November 29, 2023 10:29 AM UTC

We're Slowly Becoming Less Broken

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• by: Colorado Pols

The past few weeks since our switch to a new site design for the first time in ten years have been challenging to say the least, and we appreciate our loyal readers’ patience and help troubleshooting as we continue to finish building the proverbial plane in mid-flight. We continue to work through a long list of needed fixes and enhancements with our developers, who have been working primarily during the overnight hours to make changes–which may explain certain errors some users have received during those hours.

Commenting: After several weeks of wrangling we believe the comment editor system signed in users can see below is functional in all browsers with a greater range of features than before. Comment “threading” or reply indentation now also works in all browsers. If you’re not seeing these updates, please shift+refresh to ensure you’ve got the latest version of the site loaded.

My Account/login issues: Many users have had trouble logging in over the past few days due to changes in the code for the login page. This should be resolved, but there is still an issue with logged-in users being directed to pages where they don’t appear logged in. In this case, shift+refresh has cleared up the problem temporarily and we’ll have it permanently fixed soon.

Site periodically loading broken: We apologize for this side-effect of updates to the live server that take time to be recognized by all browsers. This should decrease over time, should you encounter a visibly broken page please take a screenshot and send us a message, then shift+refresh to ensure you’re loading the latest version of the site.

Homepage navigation and categories: The “Top Users” sidebar on the homepage will soon be replaced with category indexes about 2024 races and issues as soon on the old site. The “Recent Posts” feed will be expanded to accommodate this additional navigation, as well as changes to the footer navigation to allow easier access to more content from the homepage.

Search: Slowly improving the format of the search results page. This is a top priority.

Slow page loads: We are continuing to restore traffic management which was in place on the former site, and slow page loads are mostly confined to the homepage itself which we are working to address.

Still need your feedback: Readers are overall doing an excellent job in helping us troubleshoot, and please continue to provide feedback as we work out remaining issues. It has taken longer than we originally anticipated to solve the many unexpected problems we encountered switching to the new design, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We–or at least our hardworking developers–won’t rest until they’ve all been addressed to your satisfaction.

It’s not true, they get to rest. But you know what we mean.