Upgrade of this community

[Alastair]

Just to let you know that Steve will be working on this community tomorrow (Friday) and over the weekend. He will be updating the base software to the latest release. He will also be updating any of our application to the latest releases and he also plans to bring in new facilities. So lets sit back and see what he comes up with :-)

Alastair

[Alastair]

Well Steve has today upgraded our software to the latest release and in the process fixed the Facebook problem. He will be working on the community over the weekend to update the various applications we've added to the site and also bringing in new apps that we've spotted that look to add value the service.

Should you spot anything missing or not working properly please let us know.

Alastair

[1938 Observer]

I cannot find 'Like" or "thankyou" icons at bottom of posts????

Cannot find "Photo gallery" link at top of page.

[Alastair]

Neither can I Gordon and have reported that to Steve. He's working on the community today and over the weekend so hopefully he'll have this fixed shortly.

Thanks for reporting this.

Alastair

[sandyc]

Probably not related??? But there does seem to be a LOT of "crap" getting in on ES these days.

Sandy (back in Canada again)

[Alastair]

Yes and I am spening time removing it. I need to talk to Steve to see if he's re-implented the spam protection software.

Alastair

[Alastair]

OK the "like" and "thanks" and Photo Gallery are back.

Alastair

[1938 Observer]

Probably not related??? But there does seem to be a LOT of "crap" getting in on ES these days.

Sandy (back in Canada again)

I've noticed it too Sandy, but as Alastair said he is working on it, also the spam protection in Papa Bears domain, I don't know where all these "Trolls" breed,probably an alien species, maybe we need one of those identifier codes for new registrations to deter machine generated exploitation.
Gordon.

[Alastair]

When we first setup the system Steve approved each application manually. However he wasn't very diligent so it could be several days before he'd get around to approving folk and that caused problems as they would email me to ask why they hadn't been approved.

So the compromise was to include a spam email checker within the process and if you got passed that then you would be approved providing you also clicked on the link in the email we sent you.

I'm just thinking that perhaos Steve hasn't re-enabled this spam checking since doing the upgrade given the number of spammers that have come in during the past 24 hours.

Alastair

[Alastair]

Just to mention that we're working on a couple of issues or will be over the weekend.

We'll be doing an upgrade to the Arcade system and will carefully examine the configuration to ensure everything works as it should. I've had two emails in telling me that after playing a game and you go back to try for a better score they are getting "You don't have permission to play this game" or some such words. That is totally weird so we're going to try and track that down.

As I mentioned above we're going to double check on our spam prevention system to try to eliminate most of the spammers that are appearing.

And another problem we've just become aware of is that for some reason if you use out ScotCards program to send a postcard they are not being sent out. Not sure if this is a recent problem due to our move to a new Telco but we'll be testing to see why this is occuring and get it fixed.

And we did add back in the tabs on the menu bar for Radio and EScotland. Also the Facebook connection is now working again. This last was due to Facebook changing something and the software company has now provided a fix for it.

Once we're confident we've fixed these problems it will be time to try out new things.

Alastair

PS While this is not something for this community we do intend to add a comments system to our web sites of electricscotland.com, electricscotland.net and electriccanadian.com. We tried a quick implementation and while it worked fine on a test page we couldn't replicate throughout the site. We have two issues one of which we know about and can fix albeit will take a few days and the other we don't yet know how to fix yet but we'll figure it out.

Overall the comment system looks great and is much like the comment system on newspaper sites where you can add your own comment to a news story. Like them you'll be required to create an account to allow you to post and we'll also be moderating each post before it goes live on the system.

We did test out a system a few years ago which actually worked very well but we were concerned that the comments were stored on a third party site. This system will have the comments stored on our site. In many ways this is important as we hope we'll get comments that will add new information to the page you are reading and also be a way to mention any incorrect information you might find on a page.

While I didn't check for it I believe like the newspapers that once you have been approved for adding comments there is a way to flag good users to be give immediate posting rights so avoiding the delay in getting your comments displayed.