New CC Forums launch date set: November 23

Parents Forum
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As you have probably heard, the new forum platform is coming. And I can now announce the date: November 23. The plan is to change this site to read-only mode shortly after 5am Pacific (8 am Eastern). That means the site will be visible to anyone, but nobody will be able to start threads, reply to threads, react (with like/agree/helpful) to posts or send private messages. The reason is we will be getting our final export of site data and adding it to new site. If we didn’t set aside this time, conversations would become lost or confused on the new site.

The timing is largely set by our current hosting company. (In the future, we will be hosting the site ourselves and can do this sort of thing in off hours.) Next week is a short window before traffic picks up again in December and we have higher levels of activity through the spring. Our goal is to keep the downtime to just a few hours. I’ll keep everyone updated on our progress using the site banners during the migration.

As always, we’ll be available via the contact form: https://www.collegeconfidential.com/us/contact-us . We will also monitor our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/collegeconfide/ Thanks to our testing over the last few weeks, we are confident most people (and likely everyone) will be able to log in without problems. But we also know from experience that things happen. One of the advantages of the new platform is that we have much better insight into what’s going on with the log-in system and can solve any issues that might arise.

As you might imagine, this has been one of the most exciting and stressful things we’ve done together. It’s important to understand that the new platform will enable us to fix annoyances and bugs far quicker than we have in the past. As soon as we get into the new server, we can prioritize responses to the feedback items you all have already provided (and will provide in the future). We’ve been carefully cataloging the concerns in a spreadsheet with hundreds of rows. We already have designers and developers working on some fixes. I’ll have more details soon.

Thank you for testing the new site and for all your feedback! As always, I’m impressed with the care and dedication of this community. Looking forward to an amazing 2021 on College Confidential!

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Good luck!!

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Always makes me nervous, but I do REALLY appreciate the communication. Maybe the changes in the past have been this thoughtful, I don’t know. But the perception has certainly been that the boards were being treated like an annoyance for CC, with not much thought put into major changes.

This time it seems like much thought is being put into it, and feedback is being listened to. It will probably be easier to address some of the minor annoying issues, since hopefully the major fires will be put out before they start this time.

Thanks, and good luck. :smile:

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@dadof4kids yes, MUCH more thought has gone into this switch. Even the moderators weren’t given much notice in the past, and we didn’t have the chance to look at the site ahead of time. This go around, moderators AND users have been allowed to see the new site before it’s launched.

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Hope the change over goes smoothly. Looking forward to seeing the finished product! And getting used to using it.

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@CCadminSorin, @CCadminJon

Could you please please put this announcement of the shut down and reopening times as a very noticeable banner at the top of every single forum.

This thread is pinned but some folks don’t really notice those things. A notification banner would be a really good thing to do.

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@thumper1, yes, this is now up. Thanks!