Hi Everyone,
We just went through an exhaustive journey to get to the root cause of a lot of the issues popping up lately. The good news a lot of resolution has occurred. Here is what has been addressed:
-Who is online back on homepage
-Swap board strange permission issue messages
-Homepage width
These issues should be fully resolved. Issues in progress:
-Groups access and usage
-A few people can't always access the site
-Who is in chat
I will expand on these items now.
Chat - We will most likely have the who is in chat up top again tomorrow.
Groups - Upon investigation we discovered the software used here actually has two types of groups. At some point a programmer in the past disabled and hid one in the code we found today. To keep a long story short what we are doing is giving everyone the ability to create and participate in groups.
To access groups underneathe the blue site buttons in the green bar up top go to Community > Groups (it is a drop down menu)
From here you can create and join groups. I am working on only having public groups available. I would prefer it if you do not create private/invite only/moderated groups. I really don't see the point of allowing groups that cause exclusion. So please create only public groups. If plus members need more locked down forum areas let me know.
After we get only public group options available I will create a video tutorial and post it to help everyone be able to know how to participate.
Site access - we are working with our hosting company that is known for reliable service to resolve the issue. Our issue is elevated to a higher tier of support currently. We will figure out why some ISP networks in certain areas are having issue which effects a few shackies.
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Moving forward... it seems the root cause of a lot of our issues was a recent site update/patch. What we are doing differently from now on to prevent unexpected changes to our custom code is we have setup a test copy of the site to try it on first.
We may call upon a couple of you to test it out at times when we put in a new feature or install an update to make sure we aren't missing anything.
Thank you so much for your patience and support. We are really fortunate to have the programmer on board that we do. A lot of times these issues get farmed out to a consultant. Matt has worked with the same guy for 8 years and he can learn and figure out anything. He did a lot of great work today. His name is Naz and he will be the only one working on the site. Our team behind the scenes cares a lot about this site and will continue to learn, improve, and communicate even better as we move forward.
Again Thanks for making this community so wonderful. I really appreciate all of you and reading your posts and seeing your cards. Even when things are broken
Sincerely,
Mike