Migrating to a whole new world...

The classic WinCustomize.com was originally launched almost 4 years ago.  Hard to believe eh? And it's easy to forget that when it launched, it was pretty bare bones. The features that many users took for granted got added much later.  It is also easy to forget how slow the site tended to be at various times due to server or bandwidth overload.

The new site was necessary. Really it was.  I know some of you miss some of the goodies of the old site. Don't worry, they'll migrate back in time.  We'll shrink the editor size and we'll have buttons to take you back to top and buttons to list what your activity is without having to go to your personal page and countless other features.

And most of all, we'll be improving performance.  Performance is a tricky thing. It only takes one bug to slow down the site drastically. Take today for instance. Why was the site so slow? Why were there all those "server too busy" errors? One big reason: Every hit to the home page caused a very long query for figuring out the featured articles. A trivial thing seemingly and yet all by itself it brought the site to a crawl. That's why the articles are down tonight. We have to find a better way to display the articles.  We also found out that referral tracking was not cached. So we have that turned off tonight.

And there's tons of things like that lurking to be squashed.  The new site IS faster. You can tell sometimes when, just for a moment, it'll zip really fast. Then it'll dog down again due to whatever bug we haven't yet uncovered cropping up on one of the thousands of other users visiting the site.  You see that here in the forums. Forums are particularly tricky to optimize.  Cache too much and the data doesn't update as fast as people want. Don't cache the right areas and reading every post is very slow.

But consider the advances in this forum technology? Where almost every site uses invision power board where you have to go to every single forum (click click click) to find out what's going on, our forum works the opposite - the top most forums display the newest of all the sub-sections. If you want to go to a particular subsection just grab the sub-topic combo and go to the area you want to get more and more specific.

For example: I eventually could have a forum called OS Customization->WindowBlinds->Software for skin art->Photoshop->Techniques

The visitor to OS CUstomization->WindowBlinds gets to see everything that's new in all the sub-topics. But if it's too busy, they can get more and more specific and read up on it.  By contrast, on most sites using their BBS system, sub-forums simply die.  No one wants to keep clicking and clicking and clicking to get in there.

Moreover, we have bookmarks.  That's what the tabs are at the top of a forum area are.  They're just the highlighted sub-topics we've picked. With luck, someday we'll be able to make it so that users can make their own bookmarks for themselves.

We also are able to keep the global most recent responded to posts showing up on the left. By contrast, on other BBS system syou're back clickity click click back to look at the forums to try to see what the hot topics are.

So yes, some neat little features are still missing. They'll get in there.  But hopefully you can see the potential of the new forum system.  Once we get performance worked out, it'll be lightning fast and very convenient to use.  Just give us time.