Welcome to the new site!

Profile picture for user Floydm
Floydm on

As I've been posting about, we've been working on upgrading this site to a new version of the platform it runs on for some time now. If you are seeing this, you've made it to the new site. Welcome!

There will be some turbulence as we get settled into the new system, learn about its quirks, and add some finishing touches. Your patience during this time is appreciated.

If you run into problems, feel free to comment below, send me a private message, or email me at floydm [at] thefreshloaf.com

Looks like things went smoothly enough and it's up and running sooner than anticipated :)

Good job you two!

Awesome Floyd and Dorota.  Nice to see the new site up and running already.  Thanks for everything you do.

Benny

So far so good, Floyd.  I wrote a little for the bio section of my account. One difference I see that I hadn't expected is that the new text input boxes do not double space automatically when <ENTER> is pressed. I had gotten used to it but this is probably better, especially for pasted-in text.

 

Thanks for all the hard work!

TomP

It'll take time to get used to. Normal for when you're used to seeing a website a certain way for so long. 

So far so good. Seems to run smoothly. 

Thank you Floyd and Dorota. 

Looks great! I also like the new logo; it nicely sums up the tone of this site: happy and friendly.

I see you've made a few changes to the Comments box. I like the look of it and the Table function looks new (or was I not paying attention?). What is the Alternative Text popup box for in the Image Upload? Are the images that were uploaded to the site previously no longer accessible?

Thanks for the hard work! 

 

Alternative text is a relatively new best practices measure. It's meant to be a description of what's in the picture for any site visitors who are visually impaired or who need screen readers to view the pages.

Images previously uploaded to the site should all still be there in your posts - but how you add images to a post now is done differently because it's a whole new system under the hood. 

Toast

Kumquat on Sat, 01/04/2025 - 14:30

I usually don’t post. But use the forum to find answers all the time.

But now all I see is tons of advertisement. On the Top, on the bottom, covering text so it took me few tries to get here.

 


 

I'm seeing quite a few too. It's interesting because I actually turned the throttle down on the ads some -- just did a bit more -- and removed a few units that were particularly jarring. 

I have a couple of hunches about what could be going on: one is that the markup from the new version of the CMS is considerably more up-to-date and semantically correct in how it describes the page and thus the ad placement scripts better understanding it and so may be more aggressive about placements. Either that or nearly the opposite: Google ads and probably some of the others optimize placements based on past experience, and since this version of the site is brand new it has no meaningful/helpful experience and so is just barfing out whatever it can come up with. 

As I've said, the new version of the site is a work in progress and still being tuned. Your patience is appreciated.

There are ways of getting rid of ads at your end. I've never seen an ad on TFL. It depends on the browser you use, how it is set, and if you use an ad blocker programme.

It will take some time to get used to.  I just posted my first new blog post and it was a pleasure not to have to resize the main image.

Great job!

Ian

Thanks, though I think I see one issue in your blog post: the formula image didn't finish uploading, I believe.

There is a new feature here that I haven't been able to figure out how to change (yet). When you upload a large image into the editor, it shows up to you immediately because you've got the original file on your computer. But if you look carefully, while it is uploading to the site there is a blue progress meter at the top of the image. If you save the post before the progress meter is full -- the image fully uploaded -- it never completes, so the image doesn't actually make it into your post. :(

I'm looking for a fix for this issue; it is really misleading and waaay too subtle an indicator that you need hold on for a few seconds before saving.

Your bread looks fabulous though!

I agree with you Ian.  Not needing to resize every photo makes posting so much easier.  Now, if we could batch upload even 4 photos at a time, that would be incredible.

Benny

The old site let one unreport a comment and I think that's important.  I know I have accidentally reported a post and needed to reverse my report. If it's feasible, please add a "Unflag" link.

"Unflag" is more directly connected with the link label, which also starts with "Flag".  Having an unflag link appear only if a post has been flagged is a good idea, I think, though it sounds like more work at your end. Also, is "Spam" the word we want? Most of the recent flags have been for suspected AI.  Maybe something like "Flag as spam, AI, etc."?

I think I'd like to see the "reply" link to the left of the "flag" link. Most people will look to the left side of a line to start scanning and right now, the "flag" link is the first one that will be seen. The "reply" one will be what will usually be clicked on, though.

I have another question about the new site. I searched for a few keywords I know have been in previous posts but I don't get any results. Will the new site be able to search the previous posts?

Thanks!

Can you give me a few examples? I've just searched for a few random terms like "baking powder" Ah I figured it out. 

The search index is still being built. At the moment only 5% of the site content is in the search index. 

Thanks for noticing and reporting that. I'll see if I can speed that up.

 

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alcophile on Sat, 01/04/2025 - 16:36

No hurry! I just happened to search for something and didn't get any hits and thought it was weird. I understand the transition will take some time.

All my messages i've ever had, even the deleted ones, have reappeared. 

On the old site i only had two PM's. Once PM's had been concluded I deleted them. 

Yet they are all back. Going back years. 

Not that it is a problem but thought you should know as you want to iron out any teething problems. 

That is interesting. That means the old system didn't truly delete them. 

I will look into how things got marked deleted and how they get deleted in the new system and see if I can port the deletions over.

I can see that the private message module has some of the plumbing in place for deleting threads but the feature itself hasn't actually been implemented. I'll see if I can find a fix for this or figure out how to remove the previously "deleted" messages soon.

When one deleted a PM there was a prompt, something to the tune of, "this deletion can be undone by clicking here". If you didn't do so and went onto another page it got deleted "permanently". So it must have been holding messages 'somewhere'. 

Hope this helps you find the solution Floyd. 

I'm thinking I'd actually like to just purge all private message for everyone and start fresh. I'll look into that and post a bit more about it soon.

Thanks again guys.

Interesting to see the things folks are finding about the new site, I guess we didn't really test as much until we went live! 

 

Very clean, and seems to be working well. As Abe said, all the PMs are back which just proves nothing is ever really deleted from the web. Yikes.

Thanks Floyd & Dorota.

Nice, clean look, Floyd!  :)

One request: When you click on a forum and see the list of posts, the rightmost column shows details of the 'Last Reply'. How about making that a clickable link to that last reply? Right now the only entry to a thread is from the top.

I'm curious, was there something in the 'web infrastructure' that prompted this change? I know of two other sites which were just forced into upgrades by their hosts. The hosting of my own little website got the boot because of it  :( So I'm looking for a new home for it.

I'm also curious to see if/how friendly the new format is with older OS's. My computer in the lab downstairs is WinXP Pro. Will give it a try manana.

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll look into it.

Regarding the prompt for upgrading: at least for me the issue was that support for the version of the content management system that this site runs on has been discontinued. Today, actually, is its official end-of-life date. I've been putting off the upgrade for years, literally as long as I could without jeopardizing the safety and security of the site. But time has run out.

The new version of the software is nice, and there are a lot of new tools and technologies available to us now that we've caught up technologically. We'll be trying to get the system running smoother and keep fixing usability quirks so it is easy to post and follow the discussions you want to follow here. I am acutely aware that the community and discussions are what make this site worth visiting rather the technology. Ideally the technology is simple and intuitive enough -- and the design clean enough -- that it just fades into the background. We're working on it.

Previously, clicking on the title of a comment would take us directly to that specific comment. Now, it only takes us to the top of the thread where the comment is located. It would be great to have that feature back. 

Similarly, having the option to click directly on the latest unread comments in the Activity Tracker would be super helpful.

Thank you!

Yippee

I'm not sure we can modify the activity tracker easily like that...but we can look into it later.

Separately, I'm currently doing a bunch of content editing to fix broken videos that used an outdated embedding format which is bumping up the content in the "last updated" queue as I add the old videos back. Hopefully I'll be done with messing with those in the next few days (It's a manual process and theres like 400 :( of them) and after that the activity tracker will then just show new stuff rather than all the old stuff that had to be updated/resaved. 

You can always see all the real new comment activity from the "all recent comments" listing page - (and I do have a thing in the works to make browsing all the newly added forum topics better but I have to finish the thing I'm working on before I can finish that up)

Great job, Floyd and Dorota - I can't begin to imagine how much work and time went into doing the site upgrade!

It all looks pretty good - nice and clean - somewhat too much white space for my liking, but you have explained why this needs to be; at least there are no Google style curved end dialogue boxes!

A question though about the home page: on the old site as I saw it there was recent posts on the left, blogs and then advanced posts below that. On the right there were recent comments on the right and I think bookmarks below that.

For the new posts, blogs and comments, there was a button at the bottom of each section that took you to a list of all the posts for that section in chronological order with pagination buttons. I don't see those buttons on the home page anymore - I guess the lists on the home page can do the job. But what about when the main page fills up with posts and comments - will the older posts be there in paginated lists? Or will there be a cutoff after so many entries?

I think there would be a loss of functionality if you had to scan though each subject section of the forum, but maybe I am missing something.

Another minor thing I have just noticed as I write this comment: in the past when writing a comment, my browser tab text would change to something like "creating new comment", but now it has just stayed at "Welcome to the new site..." Since I always have plenty of tabs open, it can make navigating back to your work in progress tricky if you change tab for whatever reason.

 

Lance

Hi Lance - its been months in the making and we're still working on it.  The parts that I can help with rely on more database and back-end under-the-hood bits that Floyd's been focused on.  

Regarding the missing listing pages - yes - we are still working on those. Every single one of those listing pages has to be rebuilt (and then styled so it looks ok... it's a whole thing...) .  We're working on it  (and rebuilding those most useful listing pages is on my to-do list.) Floyd spent three hours this morning just digging into the migrated mail stuff so it's going to take a bit of time.

Thanks for your patience.  

Regarding the tabs issue - I'll look into that too - but if you're adding a comment by clicking "reply" then you do currently see "Add new comment" as the tab title (if you're responding in-line with the thread you're not on a new page though - which is how it's always worked)

The all comments page is there now. Dorota built it and I blew up the site for a few minutes deploying it, which I think is a sign I should stop and take a few hours away from the computer this weekend. As she said though, we'll continue to work on adding back the features that got dropped.

One thing I've just noticed is the the links from /comments do not take you to the comment directly.

For example, from the home-page https://www.thefreshloaf.com/ in the recent comments section the link to my comment, "Might have to buy some more rye" is linked to:

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/75013/whole-rye-wheat-sourdough-hokkaido-milk-bread-sunflower-seeds#comment-538804

But from https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comments it links to:

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/538804

which takes you to the blog post and you have to unfortunately hunt for the comment.

Just added the Activity Tracker listing page which shows anything with recent activity (posts and comments) on any content (blog+ forum) with the pager. The link to that currently has been added to the footer.

(I'm aware that the listing table is a little squished on phones but we'll have to circle back to that later to add some more finishing touches - but at least the listing page that folks had before is now back.)

Note: that there may be some older posts surfacing there over the next few days as I work to restore old videos that were using the outdated markup styles- that listing page shows any content that was recently updated - not just when it was posted - which includes when I'm fixing stuff.

Toast

Marty on Sun, 01/05/2025 - 16:07

When I tried to go to page 2 in a forum topic I was returned to the recent posts page. Same if I used next selection. 

Android tablet using Chrome.

Thanks for the hard work.

Profile picture for user Floydm

Floydm on Sun, 01/05/2025 - 17:38

Thank you for reporting this. I must have broken that earlier today when trying to fix something else. I've fixed it now.

Love how the new site looks! And as a newbie, I actually really like the double-enter to double-space. It's more in line with my typing experience elsewhere.

 

The only thing I miss from the old site is the photos on the main page! It was nice to see everyone's bakes. But in the grand scheme of things, this is so so minor.

Thanks!

Yeah, I enjoyed the homepage features too, as well as the featured posts in the sidebar. It wasn't a top priority to get those in place before the migration -- it's like thinking about the art that you want to hang on the wall before moving into a house that is still under construction -- but I definitely think featuring lovely breads made by community members makes it more inviting here.

Profile picture for user justkeepswimming

justkeepswimming on Mon, 01/06/2025 - 09:06

Thank you both for all your work on this, truly. 

So far I am able to navigate things ok. Though it is a little different, overall it seems to be working fine. The one thing I am having difficulty with is uploading photos. I made the mistake of deleting my profile pic before figuring out how to upload a new one, lol. I can't seem to shrink the file size on my phone to something that will upload on this new site (was able to do it on the old site). Maybe once things settle down a bit for you, could you add some sort of tips on how to add photos? I know people struggled with that before too.

Mary 

Thanks for making this appear so smooth from the front side!  I spent too many years doing too many of these upgrades to ever believe it was that smooth from your POV!!  Congratulations on the success though.  Now you and Dorota should go get some sleep!

OldWoodenSpoon

Heh, thank you. 

My Fitbit shows that I haven't gotten a good night of sleep since 3-4 days before the switch over -- anxiety about the pending switch, then anxiety about any/all the little mistakes and missing features -- but it is coming together.

I very much appreciate the patience and kindness of folks here. It hasn't been perfect but we're doing our best given all of life's competing priorities. It is nice that people recognize that.

FYI - Alan tried to message me but my name doesn't pop up in the search window. He tried to find a 'send a message' button in my profile but that has gone too. So he had to find an old correspondence to PM me.

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alfanso on Mon, 01/06/2025 - 12:09

for messaging, there is no longer a Preview Message, only Send Message

It is clear to me that the new private message system is underbaked. 

I actually thought I was going to have to completely drop private messaging as a site feature, but then I noticed that someone had done some work on creating an updated version of it. Alas, it clearly isn't ready for prime time yet. Like a lot of open source projects, this depends on developers volunteering their spare time to make it happen, and someone probably got busy before they could complete it. 

I may be able to contribute some time and help improve the private message module at some point in the future, but I think we're looking at weeks or months before it gets much better rather than a few days. It's just too big a feature for me personally to commit to fixing any time soon.

In the meantime, I'd like to purge all of the existing private messages. As far as I can tell it is secure, but I just don't trust the state of this feature enough. Also, I suspect few of the PMs were intended to be held on to forever. I hadn't realized the old system retained all of them until now. They should go.

I won't delete them without a few days' advanced warning. Consider this foreshadowing, not the actual warning that I'm going to delete PMs. That will come soon.