[chris (OP)]

Last update of 2019, effectively the first update of 2020!

Dear all

I've made a few minor alterations to the way the systems here work; this is to speed up the forum and the rest of the naked scientists website, and also ensure that we remain up to date in terms of security.

This should not have any negative impact on the operation of the forum, but while we monitor to ensure that the environment is stable, I apologise in advance if anything misbehaves.

One bonus is that you can now check your spellings, so we expect nothing other than perfectly composed posts from now on!

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year!

Chris

[ninaholm]

Thanks for latest updates.

[chris (OP)]

MARCH 2020 - CORONAVIRUS SPECIAL UPDATE!

Hello everyone. I hope that you are all keeping well and we thank you for your contributions to this forum, especially the moderators who do a wonderful job and all deserve our wholehearted gratitude.

Regulars may have noticed that we have taken the unusual step of creating a special new board to accommodate the enquiries we have been receiving about COVID-19.

We felt this was justified because this is a specialist topic that is generating a high volume of traffic and will be easier for us all to curate and browse with all of the posts gathered together in that venue.

Could I ask, therefore, that if you decide to start a new topic relevant to COVID-19, please use the above-linked board to post it.

Many thanks, and stay well!

[Eternal Student]

One bonus is that you can now check your spellings,

   Thanks.  Minor question is this   US,   UK   or International English  spelling.    Can we switch it to our own preference?

[chris (OP)]

SERVER MIGRATION UPDATE - May 2023

Hello everyone. I wanted to bring you up to speed on what's been happening in the background recently.

After 17 years, the company that had hosted us through most of this site's lifetime were taken over by a new kid on the tech block. The "new broom" decided to make a clean sweep of existing relationships like the one we had and asked us to pay ?25,000 per year for our webservers, or pack up and go. I attempted to negotiate a bit, having pointed out that they'd had 120M+ brand impressions through us just on our podcast, but to no avail. Their best offer was still stupid amounts of money for what amounted to an annual electricity bill (the servers were already set up and running and had cost nothing in maintenance for a decade).

Unsurprisingly, I decided to exit and set up our own hosting from Naked Scientists Towers. This has involved quite a bit of behind the scenes work to migrate everything across and make it work stably; I was especially worried about this forum because it's notoriously fickle and doesn't like to budge from its home.

It looks like it's moved across okay, and I hope the user experience is tolerable. I'm still doing a lot of optimisations behind the scenes now to make things work better. There is always a bedding in phase with new setups where one strives to find the config "sweet spot" for the stack that's running. We're just at the start of this process at the moment, so it will hopefully continue to improve from hereon in.

My plans for this year are to upgrade this forum to newer iterations of the software, which should make it run more slickly, grow our user base more, and upgrade the theme to a more contemporary look. Suggestions, though, for the latter in particular, would be most welcome. And any coders and web gurus out there who would be willing to help, do please drop me a line.

Meanwhile, thanks for your energy and contributions, especially to the moderators!

Chris