Best Ever Albums

Re: 2019 roadmap

albummaster — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 13:39:32 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 09/15/2019 17:39

Need to see how the icons blend in with the upgraded forum software before deciding whether to change. Emojis could be added in addition (or instead of), but not explored that yet. (It shouldn't be too difficult to have both but need to get a bit further down the line before doing this.)

Re: 2019 roadmap

baystateoftheart — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 13:06:32 GMT

Author: baystateoftheart

Posted: 09/15/2019 17:06

albummaster wrote:

What's not to like about 20 year old emoticons? 😁 I'm sure these will be changed...

😢

Some of these are corny and out of date, but I must say I have grown attached to them. It would be nice to have them as an option in addition to emoji (which I hope will be supported in the future), even if they're not the defaults anymore. As long as that wouldn't throw a monkey wrench in stuff on the back end.

Re: 2019 roadmap

albummaster — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 12:59:29 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 09/15/2019 16:59

What's not to like about 20 year old emoticons? 😁 I'm sure these will be changed...

Re: 2019 roadmap

baystateoftheart — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 12:15:05 GMT

Author: baystateoftheart

Posted: 09/15/2019 16:15

Will the upgraded forums have the same emoticons?

Re: 2019 roadmap

albummaster — Wed, 4 Sep 2019 04:10:05 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 09/04/2019 08:10

Jameth wrote:

^^^That looks to address some of my issues, so I’ll wait for updates. But, if I can make some specific suggestions:

1. The profile menu in the page header on mobile needs to be pre-collapsed when a page loads. It has to be done manually.

2. The menu button needs to be moved to the top right, next to the profile button. That would help trim down the header on mobile, as well as place it in a more obvious location.

Maybe, you’re already aware of these issues, I don’t know.

Hi Jameth, thanks for your feedback. I like your ideas of collapsing the logged-in navigation and moving the menu button. I'll get this done over the next couple of days.

Re: 2019 roadmap

Jameth — Tue, 3 Sep 2019 19:13:43 GMT

Author: Jameth

Posted: 09/03/2019 23:13

^^^That looks to address some of my issues, so I’ll wait for updates. But, if I can make some specific suggestions:

1. The profile menu in the page header on mobile needs to be pre-collapsed when a page loads. It has to be done manually.

2. The menu button needs to be moved to the top right, next to the profile button. That would help trim down the header on mobile, as well as place it in a more obvious location.

Maybe, you’re already aware of these issues, I don’t know.

Re: 2019 roadmap

albummaster — Tue, 3 Sep 2019 07:48:52 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 09/03/2019 11:48

This isn't intended to be the final design. The layout will be refined over the next few days/weeks and feedback such as yours will help influence how this is implemented. One of the tweaks that we will make is to reduce the amount of white space on high screen resolutions so that the layout can be more compact. This is being checked into at the moment and small changes will be rolled out on a continual basis to improve how the site behaves on a variety of screen resolutions.

Re: 2019 roadmap

SilkTork — Tue, 3 Sep 2019 07:15:53 GMT

Author: SilkTork

Posted: 09/03/2019 11:15

I'm uncomfortable with the new design. It's too large for me. I find it off-putting. I have to scroll further to get the info I need, and there's a lot of empty white space. I valued the previous compact design. I understand the desire to create a website for the mobile platform, but usually the mobile website is a different design to the desktop website. Is it possible to run two designs?

Re: 2019 roadmap

albummaster — Sun, 1 Sep 2019 09:28:04 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 09/01/2019 13:28

🤫 Might be something in the works fairly shortly... just working on some final tweaks.

Re: 2019 roadmap

Hayden — Sun, 1 Sep 2019 09:05:56 GMT

Author: Hayden

Posted: 09/01/2019 13:05

I think I spotted a new site layout? It looked pretty good. No complaints.

Any word on whether or not I'm going insane AM?

Re: 2019 roadmap

RoundTheBend — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 01:11:32 GMT

Author: RoundTheBend

Posted: 08/19/2019 05:11

Best wishes!

2019 roadmap

albummaster — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 11:17:06 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 01/27/2019 16:17

This is the time of year when I traditionally spend a bit of time reflecting on the previous year and planning ahead for the next twelve months of BEA.

in 2018, visits to BEA were 7% down on the year before (2017: 9% up) and the lack of a modern design is the main factor in growth remaining fairly flat. About 51% of visits to BEA are now from a tablet or from a mobile device (2017: 48%), and this is despite BEA being far from designed for that platform.

The average number of active users decreased by 2% during 2018 (and on the forums decreased by 19%). The site now contains 14% more albums than at the end of 2017 (134,263 albums compared to 117,884 at the end of last year), so the site stagnated in 2018 in terms of visitor numbers.

The re-designed site will address a number of existing deficiencies in BEA, and will lead to a far better mobile experience for site visitors (which will also lead to increased usage and more visitors across different types of device).

The number of outstanding (uncompleted) features on the 'to do' list is about 437 (2017: 420 items). A lot of changes have been made to the site in the background to support the new design (including new servers added a couple of months ago).

Since 2017, I've been working hard in the background to modernise the site. I've suffered various aborted attempts to re-design the site from scratch but simply keeping the existing live site running uses up quite a bit of my spare time with not enough time left over for coding, so I scrapped the idea of writing things from scratch a couple of months ago and am now focused on the idea of re-skinning the existing site and refactoring as I go along in mini releases. The 'design' work of the new site has already been done so it's just a question of merging the templates into the existing site and modifying as necessary to plug into the existing code. This approach has already yielded the deployment of several new features (recognised charts now listed on people's charts pages and a number of smaller improvements which are too trivial to list).

The main work is making the new site mobile friendly and this work continues every spare working hour. I'm hoping in the next two or three months to release a more mobile friendly version of BEA and then continue with micro releases (rather than follow a 'big bang' approach) which means the live site and the development version are in tandem and it's less time-consuming keeping the two branches updated.

On a final note, I'd like to thank here everyone that has helped out in 2018 with the site. So, a big thanks (particularly) to the moderators: Romanelli, Patman360, RockyRaccoon & ShaneSpear. I'd also like to thank the people that are helping in the background to moderate the data, particularly (again) to Romanelli, but also Steppenwolf666, babyBlueSedan, Hayden, sethmadsen, mozzmozz, Cardboardfolder, Leonard & NoisyBeast (top 10 data admins in 2018), and also to everybody else on the site for your continued contributions, there's just not enough space here to mention you all but everybody's input is truly valued.

2019 should be a big year for BEA and it should be exciting. Thank you to everybody for your continued support.

albummaster