UKMIX Maintenance

[Wayne]

I thought y'all might like to keep up to date with what I'm getting up to behind the scenes - if it's of no interest, then feel free to look on. Will try and keep this updated.

• This evening, I'm pruning (see=deleting) all users with 0 posts at UKMIX.

It's a painstaking task as we appear to have around 70,000 people who have never posted at UKMIX in their life, a huge majority of which will almost certainly be spammers. If you notice UKMIX is quite sluggish tonight, this is probably why - the pruning task runs a number of database-heavy actions which might slow us down a bit.

[Wayne]

I completed the rest of the pruning activity outlined above today - and I can now confirmed that around 60,000 users have been deleted from UKMIX (with pre-2007 numbers totalling around 6,000):

Reg. Year	Deletions
2007	3,560
2008	2,885
2009	1,779
2010	1,483
2011	2,331
2012	2,124
2013	909
2014	1,561
2015	6,420
2016	7,358
2017	9,630
2018	14,216
TOTAL	54,256

The above table represents the number of user accounts deleted that had made zero posts, against the year those accounts initially registered - in a nutshell, all user accounts with zero posts that registered on or before 31st December 2018 have been deleted. If you're one of those, and you were a genuine lurker, you might wish to re-register to regain membership status. But I would caution all new registrations that I've added a new condition to our registration T&Cs:

Additional Registration Term

i. It is a condition of registration at UKMIX as a newly registered user that you agree to be subject to a pruning activity that will take place each year in which should you not have made a post in the preceding 365 days and your total post count stands at zero, your account will be deleted.

[Wayne]

Currently rebooting the server to apply some automatic updates - apologies if the site is a bit laggy in the next few minutes.

[Wayne]

This evening, I've worked with our hosts to reconfigure our DNS resolvers as there was a problem - I don't think anyone will see any noticeable changes but I will at least stop getting 5 error emails sent to me a day!

[Wayne]

Today, I've been working on a new Reviews section which I've put forward to the moderation team for consideration - here's what it might look like:









It would enable users to add their ratings and reviews to an existing review, to then allow us to derive an overall star rating.

Currently hashing out whether it'd add any value to UKMIX or not - I'll keep you updated!

[Wayne]

Today, I've been getting to grips with Google's Webmaster Tools - among the points:

* There are over 50 topics or pages that have "errors" preventing Google from effectively indexing them (will work through these over the next few days).
* I've been re-configuring our sitemaps to ensure that UKMIX can continue to be indexed properly - you may see a significant bump in bots on the visitors list (which I'm *hoping* doesn't increase spam registrations) as we have almost 450,000 pages that Google is indexing. I've currently set the site to automatically rebuild our sitemaps every few days, which will likely result in an increase in bots when the new sitemaps are uploaded.

[Wayne]

I've made an amendment to the message posting settings - you will now only be able to default rich text posts in Quick Reply - I'm hoping this helps cut down on the html posting issues (where hidden characters magically appear).

If you still post in the Full Reply screen, the html option does remain - but I would always advise that you defer to the rich text post format as there'll be no surprises when you submit your post.

[Wayne]

Google are now reading all of our sitemaps successfully, having done some tweaking - in total, that's almost 110,000 separate topics now being indexed by Google! I've now also configured Google Analytics so that I can understand which markets are driving our web traffic and how many hits we're getting.

It's required some custom code to be added to one of the website templates, please let me know if you notice anything different happening.

[BodyShop]

So much work and dedication, Wayne!
You're a titan !
Huge admirer over here.

[Wayne]

I'm currently doing some more pruning of users, capturing the final batch of suspected spam accounts - the site may be slow over the next 15-20 mins.

[Wayne]

This evening, I've been doing a few things:

* Making arrangements for our server upgrade to run tomorrow - shouldn't impact anything for our community, but will ensure that the most up to date security fixes are in place.

* Running email testing - I'll shortly be sending our first in what will hopefully become a periodic email to all site users. As you can imagine, it's pretty server intensive to send out 17,500+ emails in one go, so the emails will be staggered (and will send out in batches of 100 users per run) - you should still all receive the email on the same day-ish but will be at different times.

* Per a request from one of the moderators (who was approached by a forum member), I've made changes to topic ownership - on phpBB, it was possible to do this simply by making a correction on the ACP (Administration Control Panel). On vBulletin, it's more complex than that - you have to make amendments via the Post Table on the database (via a database management tool called phpMyAdmin). Each query takes 3-6 minutes to run due to the size of the database and there were 11 to run in total.

[Wayne]

There was previously some challenge around forum icons being difficult to understand, I've therefore disabled the "Hot Topics" icon legends. The most up to date icon legend can always be seen at the bottom of any of the /forum pages and it previously looked like this:



Now, it looks like this:



It should be self-explanatory but let me know if any issues.

I've also tweaked the settings to reflect old UKMIX when it comes to sticky topics - they will now only be visible on page 1 of the relevant forums as opposed to being visible on every page.

[beredy]

Can Contains unread posts be in different color? I think what was confusing to begin with is that the colors didn't really point as read/unread like on the previous forum and the icon difference between read/unread is quite small and no that clear.

[Thriller]

Can Contains unread posts be in different color? I think what was confusing to begin with is that the colors didn't really point as read/unread like on the previous forum and the icon difference between read/unread is quite small and no that clear.

Agree, orange and grey/blue would work best, if possible?

[Wayne]

@beredy @Thriller I've made the change to orange/grey (though it works better with blue/grey IMO - however, I shall go with consensus).

You might need to sign out of UKMIX and close your browser to see the changes - or because the images are cached, you should be able to simply do a forced refresh on your browser (hold down the CONTROL key and click on the browser refresh symbol).

[AlphaMale]

You're doing an incredible job.
The site is getting better and better.
I don't even remember how it was before this change.

[Thriller]

Thank you @Wayne - so much better!

What would make it perfect is if you could click on the envelope to be directed to the last unread post, rather than the tiny little icon next to the thread title, but I'm guessing that's not a possibility.

[Wayne]

Very minor server reboot this morning, you might've experienced 1 minute of downtime.

This was to apply general security updates which had been deployed overnight.

[Wayne]

Stumbled across someone tying to show another user how to use BB Code (thank you to that user, always good to see the community help itself) - at old UKMIX, the [ code ] tags automatically disabled the contents, to do that here and stop the BB Code being active inside of code tags, you'll need to insert [ noparse ] tags.

For e.g.

becomes

[TWEET]https://twitter.com/ukmix/status/1117858359535755265[/TWEET]

Example:

[ code ][ noparse ][ TWEET ]https://twitter.com/ukmix/status/1117858359535755265[ /TWEET ][ /noparse ][ /code ]

Just remove the spaces.

[Wayne]

I've reset MySQL just now as noticed the site was lagging - I've also applied some server updates, shouldn't be any downtime but just in case anyone experiences a minute or so's worth of downtime.

[Wayne]

We had a small bit of downtime there - Iv'e reset the server so all should be good again.

[Wayne]

The site is very slow tonight, my apologies.

I've changed the cache time on the Forum Sidebar from 1 mins to 2 mins (so newly responded to topics won't appear on there until after 2 mins) - this has improved the speed somewhat. Will spend some time tomorrow looking into what's causing it.

[Thriller]

Slow this morning and some double-posts.

[Robbie]

Very slow at the moment. Indeed at least once a day most days the site becomes very sluggish.

[Blondini]

I've had a few double posts recently. Site seems to be down in the early hours (5am).