As Christian posted in his blog earlier today, an upgrade was performed over the weekend to address performance issues as well as to introduce some new features. Though we are back online, there are still a few areas which are not yet up and running as we iron out all the bugs.

Thanks for your patience.

At the moment, attempting to upload an image triggers an error alert saying:

onHTTPError: 404

Instead of the topics I've participated in, the "track list" now shows a bunch of topics, none of which I've participated in.

My eyes ! Flaming icons, ouch, ouch !

Seriously, having two icon types doesn't add anything in terms of usability, but it does add extra visual noise that detracts from the content. I doubt many people care whether the topic is "hot" or not, especially considering that the thread message count is right there, 400px to the right.

Icons are also way too contrast. I would rather have something like this, more calm and restrained.

The replacement of "(xx new)" links with just "xx" does not seem to be a very good idea either. Even after I managed to realize that "xx" is a link (which is damn hard to do on an uncalibrated laptop monitor), I still had to overcome my arthritis, carpal syndrome and hangover shakes to aim at that ultra minuscule 1 that is now all that's left from a link.

I find it mildly confusing that the button used to post messages is labeled "Save".

Can the flaming icons be the same red as the typophile logo at the top?

It used to be that some updates were a no-brainer. Firefox (not as true now); CCleaner; Auslogics Diskdefrag; 7Zip (even beta!).

What has always been a given is that "improvements" to Typopihle have consistently been problematical at best.

As a (non-professional) typophile and former programmer, I'm almost embarrassed. Don't get me wrong. I love Typophile. I'm grateful for all the dedicated people who volunteer their time to keep it running.

But don't you test these upgrades before implementing them? Or do you count on Typophile users to do your beta testing? Isn't anybody ever embarrassed by the bugs?

"Sometimes it's better to launch and tidy up the loose ends afterwards."

Bendy: do you work for Microsoft?

>Bendy: do you work for Microsoft?

:) (No but I do look after a website and sometimes find it very difficult to balance user needs with organisational needs.)

What I mean is that with a site like this, it would have been more annoying for users to have the site down for ages and ages. I'm sure they're aware of things that aren't working and hopefully they'll be resolved quickly.

"What I mean is that with a site like this, it would have been more annoying for users to have the site down for ages and ages."

Thanks for proving my point. Test BEFORE you come up with an "improved" version.

Renuisance Man, if you think about it you'll realize that for a volunteer gig the alternative to letting thousands of helpful users find & report bugs is entirely prohibitive. And that's not even considering the valuable gauging of user opinion about the upgrade.

hhp

@Domenico: I just checked this again also, and it seems like nothing has been updated since the shutdown.

Reminds me of an expression one of my computer science teachers favored:
"My program could ran faster if it didn't have to give the right results."

hhp

>"The goal was to improve the tracker speed by at least an order of magnitude."

Really? "An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10." That' far exceeds Moore's Law. (According to Moore's Law, computer power doubles every 18 months.)

>"Renuisance [sic] Man, if you think about it you'll realize that for a volunteer gig the alternative to letting thousands of helpful users find & report bugs is entirely prohibitive."

I can accept that newly added features are sometimes problematical. My point is why do you have to break so many old features to implement new buggy features?

>"Reminds me of an expression one of my computer science teachers favored:
'My program could ran faster if it didn't have to give the right results.'"

And that reminds me when, decades ago, I told a sales person, "I can get it for $XX less elsewhere." He responded, "Well, why don't you buy it elsewhere?" to which I replied, "They're out of stock." The Response? "I can sell it for half their price when I'm out of stock." Ouch!

If I've been less than kind, I apologize. It's that I expect a lot from Typophile, and I want you all to look good.

Keep on keepin' on.

@Renaissance Man - Old features breaking is probably due to them being implemented through manual patching of the stock website engine. They appear to have upgraded the engine, and so now they are probably porting whatever the patches that accumulated in the old version.

Wow! Clicking on Track in my profile really is way-hey-hey faster. Thanks Christian and others!

Wow! Clicking on Track in my profile really is way-hey-hey faster. Thanks Christian and others!

That may be because it's no longer actually tracking your posts :-/ (at least mine's not since the maintenance).

Thanks for your work guys!

Very minor nitpick: When previewing a post, I'd love to still be able to see if the thread has been updated in the meantime. Is this coming back?

Just to check:

I've had an idea of shoe lace turning into type. I do not want to turn it into illustration, but I also want it to flow naturally.

This is one days work. What do you think?

Very nice.
But dump the aglets and make it telephone cables instead.

hhp

To now answer the question in the subject line:

Much smoother performance?

hhp

We appreciate bug reports and other ideas. You can send them through the contact page; just select "Bug Reports" as the category. When things get crazy there are usually a few threads that start up, though, and we try to pay attention to these as well.

What’s up with those W links? Aren’t those supposed to be Wiki links?

@Christopher: At the bottom of each page, there’s a feedback link

i think the red circles mean you have not vied that thread yet. just my observation.