TLDR: downtime this week, and the new version moves the menu button and introduces a sidebar. Also, new themes available.
There’s a pending update for the forum software which I aim to apply either today or tomorrow or possibly Wednesday (late afternoon UK time) - the forum will go read-only, perhaps for as long as an hour or two, and will be unreachable for some time in the middle of that.
I might possibly also migrate to a different cloud provider, something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of years, which will reduce the hosting cost or improve the performance when I finally get around to it. If not this time, perhaps next.
The new version of the software will, very probably, move the three-lines menu (aka hamburger menu) from the top right corner to the top left corner, and may also offer a collapsible sidebar down the left edge of the screen. You can preview this over on https://meta.discourse.org/
Also note, we presently have three user-selectable Themes to choose between: they are I think called Light Theme, Light Theme, and Dark Theme. Yes, two have the same name. The difference is that one can choose between the current titles-only presentation of forum topics, or a richer presentation which includes a snippet from the head post and sometimes an image from the head post. It’s a user preference, so try it out and see what you think.
Thanks everyone for your appreciation and especially for your interesting forum contributions!
Unfortunately I haven’t yet had the clear space late in the afternoon to do the thing - it’s not especially urgent, but I will get around to it, at which point you will see the read-only forum and the window of nothing-here-to-see, followed by the shiny new left-hand menu. (I prefer to do this on a weekday afternoon to get better chance of support if it all goes wrong. Don’t worry, we have backups.)
Edit: I’ve done the update, but no migration. You might need to refresh to get the collapsible sidebar and top left menu gadget. Let me know if anything seems amiss.
Once again, there’s a pending update to the forum software, which I’ll probably apply later this week - probably late afternoon UK time - and I might, once again, migrate to a different provider, just as I said I might six months ago!
So if you find the forum is read-only, or unavailable, please wait at least a couple of hours before panicking. You might need to clear a browser cache or similar, or even purge a DNS cache, if you have trouble. If you want to check if an access problem is local to you, perhaps try browserling as a proxy, just by checking here.
Just to note, I did the update, about 35 mins downtime I think, and once again I punted the migration to a later date… let me know if anything isn’t working, but I don’t think anything major changed.
from me