Able2know Blog

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!

Able2know.org is offline right now (2010/02/10 20:30 UTC) due to a network issue with our hosts at WiredTree. Their support site is also down and their phone lines busy but they’ve tweeted that:

“There is a network issue effecting some network segments. It is being worked on now. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

As soon as their network issue is resolved able2know should be back online.

WiredTree updates:

“Update: Not network issue, power issue in 427 S LaSalle which caused a large portion of our racks to lose power momentarily.”

“Waiting on update from facilities manager and explanation from CoreSite as to why. Onsite team bringing things back online as fast as we can”

2010/02/10 21:12 UTC “Power has been restored, a large portion is back online. However, some servers will need to filesystem check which takes time.”

And as of 21:21 UTC we are back online.

We’ve made a small tweak to how direct replies to a post are displayed. Previously it would display something like:

Re: Username (Post# 123456)

The problem with this is that we were seeing members use the post# link when trying to link to a specific post, mistaking the link to the post’s parent for the post itself.

We’d considered changing this format to @replies in the past, which some users might be familiar with from twitter, but we backed off because it’s a bit uglier and many of our users weren’t familiar with that convention. However now that more and more sites are using this we’ve switched to displaying the link to a post’s parent as an @reply. This should also help a bit with another usability issue, of using the last post to reply to the thread by making it a bit clearer that direct replies to a post are addressed to a specific user.

So now you will see this displayed like this:

@username,

This can make your post awkward if you are in the habit of starting your post with “username,” as it will then be repeated twice, so we figured we’d give you a quick heads up about the change.

We’ve been busy recently, and haven’t posted an update on what we’ve done recently, so here are some releases that have been out for a while, but haven’t been announced:

Music, Video and Photos on your profile

Now you can provide your Last.fm, YouTube, or Flickr userids to put music, videos or photos on your profile. For an example of what this looks like see my profile, where I use all three. For more information or if you have any problems there is a topic about these updates here: Photos, Music and Video on your profile

Posting Bugs

There were some bugs we hunted down that were causing a few users a day to see an exception (an error) message when posting. We have fixed what we believe to be the sources of those bugs, and there haven’t been any since. But if you run into any exception messages when posting please save the message and the url and contact us at the help desk to let us know.

Preferences System Overhaul

We needed to overhaul our preferences system, in order to move on to private messaging, so the entire system was reworked in a way that will make it easier to build on and less prone to errors and bugs.

Markup Cleanup

Our HTML had gotten pretty messy, and some pages had over 500 validation errors (we are markup snobs and use strict XHTML) and a general cleanup was performed that brought the underlying code to a much cleaner state. We aren’t finished, and there are still some non-critical validation errors in our markup, but it’s far from the tag soup that it was just weeks ago.

What’s Next

We have also been working on Private Messaging and Friends, our two next features on our list of priorities. Work on this will be done together with smaller bugfixes and the release of some features we’ve had nearly finished for a while. There are two of us, and initially only Nick can work on Private Messaging so if you see us release small fixes and features please don’t think we aren’t working on Private Messages, or that we can be made to go faster if more requests for Private Messages are made. We know that many of you want them ASAP and so do we, as we have our “coming out of BETA” launch planned when we are able to release that feature.

We made a quick mp3 BBCode that will display a small mp3 player and allow you to listen to a linked mp3. To post an mp3 file, just wrap the url to the mp3 file in “mp3” bbcode. Like this:

[mp3]http://exampledomain.com/example.mp3[/mp3]

For an example of what it displays see here:

http://able2know.org/topic/124541-2#post-3508894