You all might have noticed a few changes around here. That’s because we recently upgraded the software underlying the community. (These changes are separate from the search and cookie policy changes we announced last week.) As some of you might remember, CC changed to a new platform a few years ago. One reason for making the change was to benefit from updates to the software.
The new notification menu makes it a lot clearer where each notification is coming from and highlights unread notifications. You can even filter by notification type.
Improved search means you are a lot more likely to find a post if you remember words in title.
There are a lot of upgrades behind the scenes and two new features that we haven’t turned on:
We’re looking into turning on these features, but will take some time to evaluate them before adding them to CC.
I can’t let this pass without mentioning the great work @CC_Jay and @CC_Stefan have done to keep the site stable. There has been so much going on that isn’t visible to people who use the site. As a result, we’ve had 100% uptime since the start of the year:
We can’t expect to never have downtime, but it’s going to be rare thanks to their efforts.
Sorry about that. March is always a crazy time around here and this announcement slipped through the cracks for some reason. (Ok. It was me. But let’s now throw blame around. )
I don’t believe that the new search features have made it to the public branch just yet. A wild guess for when they’ll be available here is in the next 30-60 days.
Are there specific searches that are doing a bad job?
I plan to push new updates once or twice a month going forward. There were some big changes to some internals that made getting the custom theme updated quite a chore. With more frequent updates the changes will be less jarring.
@CC_Jay I have searched using the exact title of a thread…and have NOT gotten to that thread! It’s annoying.
Also, any way to take out the extra characters that appear on older threads that were ported over in previous upgrades! I share one thread in particular…and even though old, the content is excellent. But it’s almost impossible to read now with all this extra junk.
I see. Upon looking more closely, it looks like we do have at least some of those improvements here already and I just kicked off a process to rebuild the indexes. There are over 28 million posts, so it’ll be a bit before it’s done. The database is over 200GB. This should make the exact title searches work.
You mean the <p> stuff? No. It’s not easy to fix at this point. It might be possible to figure out which posts need to have that HTML removed on and do a global replacement there, but it’s a bunch of work, and then the fear is that those changes get applied somewhere that they are not wanted.
But maybe replacing <p> and </p> in posts of a certain age is something that could be considered.
I’m just asking about the one thread I linked above. I know there are other old timers on this forum that agree that this content is a must read for students and parents…and especially those applying to mostly reach schools. I want to send this now to a poster, but it’s such a PITA to read, I’m not going to.
If you have specific posts in mind, we can fix them individually. (Even if that means editing by hand.) I’ve done it in the past when I find posts that I want to show people. I wish we could fix all of them, but it seems worth fixing the most helpful posts in the meantime.
@CC_Jon this thread. But it’s not just one post…and the whole thread is important. Read it and you will understand why. Looks like someone actually fixed the first post!
So…supposedly I have one new message in this area…but as you can see…none appear. When I click on the red box, it doesn’t take me to a new message. @CC_Jon@CC_Jay
Really disliking the new notifications thing. No setting to change to go back to the old way, I don’t suppose? I can’t make the notifications go away even by clicking on the threads. It’s a lot more work and I just can’t seem to make it work the way it’s supposed to.
Always seem to have trouble finding the “good deal of the day” thread. Searches no matter how I try (even with the advanced functions) seem to pull up everything but!
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