TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » forums

The Groundspeak forums came back with a mainly cosmetic update last night. Logging in, it’s quite easy to notice the entire forum has a much nicer look and feel to it. The core functionality appears to be pretty much the same, though there are performance enhancements in the background. This will hopefully get rid of those forum timeout messages and duplicate posts that have plagued the system for years.

Jeremy posted this to describe the update:
As you may have noticed, the forums underwent a complete renovation on Monday, December 20. It was long overdue and will hopefully come with some much needed performance enhancements. There is still some drywall dust and spent nails around the place, so we’ll likely be making adjustments for the next couple of days. However, all the content for the last 9 years is still here and ready to search. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation! Jeremy & Elias

Sadly, while the RSS subscription is more prominently displayed, it is still limited in that you get the first post of a topic only – no subscribing to replies in the forums via your favourite newsreader.

A wonderful development is the mobile device support. The forum detected my iPhone and switched to a touch  friendly layout, optimized for the small screen. This also worked for me running on my Android device. It did not correctly detect my Blackberry Bold 9700 (OS 6), or my Windows Mobile Device (Touch Pro2) and produced the desktop version of the forums on those devices.

Forum upgrades have been requested by the community for years and the responses of “it’s coming” had taken on an almost Duke Nukem: Forever persona where it was widely believed we’d never see an actual update.  This upgrade kicks off Groundspeak’s major site update with the rest of the pieces falling into place later today.