Additional information about our work on the website and the fixes/changes we've done so far... 




[04 Nov - 23 Nov] - 'What's up?' (Update 2)

 

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

 

=============================================== 

 

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

 

===============================================

 

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

 





Diary by Editorial Team The PoetBay support member heart!
Read 1123 times
Written on 2019-11-24 at 01:26

Tags Community  Update  Tech 

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Editorial Team The PoetBay support member heart!
Hi everyone,

We've finished our tweakings of the first stage of changes to the Tags. Here's what they are and what we've changed.

Tags are keywords that describe your text. Their purpose is to make it possible for readers to search for specific subjects/keywords, and enable them to find yours or others' text(s) with the same tag.

They also help you organize your personal archive of texts on your page for yourself and for your readers. (This is the second stage of the changes we're working on right now)

You can add 1-3 tags for each of your texts and the tags that you set to your texts will be viewable links listed under your text's date of posting. This is one accessibility part that was missing on our site for tags.

We've also cleaned up how tags can be saved to our website to make them clearer and more efficient in their purpose :

** A tag must be one word only, ex.: Happiness.

** Punctuation (including hyphenation) or any other characters (including the # sign) which are not letters cannot be saved as a tag on your text.

We hope you'll like this first stage of changes... more soon.

Isabelle
2019-11-22


Editorial Team The PoetBay support member heart!
Hi again,

We've put across our first stage of changes to the Tags tonight.

You'll notice that the tags are now displayed on the text itself with clickable links to view other texts with the same tag. (NB: Needs a bit of tweaking still which we're doing right now)

We've also improved the 'Search tag' feature on the Tags page.

The second stage of changes is in the works... more soon.

Isabelle
2019-11-22


Editorial Team The PoetBay support member heart!
Hi everyone,

Forgot to mention that we changed a few things concerning doing searches for Texts (titles) or Members (names, city) on the site at our Search page.

More specifically, we corrected the bug where a search for a member's name with 3 letters or containing spaces didn't work. Now it does.

We also added a basic Advanced search feature allowing the use of the + operator to refine the search result.

Examples:

Searching see will give every title which have those three letters (see, seeing, seeds, etc) wherever it's placed in the title.

Searching +see will give every title which have those three letters (see, seeing, seeds, etc) and is after a space in the title.

(The title 'See You Soon' would not be part of the search result, but 'I See You' or 'Can You See' would because they are preceded by a space)

Searching +see+ will give every title which contains that word specifically.

(If the title begins with the word 'See', it will not be part of the result because it is preceded by a space.)

The + operator also works for searching a member.

I'm giving examples with only one word to search, for brevity, but it's possible to do searches on more than one word.

Isabelle
2019-11-21


ken d williams The PoetBay support member heart!
Thank you, Isabelle
Ken D
2019-11-20


Editorial Team The PoetBay support member heart!
Hi Ken,

We noticed that too. Unfortunately, there are too many factors out of our control to be able to fix this because of things like Google's web crawlers, for example, whose purpose is to index all pages of websites it comes across to make searches easier. That generates traffic on our site during their job of indexing our pages. We're looking into it to see if there aren't other options we could find to minimize their activity. But in general, there usually isn't much we can do about them - sorry to say.

Isabelle
2019-11-20


ken d williams The PoetBay support member heart!
Thank you for keeping us informed. The stats of the number reads we I am having each is not correct has far has I understand. Thank you.
Ken D
2019-11-20


Ann Wood The PoetBay support member heart!
Good morning all, any news from our new website address? Can we start writing new poems and stories? Have a nice day and new week and many thanks for your help and support.
2019-11-11


arquious The PoetBay support member heart!
The patrons of the Muse and their scribes are vital to perpetuating these creations!
2019-11-07


KYREUS of Sweden The PoetBay support member heart!
Promoting art is a marathon.
2019-11-05


ken d williams The PoetBay support member heart!
Thank you for all your hard work and keeping us informed.
Ken D
2019-11-05