Forum Transfer Status Update

Since we finished our transfer of the forums to the Drupal platform over a week ago, we have been collecting feedback from the Taunton forum communities. Our producers and developers have read through all of the many feature requests, account questions, bugs, and calls for updates.

In order to have a clear and direct line of communication with you about our progress in addressing these, we have posted a notice block at the upper right hand corner of every page with the latest status on the most important changes (such as notifications, finding new content and search), as well as an FAQ about how to use the new forums. This block will be the place where all announcements, such as this one, will be posted.

Here is the progress so far:

1. Fix the "new" feature to actually show what's new.

Completed. This caching issue was specifically affecting the Breaktime forum and new content should be refreshed in the “latest posts” and “latest comments” areas.

2. Enabling notifications so you will receive an alert when someone comments on your posts.

Completed. Members must individually opt-in to receive email notifications. To do this:
- login,
- edit your profile,
- check "Receive node follow-up notification e-mails" under the "Comment follow-up settings" section (note: you can also choose to receive notifications for comments to your comments).
- save

3. Displaying replies in non-threaded chronological order with a link to the comment you replied to.

In progress. We hope to make this user specific (you choose how you want the forums to appear)

4. Changing the "Save" button to "Post" so there's no confusion about how to publish a post.

In progress (unfortunately not a simple change)

5. Getting Search up and running.

Done on Over the Fence & Gatherings; In progress everywhere else. Please note it will take time for the Drupal search index to populate (this is especially true for large databases like Breaktime, which have millions of individual records).

In addition to the visible changes we are making, there is a lot of behind the scenes set-up going on with our hosting provider to fine-tune these sites to run at the high traffic levels Taunton can experience (we will have over 2 Million visitors on our sites this month).

If you have any requests, complaints, bugs, or questions about the forums, please respond as a comment to this post for now. Our producers and developers will be spending time with their families during the holidays and we will have a rotating crew who will be monitoring this thread and making the changes as they are able. Please continue to be patient with the process and have a happy holiday.

Jason Revzon
VP, Taunton Interactive