Main Site Changes

mclemore

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Donor 15 years: 2010-2024
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The main site got a slightly revised look. Consider it a transitional design from the old simple text menu links to something slightly more refined with pull down menus.

A few buried features (ie: Videogame history graphs, PCB identity tools) are now slightly easier to find. Overall, it allows me to begin to slowly reorganize the site and begin to prepare for a long overdue conversion to modern site design (and .css).

Besides the menu bar changes and minor relocation of some features, there are a few other changes. The game pages in particular used to have ads between the menu bar and the bottom of the page. Currently they have been moved to the very bottom of the page. This will result in some much needed revenue to drop, but will make the pages look better. I'm curious to see how much it drops...

Our 'giftshop' on the site was so bad (with a dozen links to niche books) that most of you probably didn't know it has been there the past few years). It's been replaced with a very new and filled out Amazon store that works with their affiliate program. Again, it's a test.

There have been a bunch of new expenses for the site recently. I'll mention two quickly. The first is that we moved servers from my office to a data center. This increases the expenses to run the site but also make the site more resistant to denial of service attacks and other problems.

The second expense we just added was we joined Return Path's Certified Email Program. It's not inexpensive, but the reality is we live in a world now where sending email just isn't free. For personal use, it's rarely an issue. For a site of this size, however, lost email was creating a significant amount of customer service burden (especially concerning registration emails) with sites including but not limited to Hotmail. Now we get extensive data back from nearly all the big sites (except for Google) and hopefully our email will have a better delivery rate.

We do have a minor issue with members here having 'thread subscriptions' turned on and then not updating their email address with us when they change it. This creates 'unknown user' problems. It's not just the bouncebacks... the percentage of these unknown user emails to our total sent can affect our certification. As such, please make sure you keep your email address with us current. You will also need it if you ever need to reset your password and don't want to wait around for us to show up and manually reset your account.

I'm out of time now so I'll have to write more later. We are working on a few news-worthy things, though everything in life that involves multiple people tends to move a little more slowly than I'd like.

Greg
 
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