Arghh!

[Guest capitalquality]

Has no-one heard of testing anymore?!!

[fonthaunt]

That’s why the notice at the top was updated today. It’s even in your screen shot. 🙂 They are trying to fix some issues but it has broken the home page for now. Regular outages will likely continue until they get it fixed. Patience is a major virtue on the forum.

[miiila]

They should scatter aster petals all over the forum, maybe even moving ones, like that falling snow you can activate for your wordpress site in christmas season (aster symbolizes patience).

[misscrystal]

Don’t website programmers have ways to do things on a different server or in a testing mode, while leaving the old regular site up until the changes are perfected? I don’t know about these things, just wondering. Sites make changes all the time.

[djgodknows]

You are referring to “Production”/Live site vs “Development”/Dev site.

Well this is a forum so having an entire process for development would be unnecessary since the data here is not really valuable if lost.

[Guest capitalquality]

They should, even if it’s an emulator. With virtual environments so common now there’s really no excuse to get the number of issues they get. At the least they should have a way of rolling back to the previous version when they get a bug.

As @djgodknows says though it’s only the forum. The cost of a virtual environment and testing probably isn’t worth it given it’s low to no risk to their business if things go wrong.

[mgjohn78]

One of the reasons i do all development on dev sites is to save money in the long run. With my non profit sites i just keep the dev site on a separate protected drive on the same server so there isn’t really any extra cost after the initial setup.

When you screw something up on a live site for all to see you dont have allot of options. Basically you either drop what your doing and get to work on a fix (that’s were you usually loose money), throw money at the problem or you let your visitors loose confidence in you and your ability to maintain a secure functioning site. In this case forum accounts are linked to main site accounts where our funds and financial information is handled. A single typo during dev could potentially compromise everything.

[Guest silkroute]

Second that.

Also, it’s not as complicated and sci-fi as @djgodknows and @mgjohn78 make it sound. In order to have a dev site separate from a live site, there is no need to clone the entire site and expend double the price of hosting one forum. They don’t need to backup the entire database, or all the forum posts and all the content. Just clone the bare bones framework with the design framework elements (placeholders) and edit those. Once the placeholders have been perfected on the clientside version, just port the design file to the live site. No need to touch the live site with all the posts, user accounts, passwords, login/authentication data, and so on. No need for an official dev site either. Just extract the design elements, tweak them and apply a patch externally.

I thought maybe I should stop preaching and put my own advice to good use. I cloned the site, scraped the code, created a virtual environment with a bare bones site, cleaned up the code, got rid of the misaligned elements, added my own code to it, took the final design file and injected it into my browser and this is pretty much how the Fiverr site looks on my browser now :

http://i.imgur.com/g9VU0fV.jpg

g9VU0fV.jpg1580×994

It looks clean and goes with the overall subtle Pistachio-Green Fiverr branding.

Here’s one with fancy rounded corners.

http://i.imgur.com/rAoP9WO.jpg

rAoP9WO.jpg1520×912

http://i.imgur.com/FK78mrf.jpg

FK78mrf.jpg1411×947

[misscrystal]

I think the forum is on a separate server from the main site.

[misscrystal]

Impressive!
Do you use Dreamweaver?
They wouldn’t be paying for a separate server either, only creating a separate file to work on I am guessing.

I get the 502 ERROR message sometimes when I try to submit a post.

[mgjohn78]

Huh? My comment was about the benefits of having a dev site, not the process of setting it up.

[mgjohn78]

The blog and forums are on the same servers and main site seems to be clustered

[Guest silkroute]

Yup, I got it. All I am saying is, it can be done via client side scripting even without the dev site, at a fraction of the effort it takes. The reason I am harping on it is because, well, end users are getting frustrated with the experience they are having, so a quick patch might help them retain a good user experience while they debate the merits of getting a dev site.

[mgjohn78]

Yes if the changes are css or theme related your method is a good and simple one, i used to use a combination of browser add-ons to test cosmetic changes. For testing deeper code and database changes a clone site is needed though. For that there are also no cost options such as running an offline dev site, i just prefer using an online version because then i have access to it whereever i am and i can be sure that my test are being done under identical server settings etc. I dont copy my databases though, just the essential parts and same with the files. Doesn’t cost me anything extra as i have unused space and they are not open for public traffic.

[Guest silkroute]

RE : Do you use Dreamweaver?

I used absolutely no tools for this one, no Dreamweaver, no SublimeText no other IDE. Just jotted down whatever code I could gather at the back of my head and pushed it into a browser app which injects custom CSS code on the client side.

This will not fix errors like 502, 404, etc, these are server side errors. My patch only edits the front end of the site but the bare minimum condition is for the site to be functioning from the backend. At the most it can remove unruly elements which have gotten out of sync with the design.

This is just a cosmetic patch. If you want, I can send you the CSS, you can inject it into your browser. There are certain apps on the app store (Chrome/Firefox) which allow you to inject CSS into websites from your side, without having to bother with backend permissions. You can simply paste this custom CSS into a dialogue box and the app will do the needful.

[Guest silkroute]

All good. That’s exactly what you, I, @capitalquality, @misscrystal @djgodknows are recommending in various flavors. Some recommend cloning the site, some recommend client side scripting patches, some have, in the past, recommended getting rid of Wordpress as a forum script and using other alternatives. I can see good reason why. This forum lacks the threaded comment function, after a comment attracts more than 2 replies, it becomes difficult to track who is talking to whom. There are BBPress forums, there is many other options, in the end, the common consensus we have is “do something”.

I have been working on another forum script for someone. Your post gave me some ideas so I did some rapid prototyping, uploaded some dummy forum content and churned out something.

Check this out :

http://i.imgur.com/qIsLumU.jpg

qIsLumU.jpg1853×909

[mgjohn78]

Nice i like that layout.

I didnt know much about bbpress before fiverr switched from vanilla. But since then i installed it on a server as i was curious about the moderation features and code. Seems like an ok platform for smaller communities. They usually patch vulnerabilities within a month of discovery, so that’s also ok as bbpress isn’t big enough yet to be heavily targeted.

[Guest silkroute]

The prototype I’ve mentioned above is actually Vanilla. I have no idea why Fiverr moved away form Vanilla. It is such a good platform.

RE : moderation features

In my experience, the best form of moderation is introducing/retaining interesting members who keep the mindspace of the community occupied with interesting content so that the bad posts get drowned out. Otherwise it’s just people getting into flame wars and ego battles with each other. Just take a look at how well WarriorForum, Sitepoint, StackOverflow is managed. No fancy design, no tacky moderation tools, nothing. They just focused on good content and earned a self-moderating community in return. Whatever forums we have run till now, whenever we found a chatty member, we got in touch with them, gave them perks, hosting, coupons, discount codes for ecommerce sites, whatever they want, but retained them. One has to expend less manpower on managing bad posts if there are good content creators who keep the community engaged. Fiverr seems to have invested a lot of efforts on their Facebook page; Here, not so much.

[mgjohn78]

I also like vanilla been maintaining and hosting a vanilla based forum for a friends business.
I think one of the main reasons for the switch was customization done on an outdated version most likely by a former developer resulting in way to much work keeping the script up to date (was out of date by about 2 years).

Seems like allot of businesses are focusing on facebook and classic forums are slowly disappearing. Its a shame really as fb is in no way a good substitute for a good old forum.

[djgodknows]

I think we all lost the focus of my initial post, here let me reiterate:

“Fiverr will not divert precious, paid, employee hours to spend any additional time on repairing a business function which does not bring any Revenue to the company”

Kapish?!

(Sorry not being mean here, but we all have solutions, but the company does not belong to us so all that probable cause means zilch)

[mgjohn78]

Yet here we are discussing an issue where precious, paid, employee hours are being spent on issues that could have been avoided by testing.

Allot of the things discussed on the forums over the years have been implemented and even if this discussion goes unnoticed by fiverr someone else might find it useful.

[Guest capitalquality]

Send it to the Fiverr staff, I dare you 🙂

[fonthaunt]

@capitalquality Heh. I don’t think they would care either way. Most of this isn’t for cosmetic purposes yet. They are doing some things with functionality, not really cosmetics. I know they are using a dev server too but this forum is bbpress plus some custom code. I don’t know why it doesn’t transfer to production well, but in the meantime, we wait. 🙂

[fonthaunt]

@misscrystal The 502 error (and others) are normal during maintenance. Those are brief outages that are to be expected while they have to restart things.

The view @silkroute has is pretty. I don’t know how it adjusts to change. I would not suggest having anyone send files to you for this kind of thing (since silkroute mentions it elsewhere) because no matter how harmless it may be, it’s taking slight risks. I don’t think it’s against the forum rules to offer it, but I doubt staff would encourage it.

[Guest silkroute]

RE : the company does not belong to us so all that probable cause means zilch

I don’t recall anyone here mentioning about the company belonging to us. Forums are meant to talk, that is what people are doing, they are talking. Now, barging into an ongoing conversation and saying “let’s not talk, they don’t owe us shit” isn’t exactly the wittiest of conversation starters, regardless of how edgy it makes one feel. If my target audience was the Fiverr staff, for example, I am perfectly capable of finding that link in the sidebar which says “Report a Bug/ Fiverr site suggestions”. Forum participation is purely voluntary and is not goal oriented. All of us who are discussing design changes are doing so because we love design; There’s no expectation to get Fiverr to heed anything we say to them or about them.

“X should have a better design” is not the same as
"X has a legal obligation to humor me".