Some updates, things coming and more information

  • We had an issue with background services between march 10th and 15th or there about. This meant the payment services were not linking to automatic upgrades. If you paid for premium membership and are still seeing ads please let me know and the email you used against PayPal and I cam manually verify and upgrade your account.

Dan

Kim Jong Dan
Staff member
Administrator
Tipping Member
Hi everyone,

Just wanted to keep you informed of what was happening from a Silvertails background perspective.

The site has taken hits financially since the end of last season, much of this was to be expected but still difficult. we have seen some upswing however, and hopefully this should continue to grow as the season starts.

You will notice an increase in the advertising on the site, and I know that this doesn't please everyone, but please understand that it, is not a matter of trying to make a buck, more a matter of trying to not lose too many.

I have included a few trial based advertising agreements to see how they perform until the end of March and see whether they stay on board or whether we scrap them. These are in the form of inline link adverts that you will see pop up around the place. We also have a new advertising partner that I hope will be lucrative for the site. Hopefully I have not made the advertising too intrusive for you all.

Site Update
Well after looking at the options for the site update to the new version of our current back-end Joomla, I have decided that the Joomla project has headed in a different direction, to that which is suitable for Silvertails and thus we begin the 3rd large scale migration of the site to new operating software.

After a fair bit of agonizing between moving us to a solely Invision system, with their forums, and content system, I decided against this due to the fact that the site doesn't generate enough money to cover costs in moving to this system and it would not be fair of me to ask you, the users to part with money no matter how much many of you offer it.

So the decision came down to Drupal and Wordpress. Both good bits of software and both with their own share of a learning curve.

Drupal I decided was too technical for the needs of Silvertails and wordpress offered the best features for users adding posts and SEO and SEF options and thus I have at the moment decided on this as the best for our front end

There are a few issues however in integrating the forums with the front end
and this means there is a chance we may be moving forum software again!.

However I will be doing my best to avoid that situation and have made a small bit of code that integrates the logins, it's just getting the users across and future-proofing it that may be an issue or concern.

I will make that decision early in the season and try to hold off until the bye in round 14 or another day to get the transition completed. In all the transition will only take a day or so to full complete as long as I have my code completed.

If we move, we will be moving to one of either Vanilla forums or PhpBB. I am loathed to go to phpBB however it isn't what it used to be and may well be one of the better options for us.

I have a few beta testers ready for when I complete the code, and will be calling on others as well.

I know there is a lot of jargon in there but if you have any questions please ask.

As for now I am busy coding away to get our tipping competition moved over and a few other key feature before implementing the new front end and going live with it.

Dan
 
byso said:
Good work dan. If the new software could accommodate a gallery it would be good.

Better still I am trying to do User galleries allowing users to upload their own galleries, within limits however. I may try to tie them flickr or something similar
 

Latest posts

Team P W L PD Pts
3 3 0 48 6
3 2 1 45 4
3 2 1 28 4
3 2 1 22 4
3 2 1 15 4
3 2 1 14 4
2 1 1 13 4
3 2 1 10 4
2 1 1 6 4
3 2 1 -3 4
3 1 2 0 2
3 1 2 -5 2
3 1 2 -15 2
3 1 2 -22 2
3 1 2 -36 2
2 0 2 -56 2
3 0 3 -64 0
Back
Top Bottom