Messages

E-mails should be working now. I flushed out many of the old e-mails but some of you may still receive them.

That's a lot of emails.

I'll correct that!

Oops, the mail server was down for unknown reasons. I have put it back up and there are currently 20,000 e-mails in queue, so it might take awhile until it arrives in your box.

For those who didn't know, Hard Drop was hosted on a dedicated server that was shared with several other websites. I believe the slow page loads started about 5 to 7 days ago due to an enormous amount of traffic heading over to one of my other websites that was also hosted on the same server as Hard Drop.

I decided to purchase another server and move that website over to the new rig which pretty much allowed the current server to run smoothly again. So far everything looks stable and server load average went from a constant 20-30 to about a comfortable 4 now. I'll keep you all posted as to what will happen next. I am thinking of moving Hard Drop over to the new server as well and set this server up to a 64-bit OS with other quirks.

http://blog.harddrop.com/post/47002840665/server-load-issues

Glad to see the site being updated. This is a great site that suffers a bit in the design department right now. I personally don't like the dark design. Take a look at most of the big sites out there, none of them are dark, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. I do like dark elements though, keeping a site totally light isn't good either. Having dark and light elements contrast done well is hard, but it pays off.

I don't like that everything is in a box of its own. It's something I see a lot from amateur designers (I am an amateur myself), and while it can be nice, it's just a quick way to make something decent. It's passable, but I think more time should be spent laying out the elements and tying them together. It currently has a very cluttered look, don't be afraid to add in some 'white space' (that is empty space around objects). This relaxes the site and makes it much more pleasant to read. I also think some of the elements could be dropped, like recently logged in. Don't forget about the typography of the site either. Good typography will greatly improve any site.

I love the icons in the top navigation, but I think that the size should be increased a bit, and some white space added in.

I agree that the site should have mobile features implemented. I applaud myndzi for making the front page responsive, and using buzz words , but the rest of the site is sadly not mobile. I know there are some forum software that do have mobile versions included, which might be worth looking at when doing the upgrade.

Another consideration is having the page load fast, and using all the current techniques to improve the speed. Currently the site scores 73/100 on Google's PageSpeed. This isn't the only way to improve site speed, but it's a good place to start.

I understand that making a site of this magnitude is a great deal of work, and this might not be your full time jobs. But putting the work in little by little will definitely improve the site.

Don't worry, I will take care of it all.  

I'm not claiming that the CSS is 'mine', I was referring to the portion of the CSS that I added. I had trouble with the margins/padding to make everything line up, which is why I thought maybe you had inherited them. You are welcome to use it if you like, I was simply volunteering to clean it up if you wanted to make use of it.

If you haven't already, watch what happens when the HD mainpage gets narrowed, there's 2 stages. I didn't complete the menu transition for mobile yet (li -> select). Anyway, this is what I meant by responsive, and it helps the site out on mobile too.

I do think a site can be too wide; it can be hard to follow all the text across, so I favor the current layout over fluid. I suppose it'll depend on how the space gets used, of course.

Fair enough, it did sounded like you were saying the CSS was yours, so thanks for clarifying. Fluid layouts will definitely have cons just as fixed layouts will. In the end, we will have to decide which is best for the community, when time permits, I will break it down for the community on the pros and cons for each one.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

@qwerty098765: Good point on the offset of the top navigation.

Again, this is a rough draft (spent about 2 days) and it will go through many iterations before it is launched to the public. I was thinking of implementing a fluid layout so that it adjusts according to your screen resolution, that way the majority of the screen is used up instead of having a layout with huge white spaces on larger screen resolutions (white space will be consistent throughout all devices). I also don't believe we have a mobile compatible version so I'll consider that when developing HDv2.

And if he's working from my css rather than starting clean I feel REALLY bad for him. I know so much more now, if he wants to keep the design with the content blocks and responsive interface I can probably do a much better job now.

Just a note, the CSS was not taken from the existing CSS file. Secondly, you can not claim the CSS file is yours when clearly you did not create it. Now, you may have done some minor edits to it but the site looks exactly like it did when it first launched.

What happend to our fuhrer?

You know, the guy who "owns" the site ( not blink)

Also a way to add karma to other users, as well as Like posts would be apperciated.

I think the main focus right now is to change the look and feel of the website then I'll start worrying about new features. Blink kind of wants me to push the new design out already so I'm working on that.

Greetings Hard Drop Community,

Blink's brother here, I was given permission from him to work on the website since he's too busy with school and work. I will be updating the website gradually and keeping everyone updated on the progress of the new re-design that Blink mentioned a few days ago. Most or all of the current features we have now will stay so no worries about the website becoming something else.

As for pre measures to prevent the incident of data being rolled back, the server is on a RAID1 array this time (which basically means two hard drives mirroring the same data, just in case one fails) and also daily off-site backups. I know I've stated this before when we had a similar incident in one of the forum topics about daily backups but we had a minimal VPS that couldn't handle the large amounts of data so we had to switch to weekly backups. Of course, that wasn't the reason why we couldn't retrieve the latest data, it was more so because the company was absent aka AWOL hosts.

Lastly, we just created an official blog here: http://blog.harddrop.com which I'll post upcoming plans, progress, and updates concerning Hard Drop.

I've also been working on the new layout and it should be delivered sometime around February or March. I'm in the middle of working on one other web project so I'll try to get it done asap. Also, PM me if you find any bugs, I didn't get a chance to run through every page after migration. Thanks for your time.

* Set a cronjob to automatically check for broken tables every hour.

One of the tables in the database crashed which took down the whole website, repaired it and everything is working now. Also added a cronjob to prevent this from happening again.

[What does this mean?]

* Off-site backups are now implemented.
* Increased to daily backups

What does this mean?
All backups are stored in a backup server located at a different location than our primary website. This is in case of apocalyptic events, the data will be readily available for restoring. I also increased the backup frequency to daily since the community is pretty active and 1 week lost of data would not be fun.

What day of the week are the backups?  

inb4 everybody waits until backup-day to post anything important

Backups are done every Sunday at 4 am PST.

We now have weekly backups done to the site.

Does not scroll for me either and I am always logged in.

Try clearing your caches, you might have an outdated version. I tested on all browsers and they are functioning properly.

[COSMETIC] the shoutbox doesn't autoscroll down to the bottom for me at all.

I think it only happens when you aren't logged in. Can you confirm this? I'll fix it so it scrolls down for guests as well though.

[[COMPLAINT]]

[COMPLAINT]
I don't see why the links are underlined in the shoutbox now, I mean if it helps the tab issue then good, but if it's purely cosmetic revert it. I'm probably just complaining because I'm not used to it, but it was easy to tell that links were links due to their contrasting but not annoying colour.

Also, certain characters in links still break them.

I think the real issue we have here is the #! special characters breaking the links. I'll have to fix that as a priority and I'll also take out the underline once I go over it with Blink, I could have sworn the underlining of links existed before the update as well.