Upgrading our community’s platform

Press Announcements
1

We take pride in our community’s level of knowledge and professionalism. We have shared and learned a lot from our members over the last 10 years! We think it is time to give our community some extra love by giving them the features they have been asking for.

Example requests:
• Better search
• Way to follow specific users
• Way to watch specific topics
• Improvements that help regular users to find things easier
• … And the list goes on!

Thanks to the feedback that we have received from our insiders, we have chosen 2 candidates and they are quite different from each other. We want you to tell us which platform you prefer. So please go ahead and take them both out for a test drive for the next 10 days. Make new accounts, make some posts and replies and then come back here and tell us which one you want and why. After ten days we will take your feedback and make our decision.

If you have specific questions about those platforms, please post those questions on that platforms page, not here. Let’s please keep this thread for feedback and voting only.

Discourse
This is not a traditional forum. It is a new fresh way of handling communities. It may be a bit confusing at first but try it for a few days before making a decision.
[url=http://ghi.trydiscourse.com/]http://ghi.trydiscourse.com/[/url]

XenForo
This is very similar to our existing forum but it adds many new features.
[url=http://ghielectronics.com/community2/]http://ghielectronics.com/community2/[/url]

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I don’t have the time at the moment to test either platform but I’ve got a suggestion of sorts.

I vote the new platform under consideration has a reward system of some sort. That way I wouldn’t fell so guilty every time I stuff up and come crawling here for help. A buy me a coffee sort of thing wouldn’t go astray.

Just a thought. :slight_smile:

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@ stotech, to some degree, liking posts on the current platform provides that feedback, and points accumulate.

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@ Brett - He means something tangable, like pizza, or coffee etc (but not money).

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Money would be fine too I guess, you could do like a GHI store credits thing. Sometimes people go further out of the way to help me than they should for no reward. I just want to make sure those people hang around,

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@ stotech - If they are answering your questions, they are most likely hanging around. +1 for the thought though.

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Is this upgrade in progress? The last few days when I come here the only forums I see listed anymore are “News” and “Archive”.

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@ ianlee74 - this is a two week project. Sorry this is taking longer that anticipated.

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Oh Boy! I hope it goes quicker than my 2 week projects. :-[ I’m still carrying a few of those from 2016.

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I hope not. It forum is a custom one and discourse forum would not have an importer. We have to manually modify and move everything.

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So you basically log in as every user and retype each single post :open_mouth:
I wonder if that’s what the monkeys are for :think:

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@ Reinhard Ostermeier - we only have 200,000 posts. But we type really quick!! :wink:

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What do you say to cutting Gary back to one lunch per day so we can make this a one week project? :wink:

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I see the banner "Hold on to you seat! Big changes are coming soon. In the mean time we apologize for any inconvenience. "

Please define big :slight_smile:

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@ Designer -
Big
adjective
1.
of considerable size or extent.
“her big hazel eyes”

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@ Designer - “Doing business or conducted on a large scale; major in size or importance” like big government

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@ Designer - over a year of work big. Awesome 2017 big. GHI has been too quiet secretly working on things big…

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@ Gus - Didn’t you mean, “bigly”?

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@ munderhill - bigly :slight_smile: I am not good with “big” words :stuck_out_tongue:

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bigly big, that’s how big!