I think the new FT version is great ^ ^ ^
There also was a dramatic increase in speed Thursday evening so I am sure it will improve even more over the next few days.

Bad decisions
 

No Freddies this year for FT web site!!!!

Some problems are solveable by further tuning and throwing more hardware but there are other problems that will make this unusable by some people ever. And that is the increase in page sizes. Imagine hitting the reply on a slow bandwidth and waiting for portions of the thread to load!!!!

#1 item for ALL travel related sites that none of the people that design for travelers seem to understand. Travelers are mobile (is this simple concept so difficult to understand?). Travelers do not have good connectivity all the time nor do they have powerful computers. Please make the ability to work with this site using the free computers in RCC at T3 in LHR a mandatory requirement and then worry about features.

1. No one ever solves a scaling problem by adding more features.

2. There is no way to scale to high volumes than to keep it simple.

I strongly recommend turning off every feature you can in this board software to give the basic functionality at minimum bandwidth first. Then you can experiment with turning on one feature at a time. If it cannot be turned off then I am afraid a bad choice has been made for this kind of a site.

Sigh! If I had a FF mile everytime I see a web site builder not understand the audience being catered to, I would be flying free the rest of my life.

Answers to some questions...
 

I don't know what a "current tag" is that I have the option to close while I'm composing this message.

If you have been using "tags" like [ b ] to make something bold you can use the "close current tag" or "close all tags" to insert the [ / b ] at the end, on UBB we often forgot to close a tag and without a start and end a tag won't work.


I don't know why I have title this message, since I thought I was replying to a thread.

You can give a title to a reply now as well, add something like you see on top of my reply here

I don't know what "reputation points" are, how to earn them, how many are good to have.

People can "award" you reputation points, but it's mainly active for "trust" points in coupon connection

I don't know what to bookmark to have unread messages be displayed when I visit each morning.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/search.php?do=getnew

I have an airport transfer question (FRA, AA to LH) and don't know where to
post it.

The airport boards in "localtalk" and more specifically the FRA airport forum would be best:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=540


Hope this helps!

Another interesting feature is the new search function. When doing a search on "KLM", I got the following result :

"The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : KLM"

I guess KLM is far too long, so in future I had better use KL.

johan

I agree, the new software is AWESOME! Last night when the speed was "normal" it was a real pleasure to use FT!

Where is the handy "QuickPick" list now?
 

I can't locate the handy "quick pick" list of forums that used to be at the bottom of each page, where I could effortlessly jump from the NWA forum to the Starwood forum and so forth. Is it just hidden somewhere now, or am I just not seeing it because the new site is SO SLOW!

FT could lose a lot of popularity and posting volume if it does not fix the speed problem really soon! I liked the old FT a lot -- simple, uncluttered, and FAST!

Appreciate the comments and as I personally close in on a 100-hour work week this week, can assure you that we have four people all working very hard to isolate and correct the performance of FT. There is no way to stress test our system unless it's live. We've found one bug in our load balancing system and hope that helps, but we know you will all be pleased once we get the full optimization completed. From the back end - we absolutely love the new board.

I hope I can contine to thank you all for your support of FlyerTalk.

Sankaps: The "Quick Links" will be added back in ASAP. We opened with it but took it down to try and isolate that as a possible bug.

johan rebel: the default search was for words more than 3 letters. We can and will adjust this.

venk: I think you underestimate who is building this board. I've earned well over 12 million miles, used to average more than 250,000 actual flight miles a year so I think I know of what you speak. The features aren't the problem since if you stood back, you'd see that each one was carefully designed to make your individual experience on FT truly yours. The performance problem is simply working out a few bottlenecks - something even eBay, Amazon and anyone else goes through. Please don't confuse hardware challenges with software challenges, each is different. The difficult challenge here is that unlike other software installs, there is no stress test system for a bulletin board like this. We have uncovered a load balancing bug which seems to help but know what we built the board for and it will be much faster a week or so from now. As for the Freddies, we built this for our members, not to win awards but to hopefully add more value to your frequent flyer programs and travel. I accept your criticism and am deeply sorry I have failed you. It's actually your high standards that continue to make this a better board. We strive toward your expectations.

CMW: we are working on a sort for that. We actually have a few things we'll put in place later on for you including a system in which you can have the most popular threads in a forum emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly. This way if you don't have time to vist FT very often, you can still keep up with what is going on.


Anyway, hope some of these answers help. Let us isolate a few bugs and you'll be very happy with the expeirence of FlyerTalk.

Cheers,
Randy

P.S.
SylviaCaras: you don't have to fill in the title to reply to a post. That's there in case you want to reply to simply a part of the entire previous post or to another member's post without using the quote system. It's really no different than before.

Randy,
Thanks for all your (and your team's) hard work & time in getting the new FT up & running. Having been through more conversions than I care to remember (heck, one g/l conversion was so bad we (managers) received mugs saying "When pigs fly" and included a technical drawing of said flying pig), it's not a surprise that there are some kinks to be worked through. Thanks again!

TaxiTalk will soon be FlyerTalk once again
 

Yesterday it was GroundHoldTalk, but in the last hour or two, the performance has improved dramatically. By tomorrow, I'm predicting that FlyerTalk will once again be airborne. :)

Randy: Thanks for the hard work by you and your staff to improve a website for which most of us pay nothing. :)

It is much faster today...
 

I like vBulletin best of all the message board softwares I've seen.

I think you guys have done a tremendous job of transitioning with synergistic enthusiasm! :)

Hope it gets faster as you work out the kinks.

BTW, there seem to be fewer boards every day as much fun and informative as FT and as reasonably priced ( ;) ) - great job, Randy/FT! ^

May I Have My Reputation Back?
 

Dear Moderator:

This thread was originally created at Northwest board. I appreciate your moving the thread here, but I am profoundly sad to see that my reputation point becomes "-3".

I thought, as a Northwest flyer, it is OK to report difficult time when trying to access the Northwest board of FT forum. At any rate, it is not fair to penalize me for this. After all, this thread has received a 4-star rating.

Reputation and honor are very important, sometimes more important than life :) :) It is just stressful for me to have a negative rating :D

Can I have my reputation back? Please?

This Is Not Fair :)
 

Also, when you click the little blue square under my handle, you see a sentence

"BOS-NWA has a little shameless behavior in the past."

I don't know what I did wrong ever since I joined this forum. :D

It is humiliating, to say the least. NOT FAIR!

It's probably not fair... And a bug!
 

Actually, it says "BOS-NWA is an unknown quantity at this point" -- what the heck that means, I'm clueless.

Oh, and I found something weird. I responded to a post, and it got set before the original one.

Very weird. We'll look at it.

Okay where was this thread moved to as it is still open in the NorthWest forum and that is where I am now posting to it? :confused: