Hi there Pinside!

After months of hard work we have finally migrated the old site to a new server! This was needed for several reasons: we were running out of disk space on our old server and we didn't have enough RAM to keep all of you happy.

The new server is not just a new physical machine. We've also moved northeast 1700 miles from Dallas, Texas to Canada. For the techies amongst you: The server RAM went from 4GB to 32GB and we're now running on SSD disks in mirrored RAID. We have ditched Apache in favor of Nginx webserver with PHP Fast CGI and we're now running Sphinx server instead of searching MySQL. This allowed us to switch from MyISAM to INNODB.

It all sounds good in theory.

Today we'll find out if it works well with 400 of you browsing at the same time. So we are now officially in BETA ;-D

What else is new? A lot!

Design
Lots of design tweaks, the most important being that we made the page a little wider. Stuff still works fine on iPad. Mobile is in the plans but no date on this yet.

Sub-categories
With over a 100 new topics created daily, we needed a way to better categorise posts without changing the general use of the site. This was done by adding a bunch of sub-categories, each of which has a color and abbreviation to help you recognise your favorite topic categories. The homepage still shows all topics from all subs, but you can disable and sub categories you don't find interesting (e.g. the Off Topic sub-category). The "add topic" page also tries to help you place a new topic in the right sub-category.

Karma points
Lots of discussion and this is the outcome! I have multiplied everyone's Karma points for free! This not only looks cooler and more "pinball", but the score distribution was also evened up. I have changed the way posts score you points. Thumbs up and down are still there, but you need more of 'em before they start awarding your post extra points. A post now scores 1000 points and thumbs up start counting after 4 thumbs (at 150 per thumb).

Image/Upload system
Completely rewritten from scratch. You can now drag drop files, upload multiple files simultaneously, write your posts while uploading, and much more. All images should have been migrated to this new system. Missing something? Let me know!

Settings
We cannot always agree on all things. For some things there are now settings. Check the new forum settings tab above which will allow you to tune the forum to your liking. One of the most requested features now in settings include showing the "new posts" block on the left and making a click go to the last read post automatically.

Scores
Scores now have their own section!

More?
There's a lot more, but you'll find that yourself!

Bugs? Undoubtedly! Obviously with so many changes there are always bugs. You can post a new topic in Pinside > Bugs sub-forum and I will try to squat them as soon as possible.

Thanks for all the nice words everyone! I really appreciate it!

I will take a look at the PM problems reported, stay tuned...

Could you check your address bar? Are you on https://pinside.com or http://pinside.com? Note the s behind http.

If you are on https, could you remove the s and see if that helps?

The way it's designed to work is this: you browse the http site but login runs on https.

Yes, I have noticed this as well. Working on a solution!

I'm working on all bugs reported and will also consider any feature request related to the recent changes. Please go easy on me, it's a lot to digest

I'm now working on the images that are showing too big. The server may be a little slow as I am currently resizing 17,000 images which somehow failed to resize properly earlier.

Thanks!

...Down to resizing the last 8000 images...

What your screen shot shows is an operating system that is not using font smoothing. I'm guessing Windows XP? This is the main reason the sub-forum icons are hard to read. It should look like this:

Screen Shot 2013-10-09 at 21.58.44 PM.png

Obviously I would like to accomodate your situiation as well, but I need some more time for these kinds of tweaks. First I need to tackle the big issues... Like logging in

No? What kind of download are you getting? Could you e-mail it to me (webmaster at pinside dot com) Thanks!

It's done now. Unfortunately 693 images went missing during the migration. Gotta go find those on the old server.

No problem! That's what the forum settings are for!
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/settings

The eror triggered is meant for posting to old threads (necromancing old topics) and obviously not for creating new topics.

There are some more weird issues with starting new topics and I'm afraid the server update didn't fix these. I'm gonna have to dive into this and see what is causing these problems.

For starters, which link do you use to start a new thread? Should be this one:
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/?new=1

And which browser are you using? Probably doesn't matter but just to be sure..

You're right. I have removed this text for now.

The new numbers are still settling in, today is crazy karma day. Everything will be better as the numbers get some rest later on...

Ok thanks, I'm gonna check now what could be causing this.

Could you try again?

Great!

Okay, I'm calling it a day now. Please everyone, go easy on the site! The server is still fresh and she needs to get adjusted to the smell of novus and sweaty pinball players. Not to mention all the beer fumes filling this place. And to think it's only wednesday!

Okay, good night (oh, and don't get nightmares about your Karma points)

It is now disabled on mobile devices, because it was acting funny and it was way too small anyway.

Someone mentioned adding a "back to top" and maybe "back to front page" button at the bottom of each thread, seems like a good idea.

I think I fixed this. Had to do with an iPad specific touch event that was being really bad.

Hmm? It's supposed to look like this:

Screen Shot 2013-10-10 at 16.40.50 .png

What browser are you on?

Nope, no limit at this time. Being sent to the top of the page means a javascript error in most cases. What browser is that? And can you try a shift-refresh to see if that works?

Hmm, me too. Could you go to view > developer > javascript console ?
This will open the console at the bottom of your screen. Now try thumb-upping again to see if theres a javascript error.

Very helpful, thanks. It appear that the close button is simply not showing for some strange reason. Which browser is that?

Thanks for all the feedback, keep it coming! I need to get rid of all these bugs asap

Thanks for the feedback, I will work on resolving these issues as soon as time permits

Make sure you are not loading from HTTPS instead of HTTP. There is an issue with our SSL configuration that I have yet to work out. For some strange reason the site is extremely slow over HTTPS.

Some strange bugs. These were already present before the update. Was happening when you were not logged in. Very strange. I think it should all work again!

You can do this in your forum settings: http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/settings

I hope so too! It's on my to-do list!

It's still there, the envelope just isn't bouncing anymore. Look in the blue bar in the top right of your screen. If you have unread messages an envelope should show there.

People have also reported notification via e-mail not working? I'm still getting them, so I'm not sure yet if this is an issue for everyone?

Sorry for the typo!

Thanks for thew suggestion! But for now, the new server seems to do pretty well, plus we already have a CDN in place for static images etc.

Not yet, but I agree there should be. Added to "to-do"!

Fully agree, this is a limitation of the new GUI which I only "discovered" myself after rolling it out. Oops! I will come up with a better search. Added to "to-do"!

This happened if your screen width was set to narrow. I have changed the order now, and will work on moving search to another location so it won't disappear.

It's high on my list but I'm still not sure what is causing this. The beta site (not accessible to the public) does not have this problem while it shares all the same configuration / certificate etc.. Investigating...

You're right. I will see if I can fit that back in there.

I did some tests with this and I didn't see this. I first tested manually adding an image a.jpg then manually adding b.jpg and then c.jpg - Wehn hitting submit the files would be posted in the correct order.

I then tried drag dropping them. I had my finder/explorer in the alphabetic sorting order and dragged the three files in the box. Again, they would go in the right order and after submitting the post they would be posted in the right order.

Finally I reversed the sorting order and drag-dropped again. As expected the files where uploaded as c.jpg, b.jpg, a.jpg and when posted also went in this order.

Could this be a browser related thing? And are you referring to drag drop or manual uploads? Or Both?

Thanks, that's a bug that I'll fix today.

I don't see this either on my iPhone. I'm always signed in. Could this be some privacy setting? Or maybe cookie rleated? The auto-sign in needs cookies to remember your auth token.

Hope you're all having a good time at Expo!

I have released a great update today to the map section. The Pinsiders and Locations maps are both upgraded to use a more enhanced method of clustering. This will make browsing a lot faster and more fun! Let me know if you encounter any bugs! See http://pinside.com/pinball/map

Also in this update: fixed the community > Pinsider search and rewrote the My-Pinside section that manages sign-in, sign-out, lost-password, etc. Implemented a password reset system (no more plain text passwords over the mail, yay!)

Still working on HTTPS connectivity issues.

Update: SSH fixed! You can now browse through https://pinside.com if you are signing in from an unsafe location (e.g. Internet Cafe)

Thanks for reporting!

Next time such a big issue pops up, you can also PM me, so I know about it quicker.

I'm currently working on the upload functionality site-wide, so it should be improved soon!

Great idea, and would indeed be helpful! Added to my to-do!

Mobile version is in the makings!

PM me with the details and I will add them!

Try clicking on the "1 month ago" text

Yes, I am working on some upgrades for the image server. You guys are uploading way too much data and the server can't handle it all

Yes that and the fact that I was not resizing/compressing uploads at all
Don't worry, I have been working on a fix today and am happy to report that a solution should be coming soon....

This is essentially the intended behaviour. Hide the thread if there's nothing new in it since your last visit.

I've spent some time on this today and added functionality to do phrase searches and much more. Check out the search page and be sure to open the search tips that I wrote.

You can! Go to community and then click on the cool "Find Pinsiders" link:

Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 00.02.22 am.png

From a users profile page you can hit the PM tab and starting direct messaging someone!

This was just fixed. It turned out to be a silly programming error on my end.

Could you please let me know around which time this happens? Because when I'm on (I'm on CET time) the site runs smooth and fast. I might have to pull an allnighter and do some live monitoring while America is on the Pinside.

Could you give me a link to an ad whose pictures are not loading?

That's a good one.

Yes, good catch. Will look into this.

Sorry all! A small bug in date parsing module was causing this. Should be fixed now! I'm also working on restoring auction prices, bang for buck and more!