New FT Version Seems to Be Better Now :)
 

With all due respect to software engineers of FT Forums, this new version is really bad.

It takes forever to upload or login. I miss the simplicity of the old version.

Even with my DSL or high speed internet connection, it is just sooooooo painfully slow.

Am I the only one who has this problem? I don't enjoy this site as much now.

You're certainly not the only one experiencing painfully long page load times on a high-speed connection--hopefully they are still ramping up and things will be back to normal speed soon.

I can't load FT :( anymore on my Palm Treo 600.

Maybe there is something I'm doing wrong.

RC

Took me about 3 mins. to log in with dial-up modem (no high speed available where I live). Hopefuly it is something being worked on.

Count me in on this. I don't think it's the software though, because I've seen this software on other sites that run considerably faster.

Let's just hope that it's just a slow start and not the sign of things to come...

How appropriate
 

How appropriate for the NW forum, to prefer the old. :D

The new features are cool, but clearly responsiveness is an issue. I'm sure they're looking at it.

I agree--new site enhancements don't appear to be worth it yet. Sorry guys--more speed-less glitz!

:( Ditto. Dial up here....painfully slow. I guess it will help me curb my FlyerTalk habit.

CALeeIII
Original Member
*
Join Date: Dec 1969
Location: BHM
Posts: 127


Huh? :rolleyes:

What does this mean? It took over 5 minutes for the last post. And, I have no idea why I am an Original Member since I didn't join in 1969. I was only 6 years old and didn't have a computer! Now, I will hit send and go to bed.

Select Northwest Forum.....go mow yard.
Select a thread......go wash car.
Select Post reply......go have dinner.
Select Login......go do dishes.

This is painful......Please Mr. Wizard, bring back the old one....... :mad:
(hey now, this Smilie tab is a nice addition :p )

[turtle/snail/post office FONT on]

What everybody else says.

Also, wretched smilies, yuck!

I'm actually liking the new features... will take a little while to get used to and a lot longer if FT doesn't speed up.

Ok, I admit I am a bit of a luddite, and hate change as a matter of course. I guess change is inevitable, but I really did love the infopop board format for it's simplicity and LACK of features. It looks like now I have to worry about my fellow FT'rs rating me, (I feel like I'm back in High School) rating threads (Worst thread EVER!).

I guess as long as there is useful information, which there always is, I can deal with the new multitude of smiley face options I now have.

I am in total agreeance. Flyer talk is so slow now, it is going to deter some people from visiting. What the heck did these guys mess with a perfect thing for?? Is it so slow because so many people are flooding the system? Should have been prepared is all I have to say!

Remember 9.6K speed? AOL 1.0 10 yrs ago ?
I missed an importing meeting because it took me so long to sign on. (and I'm using a cable connection)
Should I write and complain to flyertalk and ask for some type of compensation ? I think an FT cap, an FT sweatshirt, and an FT bag tag might be adequate.

You are not the only one; I have a high speed connection too (faster than DSL, FWIW), and it's coming up slowly. I also have a faster connection at work and have encountered the same. Hopefully they'll get the kinks worked out with the new interface, but in the meantime, I don't enjoy the site as much.

I would rather have something fast and simple without the bells and whistles (like NWA without IFE) than something slow and complex with bells and whisteles (i.e. another carrier with IFE that constantly plays advertising and previews over the open PA)..
:D

Anyway, I plan on giving it time as I suspect it'll take a bit to get things optimized with the new interface.

Cheers,

SDF_Traveler

I think this server needs a couple more CPUs. This is way tooooooooooo slow.

Wow, too slow. I thought it was my work computer, but it is the same story at home. I guess it just needs more time to work out the bugs.

Same result here. I have hight speeda at both home and work and it so slow as to be unuseable :(

Agree, this is slow ^_ :mad: , having been involved with many sw/hw upgrades over the years, this one is classic for what not to do as part of an upgrade. However I also realize it needs time for them to figure things out, so, with that being said and not having ft for the past week, I'll give it another week or two and then come back and see how things are.

It is rather slow. Hopefully with time the site will get faster. :)

Things are improving for FT
 

As of this morning, the situation has improved considerably. My DSL connection to FT Forum is a lot faster than yesterday.

I hope that I didn't misfire on the software engineers who designed FT web site.

Still, as some friend indicated, I enjoy the simplicity of NW products, such
as EUA (true FC upgrades, not like CO's EUA that would never come in many situations). BTW, NW's FC, although without leather seats or other fancy entertainment systems, does get me from point A to B predictably. I can count on an upgrade 95% of the time. Unlike other carriers, NW does not play sneaky "enhancement" games

:)

Yesterday I kissed it off at work as the Proxy server never let me open FT.

Got home and with cable thought it would be a breeze

Never happen last night. It was like molasses in January.

So this morning I am actually doing chores between posts - but at least I am able to post. Hopefully the incremental increases will continue or I may have to work again today!

hehehe this thread got a 5-star rating :PPPP
 

I am proud that this thread, initiated by me, has received a five-star rating !

What does that mean, anyway? :D :D :D

Five Star
 

Means that this thread is better than the four-star threads, but not as good as the elusive, super-secret SIX star threads! MUAHAHHAHAA

(And yes, it's a little faster for me this morning. A little faster)

And does anyone know if we can change the default time from GMT to something else? It's hard to do the math.

Any one know a way to make the New Posts be sorted by forum primarily and then by "most recent post"?

I really liked looking at the new posts each day categorized by forum. That way I could be thinking about each program and the posts related to it. Having everything mixed up is much less appealing to me.

CHanging the time is easy!
 

You can easily set this in about 7 minutes. Go to your "MyFlyerTalk" page (I REALLY despise the "My<site>" thing) and wait 2 minutes for it to load. Then, select "Edit Options." Wait 3 minutes for the page to open and scroll down to "Date & Time Options." Select the desired timezone, press "Save Changes," wait 2 minutes for the changes to be saved, and you are done!

Next I have to figure out what this thread has to do with NW, where it belongs, and how to move it :)

Yes site is SLOW (assume it will get faster), not sure what it has to do with NW forum...maybe moderators are overwelmed so they won't close this thread for a while.

I don't know how to ...
 

I can't yet tell if the new system is worse or better, and I know how hard a redesign is, but I am confused.

Yes, slow, slow, slow, even with DSL.

I don't know what the codings, little pictures, are to the left of the threads and messages, don't find them explained anywhere, did search the FAQ's. I see some of them as options below - do I have to remember all those? I'd like to have words display when I moved the cursor over them, I guess. There are a number of others.

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

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

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

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

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

So, if there are answers, I'd appreciate them.

Sylvia

It looks pretty but is way too slow. I've visited about 10% as much as before the updates.

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! ^