Forum Update

Lukasz Erecinski May 22. 2019 5

The forum update is scheduled to go live at the end of May (likely over the weekend May 25-26th). You can expect the forum to be down for a couple of hours as work is being carried out. We hope that the process will be relatively painless, but if unexpected issues arise then this will extend the downtime. The forum upgrade is a part of our ongoing process of improving PINE64 services, which you can expect to carry over to the month of June with future updates to the Wiki and the chats.

Updating the forum is something that has been on our bucket list for a long time, but there have always been multiple other more pressing things that have taken priority. Frankly speaking, not much though has been given to the state of the forum, its structure and usability until earlier this year. The server move this month has given us the opportunity to update, change and most importantly improve all the PINE64 community services; the webpage was the first to receive an update and now its the forum’s turn for a make-over.

GDPR Compliance

The current forum is in need of more than quality-of-life improvements – more specifically, we need to make the forum complient with regulation (GDPR). On your first login you will be presented with the privacy policy, which you need to accept before proceeding to using the forum services as per usual. Scroll to the bottom of the policy and click accept. Accepting the privacy policy (identical to the one on this website) is required for both new and existing members and applies to everyone, including moderators and developers.

New Look and Feel

The general layout of the forum has been simplified and designed to expose the bits and pieces that regular and new users access frequently. The side tab has quick access to the PINE64 chats – the Discord and IRC Webchat for the time being- while the top bar features links to the Wiki, this News blog, Forum Portal as well as other relevant information. At the bottom of the forum page you’ll find a footer with all the social links as well as some helpful information.

New Features

Apart from overhauling the look of the forum we’ve also added new features that will hopefully improve the forum experience. The most notable omission on the current forum is probably the ‘Alerts’ function, that notifies you if someone responds in your thread, quotes you in a post, rates your response or writes in a thread you’re subscribed to. This feature has now been added to the forum and can be accessed by clicking the bell icon next to your User CP icon. You can tweak the Alerts settings from the User CP if you aren’t happy with the defaults.

If you wish to mention someone, and have them be alerted of this, you can use the @ symbol in conjunction with their username. Mentions have an autocomplete feature (pictured below) so all you need to do is start typing and select the user in question from the drop-down menu. Mentions trigger alerts, so they are useful if you want to get someones’ attention.

The other improvement, which I truly hope users will embrace, is the ‘Mark as solved!’ button. I think this one doesn’t really need any explanation – if your forum query was resolved, clicking it will mark it as solved. This really simplifies looking for answers on the forum, and is likely to limit the number of reoccurring threads concerning the same subject matter.

That’s all for now. Huge thanks to ItsDave and FireTwoOneNine for putting in the time and effort to update and set the new forum up. As always, your feedback is welcome!