BE Blog: the inside story!

We have made a few usability enhancements to the forum over the last few days.

My Profile Pages

The navigation panel on the left of your control panel is now laid out in a more logical fashion. All your PM folders and subscribed thread folders are displayed hierarchically providing one-click access to any one of them. Additionally, the number of latest Karma messages has been increased to 20. 

Notification of another post while you are replying

If you are in the middle of a thread and someone replies to that thread before you have hit the submit button, you often need to edit your post to take that reply into account. This new feature will notify you of the other post before your post is added. You can then review the new reply right there on the same page before you hit submit.

If you prefer not to have the feature enabled, you can turn it off by visiting your options page. under 'Messaging & Notification' => 'Reply Check While Composing Message'.

PM Reply To All

You will notice a new 'Reply All' button when composing PM replies. This acts just like the reply to all feature in most email clients and will address the PM to all recipients included in the original.

BE on the Go! is a WAP 1.1 and WAP 2.0 (XHTML-MP) interface to the forums. Members can read and reply to posts, respond to PMs, and other usual forum tasks. There's even a Chat Room! To access the WAP site, just point your handheld browser to http://wap.britishexpats.com/ and log in using your current forum credentials.

Read on for full details!

Continue reading "BE on the Go!" »

We've added OpeSearch compatibility to the forums. If you're using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, you can  use the BE search engine directly from your browser search box.

To add the search in Firefox:

1. Browse to the forum home page. 
2. Click the little arrow in the browser search box to reveal the search engines.
3. Select "Add BritishExpats" from the menu.
   
4. Add your search term in the box and go!
   

We have a couple of new site features currently installed on the beta site and in the final testing stages. The first to roll out is a PDA friendly style.

This is a light-weight style designed and optimized for the small screens of cellphones and PDAs. There are no graphics, no fancy features, just the basic functionality needed to read and post. There will be no need for you to do anything to make use of this feature. Just connect to the forum as usual and the server will detect that you are using a mobile device and the style will be automatically assigned. Continue reading to see some screenshots.

Continue reading "PDA Support for Forum" »

The long awaited Wiki is up and running.

For those that have never heard of a wiki, wikipedia defines a wiki as: a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site. A full history of the wiki can be read here. 

The software we chose to use is Mediawiki, the same software that powers wikipedia.org and is probably the most powerful wiki software available. (with the exception of maybe confluence). 

Any forum member has the ability to create and edit pages and we encourage everyone to contribute. Just follow the short tutorial on the Wiki. There's no need to worry about breaking anything as all edits can be reverted to previous revisions. 

If anyone has performed a forum search recently, you may have noticed the lightening fast response! We have implemented a new search engine called Sphinx. It's incredible how fast this thing is! Try it out!

What's even more amazing is that it now allows searching on two letter words. No more problems when searching for k1, j1, PR, etc. However, as with all good things, there's a few caveats....

There will now be a slight delay between a post being made and it showing in the index. This delay will be around 10 minutes or so. Secondly, the ordering of results may not be exactly in date order although a recent post will be given a higher weighting than older posts, it's not guaranteed that date ordering will be exact. This is exactly how most non-forum search engines work, including Google. Finally, a few of the more advanced and little used search features may not be available.

But even with these limitations, the ability to carry out two letter word searches and the amazing speed is more than worth it. Another side benefit is the reduced load that will be placed on the server when multiple people are searching. This will translate into faster performance throughout the site.

Member Blogs Upgraded Some bloggers may have noticed a few minor changes with the blog system over the last few days. Most of the changes are behind the scenes and relate to performance or security, but a couple of other changes are worth mentioning...

Continue reading "Member Blogs Upgraded" »

A new feature added to the Meet-up calendar allows you to keep track of who plans to attend. When creating an event the organizer can choose to accept RSVPs. Members can then RSVP 'No', 'Yes' or 'Maybe'. For recurring events, members can RSVP separately for each recurrence. For ranged events that span more than one day, members can sign up for individual days of the event.

Continue reading "Welcome to the BE Blog" »