Anything else?

[Scott Greczkowski]

Many of you asked for some changes or additions that you wanted to see, and me being one who likes making people happy worked hard over the past two weeks to make as many as you happy as I could.

Many of your requests I was able to do, and the ones that I wasn't able to do were because of software limitations ,the change requested caused performance issues or there was no add ons available for me to install which would accomplish what you wanted.

Are there an big things that need to be addressed that I might have missed? I will be away for the next 3 days so if there is something big or broken I need to know now so I can fix it before I leave tomorrow.

Since last Monday I have not done much but work on this site and software and now I got to admit my brain is fried and I am feeling tired and burnt out. So because of this I am really really looking forward to getting away for a long weekend to attend a wedding of a family member.

Was the move worth it? Still to early to tell... my gut says yes. Traffic has gone up 15% in the past week. That is nice.

In our Google Control Panel there is a Scorecard and there our "Site Health" has gone from 2 stars to 5 stars (the max) in fact all of them are now 5 stars when before they were anywhere from 2 to 4 stars. This is a good thing!

As I expected our ad revenue from Google took a huge dump with this change. If we compare yesterday with the Thursday before we made the switch ad revenue is down 94%. As I said I kind of expected this to happen. When you make changes to your ad layout it normally takes Google a few weeks to learn the layout and figure which ad spaces pay the most. (For those wonder the ad in the first post is the highest earning ad on the site.)

Because of this there becomes a point where I can't touch the ads or make layout changes so that Google can do its thing and we start earning enough $$ to pay the bills again. We are at that point now.

So again I will be away for the next 3 days taking a break. So again if there is anything major I need to look at let me know now... because when I am gone... I'm gone!

Thank you everyone for your support!

 

[Bobby]

Take a rest Scot! You damned sure earned it....

 

[cosmo_kramer]

From the Forums page, when you click on a link to a thread on the right side after 'Latest:', you are brought to the last post of the thread. Is it possible to change that link to bring you to the last unread post of the thread instead??

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

From the Forums page, when you click on a link to a thread on the right side after 'Latest:', you are brought to the last post of the thread. Is it possible to change that link to bring you to the last unread post of the thread instead??

I thought that was going to be an easy one to fix... but unfortunately it was not... spent almost an hour on it.

The code to go to unread is /unread after the url...

Here is the code used for Previous and Next.

<div class="linkGroup">
    <xen:if is="!{$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails} || {$previous}">
        <a class="{xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_showPreviewTooltip}, 'PreviewTooltip', {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, 'Tooltip'}}"
            {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_showPreviewTooltip}, 'data-previewUrl="{xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, {xen:link threads/preview, $previous}, {xen:link threads/preview-previous, $thread}}"'}
            {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, 'title="{$previous.title}" href="{xen:link threads, $previous}"', 'href="{xen:link threads/previous, $thread}"'}>{xen:phrase waindigo_previous_thread_threadnavigation}</a>
    </xen:if>
    <xen:if is="!{$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails} || {$next}">
        <a class="{xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_showPreviewTooltip}, 'PreviewTooltip', {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, 'Tooltip'}}"
            {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_showPreviewTooltip}, 'data-previewUrl="{xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, {xen:link threads/preview, $next}, {xen:link threads/preview-next, $thread}}"'}
            {xen:if {$xenOptions.waindigo_threadNavigation_fetchThreadDetails}, 'title="{$next.title}" href="{xen:link threads, $next}"', 'href="{xen:link threads/next, $thread}"'}>{xen:phrase waindigo_next_thread_threadnavigation}</a>
    </xen:if>
</div>

The first one is the Previous and the second one is Next.

I tried putting /unread all over the place, but what I believe the keyplace is... is is after the href=" and I tried putting /unread in the there but it still didn't work. In fact I noticed it showed the URL of the page I was on with a /next after it.

 

[mike123abc]

I think the change is working its way up the Google search. I tried "Dish hopper help" in Google just now and satelliteguys is now 8th, top 4 are Dish network, 2 are dealers, and wikipedia. Before the change it is was 20 some down behind other bbs sites and random reviews.

 

[Rey]

Sometimes after viewing a thread and going back out to the threads list, I have to refresh a few times in order for it to be marked as read.

 

[mike123abc]

Sometimes after viewing a thread and going back out to the threads list, I have to refresh a few times in order for it to be marked as read.

It seems to take 3-5 seconds for something to change. I wonder if it is a caching issue issue to save on server load.

 

[3HaloODST]

Why do some posts not have the time posted, just the date?

 

[TheKrell]

I would speculate that the exact time of day that a post was posted 3 months ago is of no interest.

 

[Hall]

Why do some posts not have the time posted, just the date?

It looks like on or after (7) days in the past, it drops the timestamp. There's not much value in seeing the time a posting was made after "a while", but at the same time, someone went to the effort to write a line or two of code to deal with it...

 

[Hall]

I think the change is working its way up the Google search. I tried "Dish hopper help" in Google just now and satelliteguys is now 8th...

It's # 8 for me as well. Others should try that exact search and see if it shows up the same for them. Reason I'm somewhat surprised is Google ranks pages on a per-user basis to some degree. My co-worker and I can search the exact same phrase for things and it's # 3 for me and on the 2nd page of results for him.

 

[raoul5788]

I just tried it and it was third.

 

[Hall]

Turns out Google was logged in with my daughter's account. Under mine, it shows up as # 10.

This Google setting will impact each person's results:

Private results

Private results help find more relevant content for you, including content and connections that only you can see.​

• • Use private results
  • Do not use private results

 

[JR_Baas]

Sometimes after viewing a thread and going back out to the threads list, I have to refresh a few times in order for it to be marked as read.

It seems to take 3-5 seconds for something to change. I wonder if it is a caching issue issue to save on server load.

I have noticed this as well.

 

[Ilya]

Scott, nothing urgent, but Tapatalk HD (iPad app) is still having regular issues with the "Participated" tab timing out. Not sure if this one will be easy to figure out though.
I tried the updated SatelliteGuys Reader App and it seams to have a similar issue. (I think some database queries are taking longer than they should. Perhaps you can try re-indexing the database when you get a chance?)

 

[oldengineer]

One big improvement of this new thingy is that if you insert consecutive posts the post counter does increment on the second one. This will help me on the fast track to 10K.

 

[oldengineer]

Test.

 

[Hall]

The old site didn't ? I didn't really pay attention.... or care....

I did hate the XDA did that. I would purposely wait before making a 2nd post (too quick) as it seemed that people didn't respond to them while if you ask the same question in an individual post, they did.

 

[Hall]

When you return....

Can you relocate the "Watched Threads" link on the forum page(s)

to the far-left position

like it is on the main page ?

 

[klang]

A vote against moving the watched threads to the left. It makes sense where it is next to watched forums.