Please Join Us for an AMA on Thursday, May 19

Next week, I’ll be co-hosting a live AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) with our Technology and Operations director, Nick Tirrell. And you won’t want to miss this one because we will be discussing a major refresh to the Thurrott.com website that will fix our outstanding issues and add some long-awaited new features.

If you’ve interacted with me about the site, you know I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. Our small team had been focused on refreshing the Petri.com website first because it was in tough shape. But now it’s our turn. And I couldn’t be happier.

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The AMA will be held live on Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 12 noon ET/9 am PT. You can save that link if you’d like, but I’ll have a post that day on Thurrott.com as well so you can connect to it and with us. A video replay and a summary post will be available for those that can’t make it live.

Ahead of the AMA, all Thurrott.com members will be receiving a more detailed email from our owner, George Coll, describing what’s coming.

In the meantime, please think about the site, the issues you may have had, and the features you’d like to see, and post any questions you have for us here. We’ll try to address as many as possible during the event, and we’ll follow up if there are any questions we don’t get to during the event.

Thank you so much for reading, and for your patience. It’s about to get a lot better.

Paul

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Conversation 16 comments

  • bluvg

    12 May, 2022 - 2:08 pm

    <p>Awesome! Looking forward to the refresh! </p>

  • harmjr

    Premium Member
    12 May, 2022 - 3:36 pm

    <p>I would like for the theme to stay the same. I like the current theme I call it a news paper style vs. the large image scroll theme on petri. </p>

  • JH_Radio

    Premium Member
    12 May, 2022 - 5:56 pm

    <p>Please keep accessibility in mind.</p><p>I did see the email from George.</p><p>If you could keep the heading level structure that would be great! I also know this commenting system is being redone, try to make sure the buttons are labeled for screen readers.</p><p>I know people write you premium questions for the Ask Paul on Friday but have no idea where that is. </p><p>And now an actual question! (Can you imagine?) </p><p>Have you considered a beta team for all of this relaunched stuff, or have you got that in place already?</p><p>I’m one of those that won’t be able to catch the AMA live, but will check out the replay when I return.</p><p>Thanks Paul, George and all! </p><p>John</p><p><br></p>

  • wyldphyre

    Premium Member
    12 May, 2022 - 7:24 pm

    <p>It would be great if members could get an RSS feed with the full article content. That would limit access to comments, but I think a link at the end of the article in the feed that opens you to the comments would largely solve that.</p>

    • j5

      Premium Member
      15 May, 2022 - 11:19 pm

      <p>Yes! an RSS feed would be great!</p>

  • j5

    Premium Member
    12 May, 2022 - 10:33 pm

    <ol><li>An edit button </li><li>mobile version, current state doesn’t work on phones or tablets</li><li>Search; site search is really bad</li><li>Forums; more options for subject and categories of posting, search needs to work, more options to post links, emoji’s, replying to comments, liking comments</li><li>Account/profile management. There is none. Especially premium account management. You should be able to see past payment, edit/change email and payment method. Your 1 email should be for everything. Right now it’s a confusing mess with that. </li><li>Feature to just heart/like an article post to show hey I liked this article but I’m not commenting or just to single more like this</li><li>Ability to save articles to my profile, a read later or just seeing all the articles I liked</li><li>See all my forums posts and comments in my profile</li><li>2FA to stop bots and spammers and make us security nerds feel better, DB leaks happen ;)</li><li>ALL past newsletters archived on the site. Premium members should be able to see all past premium newsletters in their profile. </li><li>Discord or real time chat hang out for all registered members </li><li>Change site theme</li><li>A dedicated podcast page/area. Search all past podcast.</li><li>Major what I use section. I find these old school style articles/reviews very interesting. And like going back to reference them</li><li>An easy way to view your series write ups, in a section/etc. Like your digital photo/minimalist series. That’s such a great one. I feel like those should be front and center on the site so people doing web searches will find them and come to your site</li><li>Looking forward to the site refresh it’s been a long time coming ?!</li></ol>

    • j5

      Premium Member
      13 May, 2022 - 8:02 am

      <p>I made this post on my iPhone I don’t know why it came out looking like it does?</p>

    • JH_Radio

      Premium Member
      13 May, 2022 - 2:30 pm

      <p><br></p>

    • dftf

      13 May, 2022 - 8:22 pm

      <p>To categorise your suggestions, based on who I think they should be available for…</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Free users:</strong></p><p>"Delete" button for comments (but no edit)</p><p>Improved mobile version of site</p><p>Improved site search</p><p>Improved forums</p><p>Better account/profile management</p><p>Feature to Like articles, not just comments</p><p>2FA login</p><p>Dark theme</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Premium only:</strong></p><p>"Edit" option for comments</p><p>A "read later" list of articles</p><p>A list of articles I have liked</p><p>See all my forums posts and comments in my profile</p><p>Archive of all past newsletters</p><p>Discord or real time chat</p><p>A dedicated podcast page/area</p><p>Archive of "What I Use" articles</p><p>Archive of Product Review articles</p>

  • Suberungoer

    Premium Member
    12 May, 2022 - 11:21 pm

    <p>As more websites are implementing two factor authentication, in this rebuilding of your site are you planning on introducing this feature?</p>

  • whistlerpro

    13 May, 2022 - 10:40 am

    <p>Hi guys, a few questions on the site….</p><p><br></p><p>Will it be possible for free users to post (or at least read) comments on Premium articles, which hasn’t worked for a while?</p><p><br></p><p>Would you consider having a premium RSS feed with access to full text of articles? </p><p><br></p><p>Would you consider posting the Premium newsletter on the website (I was missing out on this for a while having opted out from emails)? </p><p><br></p><p>Dark mode? </p><p><br></p><p>Thanks!</p><p><br></p>

  • dftf

    13 May, 2022 - 3:35 pm

    <p><strong>Premium Articles: </strong>decide if free-users on this site should be able to comment on them or not; it is pointless currently being able to <em>add </em>a comment, but not <em>see</em> any existing ones! I’d suggest allowing all comments to be <em>seen</em>, but not allow a <em>reply</em> to any, unless you are Premium.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Premium Forum Posts: </strong>again, if you click on one as a free-user, you go to the "become a member" page. <em>Premium</em> forum-posts should be flagged as [P] at the start of the title or something.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Delete comments: </strong>having an <em>Edit</em> could be abused; but it should be possible to <em>Delete</em> a comment, and for that comment to then show as "[Comment deleted]", so that all child replies are retained.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Make creating a Forum Post work properly: </strong>after you create one, stop-going to the "Shoot, we can’t find the page you’re looking for" page and instead go to a "Your forum-post was successfully submitted, and will appear on the site, subject to approval by the admin team" or something.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Reply and Heart notifications: </strong>if someone replies to one of your comments, or "Hearts" them, you’ve no-way of knowing unless you were to manually re-check that page and look for it. Once signed into the site, there should surely be some sort-of notifications system to let you know this? (Perhaps for free members limit this to something like the last 10 updates only?)</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Remove retired Profile features: </strong>I think at one point this site might have had a "downvote" for comments, which is why profiles still feature the "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" percentages. This should clearly be removed, as "Heart"-ing a comment is all that is possible now.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Decide if images should be allowed or not: </strong>currently, images aren’t allowed in comments, but can be added into a <em>Forum </em>post, though only if hosted on an external site. Bit strange to allow them in one place, but not the-other, I feel. </p><p><br></p><p><strong>Dramatically improve the Comments layout on mobile: </strong>if you view a comment that has many levels-deep of replies on a mobile-device in portrait-mode, the comments increasingly shrink into ever-more thin columns, until eventually some go off-screen with no option to scroll-over. I’m honestly surprised by-now this <em>hasn’t already</em> been addressed!</p><p><br></p><p>(As an example: go to the article titled <em>"Google Launches Assault on Apple’s iMessage Abuses"</em> and then go-down the comments until you get to one by "_stevenelliott" that starts "Did you read the article?". The comment from "LT1 Z51" is comically-thin, literally <em>one-word per-line</em> at times. Then once you get to replies from "macguy59" and "jason_e", half of their comments are rendered off-screen and you cannot scroll-over to read them! As a workaround, you can ask the browser to reload in "Desktop mode"… but that defeats the point of offering a <em>Mobile </em>version of the site to begin with!)</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Fix the bug with the Article Author’s photo changing to the last commenter: </strong>right-now if I load the article titled <em>"Android Auto is Getting a Major Redesign"</em>, the photo in the top-right isn’t of <em>Laurent </em>but of user <em>Davor Radman</em>, the most-recent account to leave a comment. This doesn’t happen consistently, so not sure what causes it to randomly trigger sometimes?</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Dark theme: </strong>would certainly be nice to have a "dark theme" option for the site, especially when viewing on mobile! Virtually all sites I use thesedays now offer one as-standard…</p>

  • pesos

    Premium Member
    13 May, 2022 - 8:19 pm

    <p>Horrible timing for your HUGE AUDIENCE here in Japan :-)</p><p>Guess I’ll catch the recap post.</p>

  • ted chr

    Premium Member
    17 May, 2022 - 8:28 pm

    <p>Hi guys… here’s a question not about your site.</p><p><br></p><p>What is the best option in your opinion for doing remote support for IOS devices – iPad and iPhones.</p><p>I currently use Teamviewer for Windows 10/11 and it does the job. My dad has IOS devices and helping him is painful.</p><p><br></p><p>Cheers, Ted</p>

  • jf-nyc

    Premium Member
    17 May, 2022 - 8:53 pm

    <p>I thought a big part of the reason for the move from winsupersite.com to thurrott.com was to get a better CMS. And yet, thurrott.com seems to have many of the same old problems.</p><p><br></p><p>Are you just cursed?</p>

  • seattlemike

    Premium Member
    19 May, 2022 - 12:39 pm

    <p>Right now, I have to log in every time I access the site, especially for Premium articles. Will this be fixed with the new changes so that I don’t have to repeatedly authenticate?</p>

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