You have good debugging genes in your makeup, devil84, I am impressed. And I have to say I am less than whelmed with the board application, or at least the development and maintenance side of it. The user side is nice, I have to admit, but a lot of that might be due to the efforts of the DBR admin crew.
Thanks, 75! I worked on some novel (for their time) applications back in the day where those debugging skills came in really handy.
I do want to give credit where credit is due. The application is pretty solid (even if I initially think they organize things like rabid squirrels, haha -- it does eventually make sense, I just have to adjust my thinking). It's developed by the same people as the previous board software who broke off from that company. Obviously, they have to do things differently even though their product is extremely similar, so it's frustrating that we can leverage most, but not all, of our previous knowledge. Not knowing which is the "different" part is the real frustration. We'll get it, sooner or later.
The maintenance side of it, or more specifically, the hosting group, is a good group of people. We are tiny potatoes to them, though. This upgrade was done on their schedule, not ours (if I had it to do differently, it would NOT be the same week, or even the same month, as my son's wedding and other admin/mods vacations!). And their communication skills are pretty typical of IT people, meaning they may as well start every email with, "Guess what I just did! You're gonna love this...." To which the initial, knee-jerk response usually is, "Wait, you did WHAT? NOW??!!" Hey, the good news is that the board is no longer slow and throwing 502 errors, even if we lost the ability to work behind the scenes to make sure we give you our vision of the new boards. Instead, we get to wing it and surprise y'all with an incessant multitude of tiny, incremental changes! It'll be fun, right?!
It could be a lot worse. The hosting company is actually quite good, even though they work at their schedule. The software is a terrific, solid base product that has a lot of add-ons to expand functionality. We just need to learn to use it, which is much easier without the distractions of gaining a daughter-in-law or vacations, so we're able to focus more now. And also remember that we're all volunteers and have real-world jobs.
We're not doing anything different than previous upgrades. We were just able to do that all in the background before and get it working before we let everyone see it. It's different now; a little exciting and a lot scary. It's why I've been a bit more transparent about some of the struggles, not to gather kudos (though they're certainly appreciated!), but to let people know that something that should be SO EASY, like changing the background color of the selected text, took literally 300 times longer than I thought it should! Don't hesitate to keep ideas coming, especially if they're things that don't seem to work quite right. We'll get to it when we can! And y'know, I really enjoy doing this kind of frustratingly awesome kind of customization. I've got SOOOOOO many ideas!
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I'm right there with you, gep! Actually, the blue behind the banner (not the within the D-U-K-E letters) and the menu bar with the forum names are the same. There's an optical illusion going on, aided and abetted by the ever-so-slightly darker blue behind the username, message and notification indicators, and the search bar on the right of the screen. I have no idea where they've defined that color. I'm working on it because it bugs me!
