Editorial Team

Hi everyone,

We've done a lot of work on the site lately and have sorted out more items on the issues list (What's up?). 

We would love your feedback, whether you like or dislike any of our changes, and the reasons for your impressions.   That information helps us to determine whether we're going in the right direction in our website design decisions for the community.  

Your opinions and your experiences on the site are very important and that's what we keep in mind when we make changes.  So, let us know:  Yay or Nay, any time.

A couple recent changes are :  Tags and Search.  Additional information about them can be found in the comment section below.  Any and all thoughts most welcome.

We'll be back with more in a bit...

Isabelle

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19 Nov

Hi everyone,

As you've noticed, we've scaled back our presence as far as updates are concerned (to avoid intruding with our tech babble ;-)) since we prepared for you a list of the current known issues, as well as the issues you've reported, on the What's up? page.  We've been keeping it up to date as and when we fix an issue on the list.

However, we thought a bit of an explanation on some of the issues and the work / changes we did in the last few weeks would be useful information for you to know as users of the website. 

Right now, there are still a few issues that we're working on and it's progressing well.  We are also taking the time to correct some of the functions on PoetBay that haven't really worked or haven't been really useful in a long time when we come across them during our work, so a bit of needed revamping is happening at the same time.  

One of the changes is to the My Page | 'friends' latest texts' list  :

The list at the bottom-left of the page on My Page displays 5 writing friends' latest text that they posted in the last 6 months.  If none of the writers in your friends' list have posted any new texts in 7 months, no list will appear there as a result.

If you have more than 5 friends on your friends' list, they will be selected randomly so all of your friends' texts all have a chance to be displayed there. 

Another change is to the My friends' texts section :

My friends' texts now displays all of your writing friends' names in alphabetical order and displays the last 5 posted texts from them. 

We find it looks neater and is more useful this way than what it used to be like (long disorderly list of repeated friends' names and pictures, etc).  

We hope you like these small changes.  We're also rethinking and reorganizing the Tags at the moment because as they are now we think they're not very accessible or useful which defeats their purpose.   We'll of course present you with what we've changed about them when we're done.

About the PayPal / Supporter 'membership' fix.  We did not have to fix anything 'cause we did receive renewals recently.  However, if you experience any difficulty, please let us know.

Concerning the character display issue.  We are still working on determining the best course of action in the solutions we have to fix the problem.  We want to prevent any solution that would disrupt the community's use of the website for any amount of time.  That's one of the reasons why this one is taking a little longer. 

On a more personal level for those interested, the other reasons are all related to time and having to take care of our immigration bureaucracy fiasco that we're dealing with right now and that we briefly mentioned on a previous community update. We met with our MP's assistant yesterday, and there may possibly, very maybe, be something that can be done... Yeah. At this point no one knows for sure.  But we'll see. So we often need to take days off to focus on that for our family lately.  Although a bit of time juggling, we keep on with the work for PoetBay in between, as much as we can. 

We hope everything on the website is working well for everyone.  We'll be back with more in a bit...

Isabelle

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Our 'What's up?' page (Community notice)

04 Nov 

Hi everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that we've prepared a list of the current known issues as well as the issues the community have reported so far.  This to minimize our intrusions about things unrelated  to 'writing' on our main list of poetry postings.

We will be updating that page for you as and when we fix an issue or when a new report comes in so that you know what's going on.  

To view the list, visit this link:

What's up?

There's a fair amount of issues that we're working to solve (all relating to our server specs surprise).  However, we're making progress every day, so there's a light at the end of the tunnel for sure.

Enjoy your week!  And don't hesitate to let us know if you encounter an issue - it will not bother us at all (for those worried about us having a lot on our plates).  

Isabelle

[Pic - Example of an error message and where it appears on the page if one should pop up.]

01 Nov 2019

Hi everyone,

Welcome back! It was a bit of a fight, but we got there in the end. We are now on our new, upgraded server -yay-

However, as we mentioned in our previous updates, we didn't have the required time to fix everything on the site just yet.

Adding to that, our webhost once again misinformed us about what our new server's specs would be, so we got the unexpected surprise of having to fix our fixes to work with our new server's actual specs! So a few all-nighters later, we've stabilized our site to the best we can do right now.

This means that you may encounter a few error messages (hopefully not too many) while you navigate and try to do things on the site. They usually appear at the top of the page (see pic above). If that occurs, please copy/paste the message and send it to us so we may be aware of the issue and correct it for everyone on the site.

On the whole though, we're sure the main core functionalities of our website are working. So writing texts, comments, or messages and uploading pictures on the site shouldn't be interrupted in any way.

You'll notice that we've made a few changes on the site. Minor, lingering things that needed adjusting (ex. hearts in inbox, etc).

We've also reorganized the Forum and Help sections, as well as updated the Terms of Membership. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the new additions, and as always, we're open for discussion if any of them don't ring right for you.

The following is what we know that currently doesn't work (which we're working on right now).

KNOWN CURRENT ISSUES

- Creating an account Sign up

- PayPal / Supporter 'membership'

- Sending emails from our site (Contact us, Report, Send text as email, Send message by email from writer's profile page, system emails)

- HTML editor adding '?' for new lines and spaces in PMs (2 Nov)

- Counters not updating because of website cache (2 Nov)

- Profile shortcut link (2 Nov)

- Profile picture upload & save triggers an error msg (3 Nov)

- Displaying of characters is incorrect on accented words

- Access to comments in diary fix doesn't work on new server, need new fix

- Website maintenance scripts

- RSS feed

- Editors' dashboard tweaking needed

- Challenges (themes) make more user-friendly 

So here we go... second stage of fixing up PB begins now.  Your help in reporting any issues will speed up this stage.  

Again, we thank you all for bearing with us while we sort this out...

:-)

Isabelle

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02 Nov 2019

Our address isn't fully resolved yet, but we will be able to go back to using www.poetbay.com soon (maybe another 24hrs for some).  Periodically check on your browser to see if you can load our website from our usual www address.  If so, then our address' new web location has finished propagating on the world wide web and you can start using it again.