Am I the only one who didn't know Epi has put some of the Gail's in

That is their archive of Gail's.

They probably did work really hard...writing a program to automatically export the old Gails to the new format. Unfortunately they didn't get it quite right and they didn't bother to try doing it again to correct the problem. The recipes are unreadable; they forgot to export the line breaks! (see link for example)

That said, it was nice that they did that much because they didn't have to; it was all in response to the overwhelming demand, I believe. It's still a great resource.

http://boards.epicurious.com/message.jspa?messageID=518583&tstart=0

 
I agree Mimi...

And I still use their site a lot for recipe cruising. I think it's one of (if not THE) best on the web for recipes. I just choose not to post on the forum anymore. (Although someone recently asked me a specific question from an old post, and I replied... it would be rude not to!)

I keep checking there daily, but I don't know what for. Old habit I guess. This new site feels like the Old OLLLLD Gail's did when I first started posting in 1999 or so. Only it has technoligical perks that the old site never had. I love it here.

I love it here so much I still am posting even though school's started back up! That's a first for me. Usually when school starts I hunker down and don't have time for anything. I'm fitting this in because it is oh so worth it.

THANK YOU MIMI!

 
Mimi, do you have any idea why they just didn't save the old archives in the original format?

Why go through all the bother to convert when the stuff was all ready in archived state (non postable to, inactive links, filed by numbers and searchable)?

Updating function on a new board is one thing, but they could have saved themselves alot of trouble by leaving the old archives alone and just keeping the new stuff in new format.

Is there some tech reason they converted?

 
I've always thought it was for reasons of "continuity"

They want to present a site that is consistent in it's look and feel across the board. That's one of the principals of good web design. They felt if they could just export it to the new format, they'd have the best of both worlds. I know that the techs could have done a better job than they did, not from any lack of talent or caring but simply for lack of time to address it all. I get the impression that at some point someone high up decided "OK, enough money has been spent on this, let's move on to something else" and the techs were just pulled off the job to deal with something more pressing to the overall operations of the company.

I understand why they did away with the old Gail's. Look how many features are possible today that the old Gail's didn't have: private messages, edit your post, a way to distinguish which posts have been read, a faster search. They wanted to add those features and bring not only the technology but the functionality into the 21st century. And the kind of forum that they did end up implementing is very popular on the Internet. If I worked at Epi I probably would have done the exact same thing. I imagine that they were completely dismayed at the reaction to something that they were probably quite pround of, and whoever that was, because it was probably a web designer or tech like me and not one of the powers that be, I quite feel for them actually. Another community might have loved that new board.

Watching the whole thing happen was a fascinating lesson for a web designer to watch. NOW if I were to make a big change like that, I might set up examples of several different types of boards and privately invite a group of the most reliable regulars to evaluate them, plus closely question them on what they do or don't like about the old board the new ones being evaluated. However, I have had the benefit of watching this all happen and I'm not sure I would have had that foresight before this.

Whoa...I am feeling quite verbose today I guess! It must be that I had a medium coffee at Tim Horton's instead of my usual small...

 
I also remember them posting that they could no longer get ..

technical support for the old software, kind of like having an old car you can't get parts for?

(You explain it well, Mimi, and it did appear that they expected everyone to love their new format. But all technical issues aside, their big mistake was not realizing in the first place what a unique document--10 years worth of daily postings and so many devoted visitors--they had on their hands. I'm still scratching my head in disbelief.)

 
They did have an amazing document, and what is puzzling to me...

is that after going to the trouble to port it to the new forum software, they didn't get the darned line breaks right! I think if they had done that, it would have been OK. Not perfect, but OK. Usable, at least.

 
NFRC: Oh and yeah, HyperNews was a dinosaur!

At first, we actually got our hands on a copy and installed it. We found out that Epi had already considerably customized it for their needs and the HyperNews "out of the box" was a lot different. We would have needed to customize it too, but it was written in such an old programming language (that we never use, and barely know!) and used such antiquated techniques that we just couldn't deal with it. It was developed in 1994 and as an Internet technology, that is just prehistoric.

 
So what exactly is this board in?

If not Hypernews, what else? Did your techs write if from scratch? Or adapt and "modernize for function" something else.

And I think your idea about introducing new boards would have been much more tenable than what they did. . .

 
bSpeak is written in PHP 4 running off a mySQL 4.1 database (m)

And the whole site is sitting on an Apple OS X Server 10.3.9 (located in Phoenix) running the Apache 1.3.x web server.

 
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