Dear friends,
As you know, the site has suffered serious stability issues this year. That's driven, mostly, by the software (Vanilla) that underlies the discussion board and that Accipiter heavily modded. Vanilla is sort of an abandoned product; our version is more than 12 years old and the last release was eight years ago. The company shuttered and the software was inherited by a firm with a less-than-sterling rep. We haven't been able to update most of our tech stack because the new software there would likely break the Vanilla software.
Chip has been working tirelessly on getting us healthy again. She's got a duplicate of the site running on a new server, has migrated vast amounts of data and is now working to migrate the discussion board content - 54,000+ posts - to a new platform called MyBB. Our rollout of it is going a bit slowly because Chip is working on mods to the basic setup to make the new platform feel - and act - as much like home as possible.
She'd love to have a few beta testers but the system is making that hard (because, in IP address terms, the new site is MFO and the old site is MFO, so being able to see one of them sort of precludes you from being able to see the other).
We'll keep at it. She's hoping we will migrate before the April issue goes live. We'll do our best to keep you updated and we'll give folks a heads up before we do anything dramatic.
Back to watching my blizzard,
David
Comments
Let me know if I can assist with beta testing.
In any case, the "site at a URL not known as MFO" allows us to (very) quickly identify the user-side problems. Our style-sheet, for example, is not recognized and so the discussion board looks a lot like it was produced in 1988 by a dot-matrix printer with an impulse to add three blank lines between each line of beautiful Times New Roman text. (She tells me that's not normal, btw.)
We're also plagued by log-in issues, bunches of "authorization code mismatch" messages.
But, on the plus side, the main body of the site - commentary, profiles, all that - looks and works perfectly, and all of the discussion thread migrated over cleanly.
"This is a developing story and will be updated as our team receives additional information!" (On our local news sites that translates to "we scraped this off Facebook and you'll never hear another word about it"!)
David
1. it is at Chip's personal URL. If you have any kind of malware alarms, it will ding as "insecure - run away!" Nothing much to actually worry about.
2. when you get there, you should see a slightly outdated version of the board. The content is current as of yesterday morning.
3. you can try signing in. It would help to know if you can actually get in, our experience varies.
4. if you can sign in, poke around, click around, think about how it feels and how it works. We can make some mods, though it is not infinitely malleable.
5. let us know. We will go set up a thread on Technical Questions to avoid unduly cluttering things here.
And thanks!
David
From here it seems that if you start at MFO-2, and try to go anywhere else, you wind up back at MFO-1.
Sorry about any confusion!
First 2 tries failed because I was using my full e-mail and password - as needed for regular MFO sign ups.
On 3rd, I used only my MFO username - yogibearbull and password and that worked!
One urgent suggestion - even when unsigned, I could see the entire MFO Member list. This should be made private as at regular MFO OR restrict it to MFO Members only.
This is very welcome news.
I don't anticipate having to use this feature often but there is one particular individual...
OK! Just found that one- it's a small "View New Posts" in the upper right of the header bars. Cool!
Also right there is another handy link: "View Today's Posts".
I've started using the feedback-on-the-new-discussion-board... thread.
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/65833/feedback-on-the-new-discussion-board-correct-url-here#latest