Status update for December 4, 2020

College Confidential Community
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Today has been really good because I finally feel like I can use the site the way we intended. Since December 2, we’ve made the following changes:

  • Removed some JavaScript code that was causing noticeable slowness when composing messages.
  • New posts (those created after the November 27 launch) now display links and emojis properly. :tada:
  • We’re updating everyone’s rank to match what they had earned in the past. We’re currently working through Senior Members (trust level 3) and will promote everyone over the next few days.
  • The directory of all users has been removed. It was causing performance issues on the database and it didn’t feel right for College Confidential. We can consider bringing a version of it back, but that’s not a high priority at the moment.
  • A number of dead links have been fixed, but there are still we need to work on.
  • When you mention another user in a post (@username), that will now become a link to their profile.
  • Thread title and category links now show up in the site header when you scroll down the page. (Sorry for the bold, but this is kinda a big deal.)
  • Adjusted a few settings to make the moderator’s job easier.
  • You can now send messages less then 10 characters long. (But the minimum is 3. If you don’t have much to say, consider just using the “like” feature! The limit helps prevent accidental messages.)

This round of changes has helped me personally enjoy using the site far more than anytime in the past week. Still, we know there other issues we need to correct. That work will continue for as long as it takes.

In other news, I’m finding it so much easier to discover interesting conversations. Just today I noticed:

I know these sorts of conversations happen all the time on CC, but I personally had the hardest time navigating the old site and rarely noticed them. (By the way, Bosch dishwashers are amazing. We sold our house last year and nearly took our Bosch dishwasher with us. In the end we left it and had to buy a new one for the new house.) Seeing this sort of side discussion alongside the many college admissions discussions encourages me that things will be alright once we get past the bumpy transition. Honestly, I’m getting excited. :wink:

8 Likes
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I can’t access my inbox/PMs from pre upgrade CC. Will this be fixed?

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Yes. We have the data imported. But we need to map the messages to users.

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What does that mean? How long will it take? Will it take longer than it did to import the data?

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My understanding is that the data is in the database, but nobody has access to their own messages because there is a link that needs to be created in the database. I don’t have an estimate at the moment. I can say that it’s a priority for our developers and we need to make sure it’s done correctly. The only thing worse than not having access to your messages is having access to the wrong messages.

1 Like
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Still can’t access any of my old PMs.

Is this still being worked on, or are you giving up?

Fortunately for you, CC gets new users every year.

Unfortunately for me, as a long time user, all the “improvements” made over the last year have made CC almost unusable for me.

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We are still working on it, but we’ve hit a technical problem with the process that is importing them. :frowning:

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Is there an ETC?

Why did you upgrade the website when there was so much that it can no longer do?

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Just this evening our dev team finished importing private messages.

As for why we upgraded when we did, it was partially dictated by our previous hosting company. The other reason is that we are now self-hosting, which allows us to fix things more quickly. I know that might not seem true given the time it took to get private messages back, but it really is true. In the past we’ve had much smaller problems take months to fix. As our team learns the new system, we’ll be able to do things more quickly here.