• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

Upgrade 2018 changes

Status
Not open for further replies.

anthony

Founder
This thread outlines changes made, once made. I have enabled a member discussion thread to report any issues, to discuss as per that threads opening post.

Each topic will be its own post for ease of reference, you can link directly to a post by choosing its post #.

Server Upgrade

I have now rolled the site onto the new server stack. This system is quite unconventional from many setups, in that many performance aspects at the server have been removed, and shifted onto the Cloudflare system. Cloudflare features perform at their EDGE servers, in other words, their distributed network of servers located globally (close to you personally). This pushes more to them for the heavy lifting, allowing our servers to query the database, search and such, faster -- not worry about compression and other techniques to try and deliver a page as fast as possible to you.

Our SSL is independent, uses the latest ECDSA algorithm, yet degrades to meet the users device accordingly. SSL is now managed by CF's EDGE servers, so this minimises each SSL call to your local region, thus speeding up the handshake between you and MyPTSD.

Database improvements, NGINX improvements, PHP improvements and pretty much highly optimised so it works near flawlessly together, without bottlenecks.

Once you load a few pages, every consecutive page should then be super quick. All caches have been wiped due to the changes made, so the first few loads will be slower, then quick there forward.

I'm not saying that the server is exact, as real world testing is required. If all goes well, only minor changes should be needed. There are a few tricks available for testing, however, when I tested them on another site, whilst they showed theoretical improvement, they didn't translate into real world improvement. In fact, pages got slightly slower to load for the user even though things went faster at the server. Its a constant game -- monitor and adjust to deliver the best performance for the vast device usage available today. BUT -- load reacts differently, so those tests may perform to this sites load better.
 
Last edited:
Personal Conversations Disabled

I have now disabled personal conversations for members. Staff can create new PC's as part of the system processes required to perform their tasks, outside of that, they are disabled. You can not reply to existing ones either.

I have presently left them for anyone who has not yet retrieved data that they want, to do so now. Once the site is upgraded, PC's will be deleted to those within the last 7 days', and continue this cycle to cleanup any system messages routinely.

I have done this now to aid the transition to the upgraded system and the way it will work.
 
Email Changes

I have changed system email so we have a bounce and noreply address. Neither one will get you results in sending mail to them, as they are system accounts only and go nowhere near a human. This pushes all to the site contact us system, which will be changing in the update and will be limited to members, and guests will have to use their own email account to email an admin.
 
Email Bounce & Complaint Handling

To avoid confusion, this post outlines some information about the bounce and complaint automatic handling system, inline with email address changes just made. Email sending and handling is super strict nowadays, and vastly complicated, due to the sheer global spam problem. As such, anyone sending email is cut-off if they do not monitor the legitimacy of the sent email, outside of some rogue spammers who spam for a living, running from cyber authorities.

Outcome - If you trigger these systems, your account gets placed automatically into moderation. You will be notified that everything you do is going into moderation because your account is unconfirmed. This means a member of staff has to approve everything you post.

Hard Bounce

You will hard bounce our email if you provide an invalid email OR your email account used is some junk account and the account is full. When email is bounced, automatic systems at every email provider send a bounce response. We allow for soft bounces, ie. normal internet connection issues. If soft bounces continue past a threshold, they return a hard bounce.

Complaint Handling

How many times do you hit spam on your email software to delete an email? Well, when you do that it sends a complaint message to the sender / ISP of that email. Complaints are handled similar to bounces, in that if you send our email into your junk folder, you go into moderation. Why? Because the right thing for you to do is to change your email settings against your content to stop receiving email. The wrong thing to do, and can punish MyPTSD email sending if we do nothing, is to keep receiving email from us and sending it to junk.

So we handle automated complaints the same as we do hard bounces, your account gets moderated and our email system stops sending email to you. This is the legal obligation of an email sender.

Amazon SES

As we use Amazon email services to handle our email, as they provide the highest inbox deliverability, as such, they also help us in fixing these issues, all automatically. If you use several websites that use Amazon, and you bounce / send mail you accept / request, to junk, then Amazon place your email onto a block list. This stops every website sending you email, as Amazon consider your email account as problematic.

This may help some understand why they don't get some email from a website that uses Amazon, where they have been sending another websites email to junk who also use Amazon.

Amazon has the highest rating in the world for quality email deliverability for good reasons -- most of which are mentioned above in understanding how things occur, and when effectively actioned, they have such good email reputation with every ISP and are given such high quality scores to keep mail from spam boxes.

Conclusion

If you do not want your account restricted, or you never understood how your email account kept putting you into moderation, this hopefully helps you understand your responsibility in how you engage with your email. If you do not do the right thing with email at your inbox, ie. unsubscribe from legitimate email from sites you are part of / change your preferences to not receive email from those sites correctly, then you get moderated here, automatically.

Put legitimate junk email into junk, these are messages from sites you have never registered at or partaken in. The rest, you should unsubscribe / adjust your email preferences correctly. If a site does not do this correctly, then yes, you can junk them / report them for spam. MyPTSD does not, never has, spammed our users, nor sold details. Everything here is private, confidential, and as per your chosen settings.
 
Last edited:
The Main Forum Software Changes

HTML 5 - The majority of javascript has been removed, replaced with HTML5. Simply this means less files to load, less likely are there browser inconsistencies and bugs, more adaptable and friendly to all browsers, regardless of device.

Mobile friendly focus - Many layout changes will be noticed for mobile users. Much of this upgrade is based on mobile friendliness. Cleaner, more content focused, with ease of navigation.

Whats New - This has been greatly improved to aid in finding new content fast, whether posts or profile content, you can now find things quickly from the one place.

Emoji support - Emoticons are now replaced by emoji. No, they are not the same thing. Emoticons are an image, emoji's are textual elements that can be copy pasted to any text field. As such, you will now see the emoji list updated to what you probably find on your mobile. In other words, you can use any emoji in the world and paste it into your content as a usable, displayed, emoji. You could not do this with emoticons.

Retina support - Elements now support full retina, again, mobile focused features primarily.

Inline editing / posting - You will notice that no longer are there popups or new pages to edit, post, where everything is now done inline within a page, improves how you interact with each page. Faster, smoother feel.

Click to action - Most elements that you previously had to hover a mouse over, or performed actions automatically on selection, now require touch to action. This improves how things work across device type, and ensures nothing happens without confirmation.

Notifications - How you get notified about things has changed slightly, improved notifications in browser tabs, navigation tabs and such, to show something new has happened as visual cues.

Media embedding - You can embed media into content, including: Apple Music, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, Giphy, Imgur, Instagram, Liveleak, Metacafe, Pinterest, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube.

Quick thread - Post a thread quickly from the forum view page, and even the forum home. No need to load additional pages to post a new thread.
 
Last edited:
Premium Membership Disbanded

Officially now disbanded, and removed. All paying existing premium members have been moved into the new sponsor group, and will be given all new permissions as part of the upgrade in the coming days. Account upgrades are disabled until upgrade.
 
Help Tickets

Help ticket system is now defunct, gone, and moved to the contact us. You can see the contact us at the top of the forum home temporarily, until upgrade. If you have any issue between now and when I turn off the site, that is your direct path to staff, in private.
 
New Caching

You should notice a significant improvement in page loading -- this is due to a new caching mechanism I have now implemented. I was awaiting the upgrade before enabling this due to incompatibility with the previous version.

If you notice any issues with your browser not changing updated content, please let me know.
 
Guest Profile & Member Access Changes

Guests can no longer see profile posts, nor member lists. Profiles, yes, if a user permits via privacy (default is yes), but actual profile posts -- no. I have removed this for additional privacy of all profile content, personalising it to being member exclusive content.

As such, a guest can only see your latest activity, postings and about tabs within a profile.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top