Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Eric on February 14, 2008 at 8:58am

Hi

Thanks for pointing out the slowness you're having. You are probably right in assuming that it's the chat box on our side bar slowing things down. We initially put the chat on the sidebar to ensure that anyone on the site would/could see chat activity no matter what page they were on.

I suspect we'll make a change and move the chat widget either to the home page or somewhere else. However, at this point it time, the virtual 'keys' to making such changes are will Bill up in Alaska. I'll ask him to move the chat widget when he gets back to civilization!

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Mellott on February 14, 2008 at 11:29am

The chat applet I believe is slowing the program a little bit but I didn't think it was a drastic slowness. Honestly I like the chat applet opened on all the pages; no matter where you go on the site you can continue your conversation unabated. I like the way that it is and am willing to deal with the delay.

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Permalink Reply by Eric on February 14, 2008 at 12:44pm

Thanks for chiming in.

It would be cool if you could choose to not show the chat if you didn't want to. But I don't know if that's an option.

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Permalink Reply by Umphrey on February 26, 2008 at 6:16pm

please, please, please could you move the chat so that its not always running? it has such a lag, and takes the pages to long to load....was able to remove the map part using adblock, but the chat, which i use often, slows it a l l d o w n s o m u c h........remember the old boards? tons of people on there posting all the time...now hardly anybody posts on here or chats! maybe its just me but it seems to be a hassle to come to this site versus the old way. i know that my opinion doesnt mean much on the grand scheme of things, but i dread coming to this new site because of the slow load times.....Im on a brand new laptop with vista and a 10 mb cable modem, so i know its not just my equipment. still love coolworks though, been here for years so please dont think i am just nit picking.

thanks for all the CW team does for us,

brian

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Permalink Reply by Eric on February 26, 2008 at 8:06pm

Hey Brian, thanks for your feedback.

It's strange, because I don't have any slowness issues on these pages, but obviously something is going on. When I go to any page here on My CoolWorks, the pages themselves seems to load fine, but there's a delay in loading the chat on the sidebar....but it doesn't slow down the rest of the page. Are you having slowness loading the whole page or is it just the sidebar? If it's the whole page, then we might need to dig deeper cuz it could be a bigger problem!

We were just discussing this issue to day to see what we're going to do. First, I think we'll going to get rid of the mappy thing. Then we're thinking we'll leave the 'Who's On' piece so you can tell who else is on right now. Then I think we'll move the chat box to a page of it's own, or maybe see about letting it open up in a window of it's own.

As for the level of activity, it's actually pretty hopping around here, but most of the conversations going on are more one to one via comments to each others pages. It's definitely a different paradigm than a regular 'forum.' The forum/discussion functionality is still here so it seems that people are choosing the one-to-one thing instead of posting discussions in the forums.

But we WANT to be AWESOME so we take all your comments seriously and will keep tweaking and tuning to make things better.

Thanks again,

Eric

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Permalink Reply by Eric on February 26, 2008 at 8:11pm

Wow, OK, I take that back. I poked around a bit using Internet Explorer and it's definitely WAY slower in IE than it is in Firefox (or Safari). Not that I didn't believe you....just hadn't noticed it myself.

We'll get it re-jiggered as soon as we can to make things a bit more snappy around here!

Eric

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Permalink Reply by Umphrey on February 26, 2008 at 8:54pm

please dont think that i was in any way saying anything bad about your site...i was able to remove the chat from my page using greasemonkey....runs great now. It used to just lag when the chat was loading, the page would load but you couldnt scroll down for 5-8 secs which i realize is absurd for me to complain about 5-8 seconds....anyway keep up the great work.


brian

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Permalink Reply by Cool Works tm on February 26, 2008 at 9:19pm

We're grateful for the feedback. We tweaked it tonight so that it shows who is online on every page but I moved the chat feature to a separate page. I created a new Group and put it there to see if that makes any kind of sense.

I THINK that because the "Who's Online" feature is on every page that everyone online will show on the chat page, but you won't be able to actually chat unless you go to that page. That may be confusing - and we can rerig it so that you'll only see icons for folks on the chat page itself at the expense of getting a heads up about who's on the site as a whole if that seems the better way to go.

Choices Choices...

Let us know what you think.

Check out the Chat Page

Bill

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Permalink Reply by Umphrey on February 26, 2008 at 10:09pm

wow works great, thanks folks!!!!

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