May 2015 Website Updates and Changes

[Mike]

Good news to report!

For May 7, 2015

• Today we have updated the forum software to the latest version. This fixes some small bugs and performance issues.
• We are talking about removing the Profile Posts from the front page and will be discussing this.
• PHP upgraded to 5.5.24
• Main server was restarted to apply some updates.
• The mobile API was updated to correct some problems.
• If you are using an invalid e-mail address and our mail server receives a hard bounce, you will now be required to re-validate your e-mail address automatically. This may help prevent quite a bit of spam.
• Some moderator permissions were fixed so that the Media area can actually be moderated.
• With the release of Windows 10, we are looking forward to doing some tutorial videos. Check out @Josephur's YouTube channel.
• Very special thanks to @Pauli for donating to the website.

We intend to have a official team meeting this month. Details are still being worked out. Stay tuned!

Thanks to our members and community for use of the website.

Sincerely,
Mike Fara
Windows Forum

 

[Pauli]

I think the idea of removing the Profile Posts is a good one. They only cause unnecessary hustle - while people seem to be more and more tender about loosing a contact for one second, I believe Longer Term to be a crucial item. One should be able to make an appropriate question if one has a question. Not to doom anyone in distress but still, building takes time and requires at least some patience.

Or maybe I'm just getting old? But I still have the catch for lure, not so much women these days, but fish intrigue me. Sorry f I insult the fairer sex of humans.

 

[Mike]

For the 13th of May:

• The media gallery code was extensively updated to fix bugs and compatibility with YouTube API.
• The resource manager was updated to cover a number of bug fixes.
• The enhanced search engine has been improved with a number of performance improvements.
• The forum code itself has been upgraded, once again, with the latest stability enhancements and bug fixes.

 

[Mike]

For the 30th of May:

• The web server was upgraded to support HTTP/2 and a number of other cache improvements.
• There was an update to PHP. These changes did require a quick reboot of all essential services.
• Looking into upgrading the database code to improve performance next month.
• The database has had a major overhaul which should increase performance right now.
• There were a massive number of server side updates performed, making this the largest "under the hood" update in a long time.

 

[Mike]

For the 31st of May:

• The website is now using SSL and this is only enforced by the browser header change Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" env=HTTPS, although there were numerous template changes. This means the mobile apps and old browsers (that can't even use SSL) will still work in regular HTTP mode. Chrome v40+ and the latest Firefox support SPDY and HTTP/2, so that is why this change has been implemented.
• Looking into gravatar issue not being in SSL, but it could be a cache issue.
• Re-issued SSL certificate so that it would be encoded in SHA-2 and not (deprecated) SHA-1
• IE 11 and Project Spartan in Windows 10 Technical Preview also support the HTTP/2 protocol.
• A good example of why this was done for modern browsers: https://http2.akamai.com/demo
• The SQL database was further updated to the latest version. There were also a number of library updates.
• Fixed 3 404 dead links on the main landing page.
• The site should be performing in an excellent manner. If not, please throw a hint. Thank you!

 

[kemical]

Working nice... Thanks Mike!