new format

by **Bill Reed** » Tue Mar 20, 2018 3:14 pm

Het Matt, thanks for your reply.

Tried to "quote" your reply but when I clicked on Quote I was cast out to the forum front page.

Tiny text=Still looks pretty small to me, compared to what it used to be.

Stretched photos=I've only noticed the stretch on POM,POD,POW. However, I have noticed that when I click on a photo in the photo page to make it bigger, sometimes the photo gets a little fuzzy. If the +cursor option appears and you click on it, the photo gets sharper.

Edit/Delete=To clarify, this was about the post below, dealing with photos, which you responded to. To me, the new way of it having to go thru you sounds very labor intensive and at the least, not very timely.

Deleting a posting or photo
by Bill Reed » Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:02 pm
Tried doing this on a classified post and some photos that were part of the post and can't figure out what it takes to do it. Clicked on the "options" box in the edit mode and nothing happens. Am I missing something?

I haven't attempted posting a new page but from what I've read on here it sounds like that may be a new challenge.

Thanks for listening!

by **Matt Miller** » Tue Mar 20, 2018 3:16 pm

AlbertoRampini wrote:
Montana Matt wrote: I just increased the font size in most content to 16px

Thanks. The font size is ok to me now!

Since the beginning of SPv2 I've always found the font on the site kind of small, so I'm glad someone offered the suggestion to increase the font size.

by **Matt Miller** » Tue Mar 20, 2018 3:22 pm

Bill Reed wrote:Tried to "quote" your reply but when I clicked on Quote I was cast out to the forum front page.

That's functioning as it should. You either need to hit the "QUOTE" button, which is the one with " in the top right corner of any post, or you can highlight text you wish to quote and then use the "Quote" link under the posters name. If you don't highlight any text, that "Quote" link will bring you to the front page of the forum.

Bill Reed wrote:Tiny text=Still looks pretty small to me, compared to what it used to be.

Hmm, really? It's 16px on all main pages on the site now. It's a bit smaller on the forums, depending on what size you have your browser window (it responds to the window size). 16px is as large as most sites go. Can you provide an example of a website where you like the font size?

Bill Reed wrote:Stretched photos=I've only noticed the stretch on POM,POD,POW.

That should be fixed now.

Bill Reed wrote:To me, the new way of it having to go thru you sounds very labor intensive and at the least, not very timely.

It requires a bit more of my time, but not much (a few minutes a day) and it eliminates the possibility of pages disappearing without consent, which was happening and stopping it from happening was the ultimate goal. So a little more labor and time is a fair trade off to eliminate something very undesirable.

Bill Reed wrote:Thanks for listening!

My pleasure! Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming and we'll continue to improve the site

by **Klenke** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 3:27 pm

Montana Matt: what was the reason (or reasons) again for this wholesale upgrade in the look and functionality of summitpost?

by **Matt Miller** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 3:51 pm

Klenke wrote:Montana Matt: what was the reason (or reasons) again for this wholesale upgrade in the look and functionality of summitpost?

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by **Klenke** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 9:37 pm

No, Matt, answer it in your own words.

Did the administrators of the site demand the change or was it the owners who initiated the demand?

Is the purpose of being "Google friendly" really just done to maintain a certain level of ad-space revenue?

If the level of usage of the site drops due to the new but not improved layout, does that revenue drop in an amount equal to if the site was not upgraded and left as it was? That is, is it a net push?

Was the new "Google friendly" website aptly beta-tested before rolling it out?

Did administrators/owners/users get a chance to vet these changes before they were just implemented? Or did the company you went with to make the changes do it all themselves and we just had to go with what "they thought" was the best thing to do?

Did summitpost cut corners with this contract?

Paul

by **Matt Miller** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 6:44 pm

Klenke wrote:Did the administrators of the site demand the change or was it the owners who initiated the demand?

Neither. It was Google who demanded the change.

Klenke wrote:Is the purpose of being "Google friendly" really just done to maintain a certain level of ad-space revenue?

No, it's to keep the site visible to the rest of the world.

Klenke wrote:If the level of usage of the site drops due to the new but not improved layout, does that revenue drop in an amount equal to if the site was not upgraded and left as it was? That is, is it a net push?

I don't understand the question. If traffic drops to the site, so does ad revenue. But traffic had been dropping since Google made their algorithm change a couple years ago and we didn't respond to it. Now that the new layout is mobile friendly, traffic should rebound.

Klenke wrote:Was the new "Google friendly" website aptly beta-tested before rolling it out?

Yes. It had been worked on for nearly 2 years. There were just a couple of things that weren't tested to the point where I felt they were 100% ready. But there was a need to get the changes rolled out ASAP, so the decision was made to fix any outstanding issues after the changes were rolled out.

Klenke wrote:Did administrators/owners/users get a chance to vet these changes before they were just implemented?

No, the roll out didn't happen like it was envisioned. Most things were adequately tested, but the editor was not, hence it being the biggest source of problems. The good news is that the site isn't at all static and all problems will be resolved in time.

Klenke wrote:Or did the company you went with to make the changes do it all themselves and we just had to go with what "they thought" was the best thing to do?

There was no "company" that was "went with." I did the majority of the work myself (for free), along with a single contractor (for pay).

Klenke wrote:Did summitpost cut corners with this contract?

In the sense that I did all of the heavy lifting and saved the site tens of thousands of dollars, yes. But in the sense that the new layout receives near-perfect scores since the change (Google reported that there were 100,000 pages with problems at the end of January and now there are zero), no corners were cut.

I understand it's not popular with some (though most seem to be indifferent or slightly positive about the new changes), and that there are still a few bugs to work out (which will all get fixed in time) but despite all of that, the layout change was mandatory for the continued future relevancy of SummitPost. Without the change, SummitPost would absolutely been doomed to a slow decline of traffic to the site and probable ultimate death. With the change, we should see visitors to the site increase again.

by **Scott** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 7:01 pm

Now that the new layout is mobile friendly, traffic should rebound.

Matt, I don't mean to be negative, but I don't understand how the new format is mobile friendly. Could you explain that a little? To me, it seems a lot less mobile friendly. What makes it more mobile friendly?

I understand it's not popular with some (though most seem to be indifferent or slightly positive about the new changes)

I think I would have to disagree here. It seems like most have not viewed the change positively, especially those who have tried to add any content. It's a lot more time consuming and frustrating for sure. Hopefully this will be worked out eventually.

by **Matt Miller** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 7:15 pm

Scott wrote:I don't understand how the new format is mobile friendly. Could you explain that a little? To me, it seems a lot less mobile friendly. What makes it more mobile friendly?

"Mobile friendly" is a measure of how things look on any sized screen, from phones to desktops. It relates to many, many things in terms of how a website displays on all devices, so it's not an easy explanation.

One thing that makes it easy to tell if a website is not "mobile friendly" is when a user on a small device has to "zoom in" to click on links because they're too small to easily click when the page loads.

If you want to know if a page on a website is mobile friendly, you can check here:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Scott wrote:I think I would have to disagree here. It seems like most have not viewed the change positively, especially those who have tried to add any content. It's a lot more time consuming and frustrating for sure. Hopefully this will be worked out eventually.

I hear you on that and will continue working to improve the new editor. I'm also going to look for different WYSIWYG editors to implement and try to see how well they work.

by **Scott** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 8:15 pm

I hear you on that and will continue working to improve the new editor. I'm also going to look for different WYSIWYG editors to implement and try to see how well they work.

I just created a new page. It was much faster than the last time, but not as fast as the previous version (maybe twice as long as the old SP version).

For others, here are some things that helped:

Adding the photos directly to the page while in edit mode and then attaching them later worked much better than trying to add photos to the page and then imbedding them.

Refresh everytime you go into edit mode and everytime you switch between new and old editors. If you don't things get messed up quick.

One thing I found though is that I couldn't edit a chart format copied from another page while in the new editor. It only worked in the old editor, though I'm not sure why.

by **Scott** » Mon Mar 26, 2018 12:27 am

If it helps improve SP and can possibly fixed, here are the specific reasons it takes longer to create a page now. This is meant to be constructive criticism.

1. SP seems to run slower.

2. To get the photos in the right place, it seems easier and less buggy to add them while in Edit Mode and then attach them to the main page when done. This does take a bit longer, but it seems a lot less buggy than trying to imbed them after the fact.

3. Cut and paste doesn't seem to work as well for tables anymore. If I want to copy a table format that I have already used on a page, I used to simply go to the page I want to copy from and copy the text from the old editor. I could then edit the table in the new editor just fine.

It doesn't seem to work that way anymore. I can still copy the text from a page in old editor, but can't seem to edit it in new editor. I can in old editor for both pages, but it is more time consuming.

4. Pages must be refreshed every time you get into edit mode. This isn't that big of a deal-if you know about it, but if you don't it can create frustration and you can lose changes.

I don't know if anything can be done with the above, but I thought I'd point out some specific reasons why it takes longer to create a page now, just in case it can be tweaked.
-----------------------------------------
As far as seaching for pages now, it seems that you can't search by letter anymore?

Also, a lot of searches don't seem to work, even with simple words? It works fine with other pages, but not with others, but I don't know why. Today I went to add a summit log to Three Canyon. Neither "Three" or "Three Canyon" shows up in the seach under canyon. I can't seach for it by letter either, or at least if I can, I couldn't figure it out? It does show up in the Google Search though, so you can get to it that way.

The following user would like to thank Scott for this post
Matt Miller

by **Matt Miller** » Mon Mar 26, 2018 12:52 am

Scott wrote:1. SP seems to run slower.

Yes, losing Varnish (which was necessary to make SP secure with HTTPS) was a huge hit to the site. I've been implementing different ways to cache pages and the site has been getting faster. I'll get it back to where it was eventually.

Scott wrote:2. To get the photos in the right place, it seems easier and less buggy to add them while in Edit Mode and then attach them to the main page when done. This does take a bit longer, but it seems a lot less buggy than trying to imbed them after the fact.

Noted. I don't fully understand the intricacies that are leading to the "bugginess" of trying to embed them after they're uploaded but I'll look into it.

Scott wrote:3. Cut and paste doesn't seem to work as well for tables anymore. If I want to copy a table format that I have already used on a page, I used to simply go to the page I want to copy from and copy the text from the old editor. I could then edit the table in the new editor just fine.

Have you tried viewing the source HTML and copying and pasting that to start? My guess is that would be far easier for replicating work than trying to copy and paste from the "viewing" side of things than the code side. It's possible that we can fix the problems with copying and pasting viewing text, but that will have to come from the creators of the editor, which might take some time.

Scott wrote:4. Pages must be refreshed every time you get into edit mode. This isn't that big of a deal-if you know about it, but if you don't it can create frustration and you can lose changes.

Yes, this is super confusing and annoying for people. I have no idea why pages have started caching in browsers. It's good for the speed of the website and would be great for people who aren't logged in and making changes to pages. But for those logged in, it's very confusing.
I'm hoping it's an easy fix, but I haven't found a fix yet. It seems like it just started a few days ago so hopefully it will be easy to reverse. This is near the top of my list of things to fix.

Scott wrote:As far as seaching for pages now, it seems that you can't search by letter anymore?

I removed a lot of the search functionality. It was next to never used (based on logs) and created quite a bit of confusion for some people. I know there are others who did use it, so this is also on my radar to change or implement.

Scott wrote:Also, a lot of searches don't seem to work, even with simple words? It works fine with other pages, but not with others, but I don't know why.

I'm guessing this is on the SummitPost custom search and not the Google search, based on the last sentence in your post. I've not tinkered with the SP search much lately. I'm guessing there are many ways it could be improved. It's not at the top of my list of things to do though because over 90% of the people coming to the site use the Google search (or come here via Google and don't use the on-site search feature at all). But it's something that I can see the value of to the super users here, so I'll work on improving it.

by **Scott** » Mon Mar 26, 2018 3:47 pm

Have you tried viewing the source HTML and copying and pasting that to start?

I'll try that next time.

I'm guessing this is on the SummitPost custom search and not the Google search, based on the last sentence in your post. I've not tinkered with the SP search much lately. I'm guessing there are many ways it could be improved. It's not at the top of my list of things to do though because over 90% of the people coming to the site use the Google search (or come here via Google and don't use the on-site search feature at all).

That makes sense. I assume most people stumble on pages using Google searches. I'll try to use those from now on.

I did use the letter search for mountains that I had no idea how to even remotely spell correctly (Hvannadalshnukur, for example), but I'm in the minority and it isn't a big deal since there are still other ways to find them.

There is still a lot of value in the custom search, so hopefully that feature will stay. For example if I want to see what mountains SP has in Portugal (as an example), the custom search is very useful and it isn't something that can be googled.

by **Matt Miller** » Thu Mar 29, 2018 8:37 pm

Puma concolor wrote:I’m guessing that you didn’t envision threads and user pages being turned into “ads” in the new format.

Those aren't "ads" but 7 links to other pages on SummitPost related to the page the person is on, along with 1 link to an ad. They are sort of "suggested links" to relevant pages that the user might be interested in visiting.

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