The Money Shed - Service Updates

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Jon

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Hi all,

I just needed to make a thread where I can post whenever I make changes to The Money Shed or am planning to

I have made a change to the way the URLs look for the site, it used to be in plain English but there are things I didn't like about that, not least that if someone changed the title of a thread it kept the URL as the original title.
 

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Just wanted to add a bit more to this.

While I am happy with the change to how the URLs look there appears to have been a slight knock on in regards to the pages indexed by Google as they point to links that no longer work.

I have had Google craw the sitemap of TMS again and pickup the new URLs for the various threads that rank highly out there. hopefully things will go back to normal after a week or two.

It might mean until then we have a bit of a slowdown in terms of new users coming here but we have a good article about us going up on a site on Saturday hopefully plus we have someone on the case with social media marketing.

As ever, if you have got something from this site, PLEASE let others know about it
 

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Just upgraded SMF (The software The Money Shed runs on) to the latest version that came out the other day 2.0.8

It is a terrifying experience of watching a progress bar move very slowly and praying to jebus that the entire site doesn't break.

Anyway, it didn't. It is still here

This patch focuses on fixing a few memory issues caused by some of the changes in 2.0.7, as well as fixing a crucial bug which caused the boards to appear in a seemingly random order for forums running on MySQL version 5.6 and above. It also fixes a rare bug that could cause a database error when invalid data is passed to the memberlist search form. Users experiencing white pages and similar issues caused by excessive memory usage by their forums should experience an improvement.

I have seen both of these going on so hopefully they will now stop..
 

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TMS_BOT seemed to have stopped posting his updates in the RSS Feed forum after the upgrade to 2.0.8 at the weekend.

I have given him a kick and he is all working now...
 

Jon

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Likes:

I have spent some money ($19) on a mod that gives us the ability to like individual posts within the forum. I have wanted to run something like this since The Money Sheds inception.

You will see there is now a Like button with a heart symbol next to the top right of each post. You can then 'like' the post if you feel it is useful to others or just generally a great post. If you clicked it by mistake you can 'unlike' it just as simply.

It will then show others how many have liked that post when they browse the forum and others can also see how many times a post of yours has been liked and how many times that person has given other people likes.

I will be turning the Karma system (Applause) off now as I see no reason for the 2 systems to coexist at all.
 

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I am going to be putting a portal front end onto The Money Shed Forum either later on today or tomorrow

The idea behind it is that it will again make the site even more easier to navigate when you first come to the site and also help promote content from the Blog. It will highlight top threads and other important information rather than just a 'wall of forum text' that people might see when they come here and not know where to start.

The whole portal will help promote communication and interaction between the sites members.

Things might break while I am doing this but don't worry, if we hit a 'tapatalk' situation I will just role back to before the change.
 

Jon

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The portal is up

It does what I want

Shows off information like the blog, new posts, who's online all from the front screen. Quick access to the information you want without having to do any clicks

The "what is the money shed" type post on the front needs some work. Will work on it later.
 

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If you want to write content to give links away that you only want members on here to be able to see/sign up to

you can now use the following tag around it

[ only_members ] [ /only_members ]

This will make it only visible to logged in members of The Money Shed
 

Jon

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Bookmarks:

These are now working so you can now bookmark a thread that you want to keep an eye on or have an interest in.

The button Add Bookmark appears at the top of each thread and once you click that the topic will be added to your 'My Bookmarks' collection on the right hand side of 'My Messages'
 

Jon

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We have a new area on the The Money Shed now called 'Money Saving Diaries'

It can be found here

http://www.themoneyshed.co.uk/index.php?board=24.0
 

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We have a new area called 'Techie Stuff'

It can be found here http://www.themoneyshed.co.uk/index.php?board=25.0

Here you can ask anything regarding technology

That can include anything like

Phone
Tablets
Laptops
Domain Names / Hosting
Social Media
and anything in between..
 

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3rd update for today! (Phew!)

We now have a member map

idbxnk.jpg


Click on the Member Map option and you will then be taken to a MAP of the World.

Zoom into the UK and you should see Money Shed Members

Just below the map you should see an option to add YOUR location

2dvigj7.jpg


Once you click that it will take you to your profile page and if you scroll down you will see you can now add you location to the map

snjbsh.jpg


You can type in your location and be as accurate or as general as you want. So I could put in my actual postcode or just put 'Leeds' for myself

once you are happy CLICK INTO THE MAP AND PLACE A PIN, then choose Change Profile at the bottom and you will have been added to the map next time you look
 

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Thanks to all the testing and bug spotting done by the testers we are now ready to move to new theme/layout which I will be doing this afternoon

If you spot things not working then please drop me a PM
 

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Not on the forum, but part of The Money Shed

I have been redesigning the Money Shed Blog today to bring it more in line with the branding of the forum.

You can check it out at http://blog.themoneyshed.co.uk
 

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We now have a Direct Selling subforum to contain those doing Direct Selling

Strict rules will apply and an instant ban for spam
 

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I am about to upgrade SMF (The software this site runs on) to 2.0.9


If you find things aren't working as they were before please PM me and tell me
 

Jon

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Well, we are out the other side.


It was important that I upgraded to 2.0.9 as soon we will be going to 2.1 which is currently in Beta

2.1 brings MAJOR improvements to this site


  • A fresh, new, responsive design with Curve2:
    SMF 2.0 introduced the Curve theme, which was an update that gave a more modern web look to SMF. 2.1 includes a revamp of our default theme called Curve2! Curve2 introduces responsive design concepts to most of the areas of your forum, making it much more easily accessible to modern smartphones and tablets. Additionally, we have a number of major and minor UI/UX improvements across the board.
  • Notification Alerts:
    In prior versions of SMF, notifications were a distributed affair, with the two primary options being e-mails and PMs. 2.1 changes this with the introduction of Alerts, which can be enabled to display all your forum notifications, major or minor, in a single location without cluttering your e-mail or PM inbox. Alerts' preferences also acts as a central notification preference center where you can specify the format of notification you'd like to receive: e-mails, alerts or none, all in a single place, instead of having preferences scattered throughout the forum. In the new preference center you will now have the ability to set preferences for e-mail, alerts or both for individual topics and boards instead of forum-wide settings, which allows you to exercise a much finer control over notifications you want to receive
  • PM and Post drafts:
    Ever closed a tab or window on a long post you've been writing for a long time? I know I did while writing this announcement. Or perhaps you simply couldn't finish a post in a single sitting and hoped you could continue from where you left off? Then Drafts is for you, it is fully integrated into 2.1, along with the ability to auto-save posts and PMs as you're writing them.
  • Likes and Mentions:
    Likes has been added to SMF, replacing the existing Karma system with a more content oriented one. The system can also be extended internally by mod authors in order to allow likes for their own content.
    Members can also flag a post to call the attention of other members by mentioning them, using the internet standard @displayname syntax. This will send an alert or e-mail (depending upon the receiver's preference) and notify them of the mention.
  • A bunch of other stuff!
    • Full SSL support throughout the forum. (NOTE: Requires appropriate certificate and configurations on the server.)
    • Password hashing has been improved from sha1 to bcrypt.
    • The Admin area has received a number of usability and organizational improvements. A few of the areas have been reorganized and relocated as well as some overall clean up
    • The Moderation Center also has several usability improvements, including enhanced reported topics, and moderator notes among other things.
    • Improvements to membergroup requests and approval.
    • Permissions have been expanded with new permissions for member profiles, accounts etc.
    • Built-in support for Gravatars.
    • Users can select their timezones instead of manually selecting the time offsets.
    • jQuery is now included by default with many functions now using it in core.
    • Support for SQLite has been dropped.
    • Internal improvements reducing memory consumption and improving overall speed.
    • Lots and lots of other internal and external improvements!
 

Jon

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I've turned on comments on the Blog (blog.themoneyshed.co.uk)


The blog has gained quite a good level of traction over the last few weeks with good visitor numbers and decent searches to get to the blog and I want to keep that side of TMS as accessible as possible and i'm not too sure that asking them to sign up for the forum just to post was such a great idea.


You can now comment on a blog post using your Twitter / Google / Facebook logins as well
 

Jon

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So logs on the site have told me that the usual route for a new user goes


Sign up > Account gets manually approved > Logs into site > Goes straight to HELP


HELP has been removed from the top incase you haven't noticed - it was generic and FAR too involved and not tailored enough to this site.


Instead I have replaced with a nice circa 2000 word instruction guide dedicated to this site with screenshots to match which can be found here.


Help / Assistance also has it's own subforum so people can ask questions as they get going on using the site.


Hopefully this will be much less of a passive experience for new users going forward.


New users will be directed to the help / assistance section section in their welcome email from later on this week
 
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