Good news everyone!

We’ve finally upgraded all communities to ‘version 6′ today. Englishforums.com was the final step, taking approximately 6 hours to complete. Just a few points to add onto the previous post:

The focus of this update was primarily speed (due to rising traffic volume) and stability (we’ve fixed almost all the known bugs).

Certain elements of the interface have changed for convenience and to defer rendering processes. For instance a menu is no longer rendered to the page on each request, it’s ‘loaded’ when needed. This results in millisecond delays on certain UI elements, but reduces page load times considerably. Why generate 15 menu items, and 20 button panels when you won’t necessarily use them.

We’ve also improved the focus of the forums with cleaner ’shortcut’ displays on the alternate homepage. We’ve reduced noise from usenet, and established filters that quickly eliminate pointless content.

In addition you’ll now see ‘rating’ icons everywhere. As time goes on the value of your rating will increase, the content you rate is re-considered by the system according to the rating. Spam can be removed by community voting, and quality content can rise to the top. The more you rate, the more power your ratings are given.

If you have been answering questions previously, or participating you’ll notice your ‘rating power’ will be higher than that of an ordinary user.

There are many other changes, our team will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Cheers, hope you like it,
Frank (hitchhiker)

To finish off the update to Englishforums, it will be offline for approximately an hour or more. Read more in the post below.

Today we will be updating Englishforums to Version 6.0. The site will be slow at times, we will let you know when everything from our end is done.

Visually, Version 6.0 will be very much the same as the old one, but there have been many changes in the code.
Some mentionable changes include:

1. the search system working much better
2. a new “holiday mode” which you can set if in your profile if you decide to go away for a while and would like to let your friends know,
3. members can now rate everything, they decide on the quality of our sites
4. cleaned up the Shortcuts so you can view discussions/questions with no replies.

We’ve cleared out over 200 bugs and tried to clean the site up so browsing is quick, fun and comfortable.

All Emails should be working now, we suspect that you might not have been receiving all of them! Let us know if you are not receiving any Emails that you think you should (Profile notifications, friend request, picture comments, or if someone replied to your thread etc). Before you let us know, check your settings in your Profile.

All other community websites are already running on Version 6.0 and we’re happy to see that this is a very stable Version.

Enjoy

An unknown problem is affecting the englishforums.com server, engineers are working on it now, but repairs may take some time…

Resumed at 19:38CET – However the issue has not yet been identified.
Sorry for the off-time, we’ll be keeping an eye on this server.

15:00 CET – We are aware that The Chat Page is having difficulties loading and some members are getting Oopsed. We will work on this problem shortly.

10:00 CET – This morning we have updated all community sites to include a feature that enables you to support your community by inviting your friends. You will find it by clicking on your profile and clicking “Send Invites” at the bottom right where all your friends are listed.

16:20 CET – We are offline for approximately 10 minutes while we run a short system maintenance.

07:00 CET – Englishforums.com is down, we are currently trying to resolve the problem.

11:00 CET -   The networking issues have been resolved, we’re back online.

10:00 CET: From last night onwards we had issues with our provider which affected the following sites:
knink.com, igamingforums.com and forodeespanol.com

The sites are back up now, sorry for any inconvenience.

We’re dealing with a faulty drive on the primary englishforums server. The site will be slow until the unit can be replaced. We’ll keep you updated.

Update 19:26 CET: We’re moving the rest of the system off the problem drive, it should take about 20 mins.

Update 12:31 CET 08/01/2010: The new unit is in place, as we’re slowly moving the system back to normal. There many be occasional offline spans that might last a few minutes.

Issue resolved