts, who is the winner of the graphics competition that I ran over the last couple of weeks. The brief was pretty broad. I was looking for an image that represented our forum community. There were lots of great entries, but I like the way this particular image expresses the way that the forums make you think. So congratulations Chris.
Hot Topics This Week
If you fancy yourself as a bit of a whiz when if comes to CSS, why not show us what you’re made of and take our CSS quiz – Test Your CSS Skills No 33 This quiz looks at solving a real life problem that affects IE7 and IE6 (and is a real pain at times).
In the Graphics forum they’re discussing an issue that I’ve come head to head with more than once in my life as a designer, and that is the issue of colour management. I love the title of this particular thread, which is Making CMYK “work”.
The jQuery guys are talking slideshows. If you’ve got any good Javascript slider recommendations, drop in and let them know.
Google have just announced Search Funnels, which is a new feature in AdWords. They’re talking about it over in the Promotion Techniques forum.
And if you’re over all this geek talk and you just feel like blowing off a bit of steam, then head over to General Chat and tell us your deepest, darkest secret.
Feature image by Chris Roberts from Digital Precision
Sarah HawkFormerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.
