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stevegrant
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Welcome to the new-look SaintsWeb!

Stuart Taylor GIF by Southampton FC

While I'd love to say that the transition from old forum to new has been seamless, unfortunately it seems as though a lot of the post data from the last month or so has gone missing in the transition - the database was a whopping 4.5GB and caused a bit of strain importing into the new structure, but I'm still not entirely sure how it went missing. The problem is that it took 3 days to run the import process, so it's not just a case of being able to rip it up and start again (even though I did do that once). In the end I had to take the decision to just salvage what I could, and here we are.

You'll notice a few obvious changes. While the forums and the people are all the same, the look and feel of the site is vastly different. Notifications are used fairly extensively for various reasons, but you can customise which you want and don't want to receive in the user control panel.

I'm sure there will be a few tweaks over the coming days and possibly weeks as we adjust to the new platform, so please bear with us and report any issues on this thread.

That's it for now as I need some sleep. Any questions?

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12 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

Do you know if the new app will have any options to see the latest replies accross all threads? Make sit much easier to dip in and out rather than having to go back out to the forum overview and then refresh. 

Not sure what is planned for the app, to be honest. They've been pretty quiet about it.

The "Activity Streams" thing is quite useful for organising what content you want to see, though. Loads of options in there when you set up a new stream, and you can then set that stream as your default one - if you look to the top right corner under the header bar, you can see "Unread content", that will get replaced with your new stream if you set it as default. On another site that runs this software, I've set it so that I can see whenever any new posts have been added to topics I'm following. Pretty useful on a big site where the content moves very quickly, probably not quite as necessary here, I guess, but still a handy reference point across all forums.

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3 minutes ago, Saint Garrett said:

What is the plan for the "legends banner"?

I don't know at the moment, to be honest. I knocked up a holding logo for the time being, but I'm sure we'll get that sorted at some point. The issue is size - because this software works well on mobile devices as well as desktop, the space available for a site logo/banner is much smaller.

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Also, a word for paid subscribers - you will have received an automated email from PayPal this morning stating that your subscription has been cancelled. This is not quite true. All I have cancelled is the recurring payment that was set up to auto-renew each year, because the URL PayPal would contact to update the forum has changed, and it's impossible to update them. We are also now going to use a different payment provider - Stripe is a little bit cheaper and much easier to manage.

The way it will now work on here is that, currently, those with paid subscriptions from the old site have been placed in the Subscribed Users group, which has the unlimited permissions you would expect. I will be manually porting across the subscription data so that you will receive a notification from the forum when your subscription is about to expire, and you will then be able to set up a new one that will be fully automated by the forum from that point onwards.

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7 minutes ago, Wurzel said:

I guess if you're ever going to lose a month or so of data doing it in a period when the entire football world had shut down was as good a time as any.

Yeah, it's not too bad in that sense, but still bloody annoying. Basically I ran the import process on a development setup on my Macbook, it took nearly 3 days to process it all, but it looked as though it had imported everything right up until the point where I took the copy of the old database. Then it ran some sort of reindexing process and that lost around 5000 posts :wave:

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16 minutes ago, miserableoldgit said:

Sorry if I missed this but what is the situation now with Tapatalk?

We're not going to use Tapatalk. The mobile experience for the site is, in my opinion, good enough that we don't need to use a third-party app. There will apparently be an app specific for this forum software released soon, but I've no idea how good it'll be.

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45 minutes ago, stevegrant said:

I don't know at the moment, to be honest. I knocked up a holding logo for the time being, but I'm sure we'll get that sorted at some point. The issue is size - because this software works well on mobile devices as well as desktop, the space available for a site logo/banner is much smaller.

We’ll play it safe and just have one photo of Craig Maskell.

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16 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

The forum seems to be quite slow for me on occasion (not sure if it's just me.) Is it likely to just be teething problems from the migration do you think? Getting this on my laptop and

I just got this .

85A0D016-6F12-41BE-BBF0-659763DB9B3D.png

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4 minutes ago, johnnyboy said:

I just got this .

85A0D016-6F12-41BE-BBF0-659763DB9B3D.png

Yeah I had the same. More tweaks... 

Slightly frustrating that it's a bit of a trial-and-error process, especially as I've managed to get a much busier forum running and stable with basically the same settings.

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1 hour ago, stevegrant said:

We're not going to use Tapatalk. The mobile experience for the site is, in my opinion, good enough that we don't need to use a third-party app. There will apparently be an app specific for this forum software released soon, but I've no idea how good it'll be.

I have just gone on to the site on the phone, clicked on "add to home screen" and a very nice little icon has appeared so can access easily. Will uninstall Tapatalk.

 

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50 minutes ago, miserableoldgit said:

I have just gone on to the site on the phone, clicked on "add to home screen" and a very nice little icon has appeared so can access easily. Will uninstall Tapatalk.

 

Where is add to home screen option ?

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Looks good on my iPad Steve, nice work. (Also just checked on my phone too and it’s good.) I never used Tapatalk, just the site as it was and this is much better IMO. Now to get used to the new functions!

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18 minutes ago, Saint_Jonny said:

I'm still getting the old forum when I visit Saintsweb.co.uk from my android phone, weirdly. Tried it in an incognito window as well, same result. 

That'll be a DNS issue - suspect your phone has cached the old server IP address. How to clear that will vary by phone and network, I think.

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Steve, I am getting it sometimes on my galaxy A40 and my laptop but come out and go in again and it takes me to old site. Happening on both. Took me three attempts to get this site. Had it on laptop but it has now reverted to the old.  Not many posts on new site today suggests many not getting on. 

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For anyone still getting the old site, I would recommend changing your DNS server to Google's, which has the easy-to-remember IP address of 8.8.8.8. I had the same issue this morning, the default DNS settings used by mobile networks and quite a lot of broadband/fibre routers have really long DNS cache times, so it takes ages for the data to be flushed through.

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I had to restart my phone to get to this new site. My laptop using windows goes to default unless I  restart. So I tried my wife's iPad  which has never been used for searching saintweb. Searched through google and it brings up the old page. So that is 3 different operating systems.  You have a redirect problem Steve.  My last post of the day 

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It can only really be a DNS problem - within 24 hrs this should be resolved for all I'd have thought.

I use OpenDNS for my DNS and this site came live at around midday for me.

Whereas via my work connection, it's still on the old server. Just depends what DNS is using! One of those things.

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Quote

I had to restart my phone to get to this new site. My laptop using windows goes to default unless I  restart. So I tried my wife's iPad  which has never been used for searching saintweb. Searched through google and it brings up the old page. So that is 3 different operating systems.  You have a redirect problem Steve.

Without wishing to appear to be mansplaining this, searching for the site through Google is a very different thing to using their DNS service.

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4 hours ago, Plastic said:

From safari, up arrow icon (actions), then this...

90DB8AFA-C959-4F37-A448-5D45EE60005B.jpeg

Oooo that’s clever - being of an age where some dark corners (to me)  of computer gubbins are entered like walking on a frozen lake that was very painless like you say smart icon too ............thank you very much.

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4 hours ago, Plastic said:

From safari, up arrow icon (actions), then this...

90DB8AFA-C959-4F37-A448-5D45EE60005B.jpeg

Had to subscribe to do this but many many thanks , I still won’t post much but I felt I had to thank you for this and not wait 24 hours to do it , also many many thanks to Steve for sorting out my subscription so quickly! COYS 

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15 minutes ago, John Boy Saint said:

Oooo that’s clever - being of an age where some dark corners (to me)  of computer gubbins are entered like walking on a frozen lake that was very painless like you say smart icon too ............thank you very much.

You’re welcome. For reference, you can do that for any website you would like to create an icon for 👍

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I got the new site the first time I fired up the forum on my laptop just now, but then it went back to the old site when I clicked on a link. And now it won't show the new site at all. Same on phone. Only way I can access it at the moment is via incognito browser. Looking good though.

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2 hours ago, stevegrant said:

For anyone still getting the old site, I would recommend changing your DNS server to Google's, which has the easy-to-remember IP address of 8.8.8.8. I had the same issue this morning, the default DNS settings used by mobile networks and quite a lot of broadband/fibre routers have really long DNS cache times, so it takes ages for the data to be flushed through.

The best way is to bookmark the new site and delete the old one.

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