Thurrott.com Site Update – New Comment System is LIVE

Good morning, Members!

We are past due for a site update to the community. Let’s dive in:

The OpenWeb comments system is live as of this morning on Thurrott.com. Highlights about our new platform:

  • Basic functionality allowing for editing, deleting, and formatting …. The best tech community deserves a platform that actually works
  • Notifications are live. Members can configure both email and web notifications
  • Up & Down voting
  • Improved readability in mobile on nested replies
  • AI-powered site moderation, advanced tools for moderation, pro-active ‘nudging’ alerts for a commenter who may be crossing a line
  • Sophisticated spam detection
  • Ability to mute a member – ouch, but yes – a long requested feature.
  • Ability to add GIFs and Photos
  • Originally, we feared the inability to retain legacy comments, however, we are delighted that legacy comments prior to today are live using the legacy comment system until the legacy comment migration is completed. At that point, all legacy comments will also enjoy OpenWeb’s features. Estimated to be complete within a couple of weeks.
  • Improved site performance and scalability

Other significant improvements for the site:

  • Thurrott.com has been migrated to WP Engine hosting. These guys are world-class and allow the BWW/Thurrott team to focus on improving and enhancing user experiences, and with professional sysadmin support, 24 x 7, from the WP Engine team.
  • Comprehensive update to WordPress and Plugins utilized on the site. Both performance and security improved.
  • Site images are still being hosted at AWS S3, however with re-engineered integration for performance and reliability.
  • Major steps have been taken in the refactoring of the Thurrott.com theme. As previously noted, Thurrott.com has been plagued with remnants of a multi-site WordPress environment previously shared with Petri.com. We have seen dramatic improvements in site performance and reliability … we “ain’t” finished yet.

Please note that our site has not suffered from an outage or major performance slowdown in several weeks. However, our work is not done. There are several issues reported by members that are still on the hit-list to resolve!

Thanks again for your support during this journey.

George Coll
CEO & Managing Partner
BWW Media Group | Thurrott.com | Petri.com

 

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