There might be real data in the webmanager somewhere about the traffic, but I don’t know where to look. 🙂 From my perception: posting traffic seems to be down for the general club members, but usage for the paid programs seems to be about equal to what it was in previous years and doesn’t seem to be affected by the change to the new website.
I don’t think it’s just you. I’m sure there are a lot more people who have issues with it. I know there are a lot of quirks to this new forum technology and we are slowly realizing exactly what they are and doing the best we can to fix them with the limited knowledge that we (the board members) have and additionally are looking for someone with more expertise to help us out fixing them. The company that we hired to create the new website focus on web design. They are not experts on the specifics of plug-ins within the general site language. They have been helping out to the best of their knowledge, which is why we have been looking for people with more specific skills. We are working with the plug-in developers as well, but we have such specific requirements that it isn’t on top of their list to implement into newer versions of the plug-ins.
I think this new forum has the potential to be much better than the old one. The forum on the old site was a complete mess built on a very old architecture. We had a LOT of custom code written into it and it still did not function that well. It was barely searchable and was not well organized. This new forum will eventually allow us a lot more functionality and even allow us to do RSS feeds among many other features.
Moving to a new website and new forum was a necessity. I know some people have questioned the need, but there really was one. The old site was built on a language that was no longer being supported and the webmanager side, that very few members see, was a nightmare. There were a lot of things on the back-end of the site were crashing and no longer working. So we desperately needed the new website. The problem then becomes that we cannot find every single bug in the new site until it’s put under duress by our users. So we launched the new site back in November with the knowledge that there would be a lot of fixes and edits needed to make things better, especially in the forum.
So I don’t think it’s just you and even I grow frustrated with it at times, but we are trying to fix the issues. It’s just a slow and learning process for us, which doesn’t tend to go over well with triathletes! 🙂
Bryan
Treasurer | DC Triathlon Club
