Able2know Blog http://blog.able2know.org The official able2know blog Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:57:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Ombudsmen http://blog.able2know.org/2011/03/25/ombudsmen/ http://blog.able2know.org/2011/03/25/ombudsmen/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:48:25 +0000 able2know http://blog.able2know.org/?p=235

We’ve created a new position that we’re calling “ombudsmen.”  The purpose of this position is to look for technical problems with A2K, and then report those problems to the developers.  If the ombudspeople learned of a problem because you brought it to their attention, they will follow up with you to let you know when the problem has been resolved by the developers.  (And the developers can continue on their merry developing way without having to deal with the cus… members.)

While the ombudsmen will be looking out for problems all over able2know, if you have a concern, the best way to make sure they see it is to put it on this forum within the able2know group:

http://groups.able2know.org/able2know/feedback/

The current ombudspeople are:

Jespah
Butrflynet
Thomas
Cycloptichorn

Most of this group responded to our call for volunteers — this is essentially the tester position (with an additional communication component).  Many thanks to all of them for their willingness to help!

Note, this is an informal, intermediary position.  The ombudspeople won’t be speaking officially for able2know, or making predictions about when a given problem will be solved, or giving you a sneak peak at new features that are in the pipeline.  They’ll just be making sure that your bug reports reach the developers, and then will be following up with you.  (Please do not send them PMs — they will not respond if you do. Keeping the reports public is better; it keeps everyone informed and reduces duplication.) Sometimes a given issue will be unfixable, or will be put on hold to be fixed as part of a larger project down the line.  But this should be a more efficient way for the developers to deal with most bugs and other technical problems with able2know.

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2011/03/25/ombudsmen/feed/ 0 The New Design Is Here http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/the-new-design-is-here/ http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/the-new-design-is-here/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:16:46 +0000 able2know http://blog.able2know.org/?p=227 That was quick!

We are putting together an explanation of the changes that will be posted soon.

Robert explains a bit about the new Able2Know group here:

http://groups.able2know.org/able2know/topic/10-1

There is a feedback thread here:

http://groups.able2know.org/able2know/topic/8-1

Please let us know if you are having any issues.  Thanks!

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/the-new-design-is-here/feed/ 0 New Design On Its Way! http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/new-design-on-its-way/ http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/new-design-on-its-way/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:31:43 +0000 able2know http://blog.able2know.org/?p=223 Able2Know will be down for a little while today.  There will be a new design unveiled soon!  Stay tuned.

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2011/02/10/new-design-on-its-way/feed/ 0 Call for Volunteers http://blog.able2know.org/2010/11/30/call-for-volunteers/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/11/30/call-for-volunteers/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:52:25 +0000 able2know http://blog.able2know.org/?p=208 We appreciate how many people have offered to help us out at A2K. Here’s your chance! There are two types of volunteers that we need right now, testers and moderators.

Testers are the first to see a new feature before it is launched. They experiment with the new feature, seeing if everything works the way it is supposed to, and reporting anything that does not work well to the developers. The feature that currently needs testing is groups, but we will continue to need testers in the future for other purposes as well.

You are probably more familiar with the concept of moderators. Our most pressing need at this point is for more people in more time zones to see and promptly zap spam. Right now the reporting system works well (thank you to all who report spam!), and we are able to remove all of the spam that is reported. However, sometimes spam languishes for a while (especially overnight) before a moderator sees it and pulls it, and some spam isn’t reported and stays up for a good long time before we are able to find it and pull it — if we find it at all. (Every now and then we come across spam that is months or years old.)

If you are interested in doing one of these things to help out A2K, or would like to know more, please use the “contact us” link at the bottom of the page.

Thank you!

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/11/30/call-for-volunteers/feed/ 1 Maintenance from 11 PM to 1 AM CDT http://blog.able2know.org/2010/10/14/maintenance-from-11-pm-to-1-am-cdt/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/10/14/maintenance-from-11-pm-to-1-am-cdt/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:09:26 +0000 able2know http://blog.able2know.org/?p=204 Our host, WiredTree, has let us know that they will be doing maintenance from 11 PM to 1 AM CDT.  They don’t expect that it will cause much of a problem:  ”During this maintenance window, there may be one or more brief interruptions while network traffic is rerouted across our providers. We expect overall client impact to be minimal.”

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/10/14/maintenance-from-11-pm-to-1-am-cdt/feed/ 0 Our Roadmap and Welcome Philosophy Forum! http://blog.able2know.org/2010/06/17/our-roadmap-and-welcome-philosophy-forum/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/06/17/our-roadmap-and-welcome-philosophy-forum/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:59:05 +0000 Robert Gentel http://blog.able2know.org/?p=194 On June 9th PhilosophyForum.com was hacked (again) through security vulnerabilities in its vBulletin software and associated plugins. We had intended a smooth merger in a few weeks but as you all now know we had to rush this on the 10th to remove the security vulnerability from our servers once in for all and we did so by moving up the merge date to get rid of the insecure vB software from our servers.

Able2know gained many valuable members from Philforum, not just for our existing philosophy forums, which became #1 for “philosophy forum” on the major search engines, but many are branching out into our other many topic areas and the able2know members have, for the most part, done an outstanding job at making them feel welcome.

But this hasty merger caused a lot of predictable consternation that we’d like to apologize for. We’d much rather have done things differently and we’ll work hard to gain your support and become your preferred forum. Here are some of the first things we are working on.

Minor Fixes

  • Usernames/emails with ” phil” appended to them. Duplicate usernames and emails had ” phil” appended to them and we will work with anyone with such an account to either restore their original name or change it to something else they choose. We are proactively doing this where we can but feel free to contact us (through link in the footer) if your account was affected.
  • Some posts were imported with bad BBCode or formatting (often appearing to be missing text until the post is quoted). We will fix such instances in maintenance windows, please send us links (through the help desk in the footer) to any you find.
  • Profiles, signatures, friends, private messages, email update subscriptions, ignore lists, thanks and more are all data we plan to import as we can. In the case of profiles and signatures we will not override any that have be entered on able2know and will only import the data when it is blank on the a2k end.
Major Development
Our current road map is a 3-6 week cycle by our best estimates but able2know is not what pays our bills so please understand if predictions change.
  • Groups – We intend to get a rough beta version of private groups going and we will import the Philforum groups. This will also allow for users to make their own forums with their own structure and rules if they do not agree with how we run things.
  • Read Tracking – One major feature vB had that we don’t yet is read tracking, so that you can jump to the first unread post in a thread or so that your new posts list can only display what you haven’t already read (with topics reappearing if they have a new post). This gives users the ability to much more efficiently manage the new posts lists, and given that our activity levels are so much higher this will only help users deal with all the extra activity.
  • Forum Filtering – Some users want the site to only be about philosophy, others don’t want the site to have so many topics about philosophy (or word games, or whatever) so we are going to implement a solution where you can subscribe/unsubscribe from forums. By default it will just learn from what you do, so if you only posted in philosophy forums that is all you will see, but users will also be able to manually intervene and view all forums or manually select what they want to see. This way users can better tailor the site to their interests.
These are the shortlist of improvements we seek to make in the next few weeks. This is by no means the full list of improvements we will make and things like blogs, albums and other missing features from Philforum will come as soon as we can build them. We just need time to develop them and do them right but give us a chance and we’ll work hard to improve this site and earn its place as your preferred forum.
]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/06/17/our-roadmap-and-welcome-philosophy-forum/feed/ 0 Contest: Want a free a2k hat? http://blog.able2know.org/2010/03/12/contest-want-a-free-a2k-hat/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/03/12/contest-want-a-free-a2k-hat/#comments Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:50:57 +0000 Robert Gentel http://blog.able2know.org/?p=192 Here is how:

1) Follow @able2know on twitter ( http://twitter.com/able2know ) and send us a tweet guessing one of the countries (other than the Vatican City city/state) that a2k has not received any visits from in the last year.

OR

2) Fan us on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/able2know ) and post on our wall guessing one of the countries (other than the Vatican City city/state) that a2k has not received any visits from in the last year.

The first person to name one (hint: it won’t be easy!) will receive your choice of a retro-logo a2k baseball cap or one with our new logo. Limited to one guess per day per site (facebook or twitter) to qualify.

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/03/12/contest-want-a-free-a2k-hat/feed/ 0 A faster able2know. We are now using a Content Delivery Network http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/27/a-faster-able2know-we-are-now-using-a-content-delivery-network/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/27/a-faster-able2know-we-are-now-using-a-content-delivery-network/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:31:04 +0000 Robert Gentel http://blog.able2know.org/?p=190 Some of you may have noticed some missing images today for a brief period, and what you were seeing was a transition where we began to use a content delivery network. To the non-techies among us what we did was move all our static content (images, JavaScript, CSS, etc) and host it with a distributed Content Delivery Network.

This should help to make able2know a bit faster by removing the need for the static content to be served by the same servers that serve the application content. We can also make those files download more quickly by using a network optimized for download speeds where the files are hosted around the globe in order to bring them closer to the users around the world.

We are using Amazon’s CloudFront network for able2know’s CDN, and this means our static content is now being served out of the following locations:

United States

  • Ashburn, VA
  • Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami, FL
  • Newark, NJ
  • Palo Alto, CA
  • Seattle, WA
  • St. Louis, MO

Europe

  • Amsterdam
  • Dublin
  • Frankfurt
  • London

Asia

  • Hong Kong
  • Tokyo
Hopefully this made browsing able2know a little faster for you, and even if you don’t immediately notice things like that they add up and we will continue to work on making able2know even faster (hey, we are hardcore web performance geeks, this is what we do). Let us know if you notice anything amiss from the CDN roll out and here’s to hoping the changes bring about a slightly speedier able2know for you.
]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/27/a-faster-able2know-we-are-now-using-a-content-delivery-network/feed/ 0 The 100K Update and DroidMotorola.com joins able2know http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/17/the-100k-update-and-droidmotorolacom-joins-able2know/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/17/the-100k-update-and-droidmotorolacom-joins-able2know/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:44:48 +0000 Robert Gentel http://blog.able2know.org/?p=188 On 2010/02/17 able2know reached 100,000 members and jespah got the party started with a tour through able2know history. But due to some time constraints it ended up also being a busy day for changes around able2know so I’ll let the 100K festivities continue there and talk about another big change that happened the same day:

We also ended up merging one of our other forums, DroidMotorola.com into able2know right after we reached 100K (we wanted to hit that milestone pre-merger) so please welcome the new folk from the Motorola Droid Forum and make them feel at home here on a2k!

We know that context changes can be rough, but we’ll do our best to accommodate you all!

]]> http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/17/the-100k-update-and-droidmotorolacom-joins-able2know/feed/ 0 Topic listing and tag listing changes http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/12/topic-listing-and-tag-listing-changes/ http://blog.able2know.org/2010/02/12/topic-listing-and-tag-listing-changes/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:55:08 +0000 Robert Gentel http://blog.able2know.org/?p=185 A couple of big changes have been made to the main grids (the pages that list topics) that you use to browse the site. The first one I personally had thought was going to be very controversial, but after several days of it being live if anyone has noticed it they haven’t mentioned it: The topics per page display has been reduced, making for smaller more manageable pages (the old grids were huge).

The second main change is that user tags are now displayed on most grids. By making the access to the tags more prevalent we hope to emphasize the organizational nature of the tags, and with the tags being placed on their own topic listing pages the graffiti tags don’t just appear on someone else’s thread but on one’s own a2k property as well.

As usual, while we don’t expect this to solve everyone’s problems with how people use tags we think it is a step towards emphasizing the intended use case of the tag feature and hopefully by doing so we’ll change the ratio of useful tags to graffiti tags and improve the community culture a bit.

And as you may have noticed, our development activity with able2know has picked up a lot. There are much bigger changes to come in the near future. ;-)

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