Hello everyone,
This month we have some updates to the Community that will go live on the 3rd of October 2017 in the mid afternoon (a few hours from now). Our QA team is just finishing up their testing as I write this so hopefully by the time you read this, these updates will be ready! As always, I like to keep my updates transparent so you can see that we are always looking at ways to improve the forums in whatever way we can to make this a great place to get advice and have a chat. Anyway, here are the changes that are coming...
Big changes:
Polls - We have investigated how the Polls work within the Lithium software and have made some adjustments to it with some CSS styling and some custom javascript to make the Polls look as good as they can. When a poll is active, it will appear on the right of the page when viewing a particular board.
Superuser escalation (beta) - I am currently experimenting with creating a way for Superusers to report a post to be escalated to staff to look into. This will create a copy of the post and send the copy to a private area for review. Superusers will be given more information when we have implemented it properly and I have ironed out some bugs.
Newsletters - We will be posting Newsletters into the blog on a regular basis. With these newsletter blog posts, I will be using custom HTML to show a stylised type of blog post that will promote areas of our already existing blog such as products like BT Sport App, Tech tips, TV recomendations and more. Keep an eye out on the blog for more information.
Moving of posts to a board that requires labels (Feedback board) - Since we introduced mandatory labels to our feedback board our moderation team found it to be a bit of a hassle to add labels manually after moving posts. I have customised the moving posts form to include labels if they are required within a board. This is only available to users who have permission to move posts (moderators and administrators).
Medium changes:
Velocity animation Javascript - We have deployed a new animation platform to the forums called Velocity and this will start to replace some simple animations done with jQuery. The library itself is an extension of jQuery but will leverage your devices hardware and not rely solely on your browser. The file is rather small too so this shouldn't impact performance at all (hopefully it will make animations a bit smoother). The polls are the first to use this animation script, more will follow in the future.
Service status - Service status board will now display a new module on the right with a link directly to the service status page. This should give users a clear way to see the official Service Status webpage quickly.
SVG icons - Icons on the homepage are now SVG format. Mobile menu icons have been revamped and SVGs have been used to provide high quality icons across all devices. Not only will the files be clearer.. they are also a lot smaller and quicker to load. An image fallback is in place if your browser does not support SVGs (I think only older versions of Internet Explorer do not support SVG images).
Minor changes and bug fixes:
Bug where the number is cut off on numbered lists within post content has been changed so there is room for the number to fit.
Main menu navigation fixes for certain types of touchscreens.
Online users component links now have rel="nofollow" to deter spammers from registering and letting search engines index their links from our homepage via their profile page.
Bug in the profile page where usernames were pushing content outside of its parent (Thanked users for example) has been fixed.
Bug where the page would sometimes not scroll to the text body input when editing a post has been fixed.
Added a check on blog article editting for when the title doesn't match the conanical URL for SEO purposes.
Thank you everyone for your bug reports and suggestions directed to myself and Louisa. We are always looking at ways to improve the forums so all suggestions and feedback is most welcome.
Thanks everyone from me and everyone at Plusnet.
