Today’s the Day! Live AMA with Nick Tirrell

Today, I’m co-hosting a live AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) with our Technology and Operations director, Nick Tirrell. As noted previously, 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.

Here are the details.

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When: Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 12 pm ET/9 am PT

Where: YouTube (this will be available for replay later as well)

We will be discussing the content of, and the schedule for, the Thurrott.com site refresh. We have some questions from the previous post, and we will try to get as many live questions as possible as well. If we don’t get to your questions during the event, I will try and follow up with as many of them as possible. And I will publish a summary post regardless.

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Conversation 14 comments

  • anoldamigauser

    Premium Member
    19 May, 2022 - 11:16 am

    <p>Why is Cloudflare suddenly so front and center when interacting with thurrott[.]com. Added to the constant requirement to login, it appears as though the site does not actually want to be viewed.</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      19 May, 2022 - 1:07 pm

      <p>Sorry, this is related to the underlying site issues that explain why we’re refreshing the site. This will be fixed. </p>

  • navarac

    19 May, 2022 - 11:37 am

    <p>….and today I had go through a full-page Captcha 4 times to get to the site. It is not happening to other sites -. Has BWW neglected Thurrott.com while dealing with Petri? Again, I suggest Nick needs some support in his job.</p>

    • dftf

      19 May, 2022 - 3:24 pm

      <p>If you’re not using <em>Google Chrome</em>, then you usually will have to do multiple ones… they tend to favour their own browser!</p><p><br></p><p>(I also dislike how US-centric the <em>Captcha</em> systems are: click all "sidewalks" (UK: "pavements"), "cross-walks" (UK: "pedestrian-crossing"); "taxis" (most aren’t yellow here); "automobiles" (UK: generally just "<em>cars</em>"); "fire-trucks" (UK: "fire-engines", and they look-different); "fire-hydrants" (the ones we have here are usually concealed, not bright-yellow and found on the ‘sidewalk’); "cookies" (UK: "biscuits", with "cookie" only-referring specifically to the type of biscuit that usually has hazelnut-chunks and choc-chips); "antennas" (UK: "aerials"); "shift-stick" (UK: "gear-stick" or "gear-lever"); "gas-stations" (UK: "petrol-station"); "faucet" (UK: "tap").</p>

      • whistlerpro

        19 May, 2022 - 6:46 pm

        <p>I don’t think it’s a Google captcha. Google are usually pretty good with localisation especially in the UK, they also have a massive UK headquarters don’t forget.</p>

  • bigfire

    Premium Member
    19 May, 2022 - 12:32 pm

    <p>This Cloudflare verification is the worst. Between less content from you directly, and not too much happening MS-wise these days (not your fault, obviously) I’m getting less and less interested in being a subscriber.</p>

    • jgraebner

      Premium Member
      20 May, 2022 - 1:28 pm

      <p>I suspect the Cloudfare issue has also broken Feedly, which hasn’t updated the feed from Thurott.com in a couple days. Looking at the RSS feed directly, it appears to be up to date, so I suspect Feedly’s crawler isn’t able to get to it.</p>

      • mattbg

        Premium Member
        20 May, 2022 - 3:36 pm

        <p>I use Feedly, and it updates for me.</p><p><br></p><p>The thumbnail pictures on articles have been hit and miss for the past few weeks (until recently, they were all blank – today some are populated and some are not) but the article titles and excerpts are syncing.</p>

        • jgraebner

          Premium Member
          20 May, 2022 - 5:51 pm

          <p>Looks like it finally updated 2 hours ago. When I looked earlier, the newest articles were from May 18. It now shows everything since May 18 with a time stamp of 2h ago.</p>

          • gorillasquid

            Premium Member
            20 May, 2022 - 7:19 pm

            <p>What’s the URL for the RSS feed? I use Reeder on my iPad; it used to just find the feed when I pointed it at thurrott.com, but that stopped working a couple weeks ago. </p>

  • dftf

    19 May, 2022 - 4:14 pm

    <p><strong>SUMMARY</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Just watched the <em>YouTube </em>video (was unable to watch it live time-wise), here’s some key points:</p><p>- Three-stage roadmap; (1) rebuild of site, May-June; (2) rebuild Forum, June-July; (3) on-site notifications, more payment-options, August</p><p>- All historical comments and Forum Posts likely to be deleted</p><p>- User history stats (total comments, Forum Posts created, age of account) aim to be retained</p><p>- E-mail notifications for comments (Phase 2); eventually on-site notifications system (Phase 3)</p><p>- E-mail notifications when new articles are posted</p><p>- During billing downtime, annual premium memberships that were due to renew during that period will have the payment taken at later date; for pay-monthly members, all months missed will be billed as-one when payment system is back online (I’d advising asking one of the team on this, to be sure)</p><p>- Dark Mode possibility briefly mentioned</p><p><br></p><p>Then answers to site-users’ and <em>YouTube </em>audience questions:</p><p>- Options to edit and delete comments, and Forum Posts, to be added</p><p>- 75% of users access site on mobile or tablet devices; improvements to speed and layout due</p><p>- Comments to allow emojis and links</p><p>- Site search functionality to move from <em>WordPress</em> engine to <em>Amazon Cloud Search</em></p><p>- "Articles to read later" not in current plan; may be added after all of current planned work is done</p><p>- 2FA/MFA: not confirmed, but said plan that "e-mails and phone-numbers will have to be verified"</p><p>- Discord, or other real-time chat, not part of current plan; might be considered after all work is done</p><p>- Site areas for specific article-types or podcasts likely to be added after all planned work is done</p><p>- Might be a gap in billing, no Premium functionality will be lost in that period</p><p>- Site to retain the "grid-based" layout on desktop</p><p>- Option for full article-content in RSS feeds for Premium members in-consideration</p><p>- Free users should be able to read all existing comments on Premium articles</p><p>- Premium Newsletters to get added as Forum Posts or Articles on the site</p><p>- Phase 2: option for e-mail alerts when someone replies to a comment or Forum Post; Phase 3, on-site notifications</p><p>- RSS Feeds for podcasts to return</p><p>- Something about adding calendar-alerts to the site (though unclear if this will be implemented via an online shared-calendar, or via browser-notifications)</p><p>- Comment system on Thurrott.com to offer similar feature-set to the Petri.com comment system</p><p>- Might allow people to post comments without requiring a Thurrott.com account</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      19 May, 2022 - 6:53 pm

      <p>Nice, thanks for this.</p>

    • mattbg

      Premium Member
      20 May, 2022 - 12:22 pm

      <p>Thanks for summarizing.</p><p><br></p><p>Full-text RSS feeds for Premium would be great. That’d probably be my #2 request after a better comments system.</p>

      • Joshua Hudson

        25 May, 2022 - 4:49 pm

        <p>This! I’ve asked for years. That would be awesome.</p>

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