Dave,

Thank you for this update.  I'm glad to see that we're taking a balanced approach to making progress and while I'm sure we'd all love to see everything done yesterday, I for one appreciate the caution in biting off new projects. I get through to members better when they don't want to have discussions about why things on the web site aren't working (the discussions about VUCC fees are bad enough.)

One thought I have about the forums, and making them as useful to league members as possible is that we consider a way to "regionalize" certain types of forums.  I don't know if this means we create separate ones for each region, or set up some sort of filter that a member can use to hide 'non-local' content.  And I don't recommend doing so on a Division basis, but more on a geographic one ie. all of the west coast, etc. or what ever makes sense.

73,
Grant Hopper, KB7WSD
Vice Director, Northwestern Division.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ <dsumner@arrl.org> wrote:

I have been asked to provide an update on the status of the website transition.

As I reported on February 14, the website is now running on its new hardware configuration at Rackspace. Proxy errors are no longer a significant issue, although one still might occur occasionally if a request involves a large amount of data and there is a timeout.

You may recall that late last year we contracted with Fathom for two enhancements, an audio RSS feed and a report generator. The audio RSS feed went live in early January, as previously reported, and yesterday the report generator did the same. So, those two projects are now completed.

The report generator resolves one of the major issues that SMs had, namely the downloading of their appointee data.

The only remaining work Fathom is doing for us is under the original agreement. Other than those related to forums, only four open tickets assigned to Fathom remain on the bugzilla list; everything else assigned to them has been cleared.

With regard to forums, I have not been pressing staff to complete this project because of what appeared to be a consensus that we should not launch any major new features as long as there was a perception that major problems were not yet resolved. We are now much closer to being past that. However, don’t expect dramatic or immediate progress on forums because of the time being devoted to the plan for electronic publishing of periodicals, as per Minute 41 of the January Board meeting.

Bugzilla is used to record desirable enhancements as they are identified as well as problems to be fixed. Other than enhancements, there are currently 20 open tickets assigned to ARRL staff. Most new tickets are resolved soon after being opened, although some will require more work. For example, today a new ticket was opened when we discovered that our Page Editor is not compatible with the recently released Firefox 4. This is not an immediate problem – the solution for now is “Don’t upgrade to Firefox 4.”

73,

Dave Sumner, K1ZZ


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