Website discussion

[Jubal]

The articles tab finally and after many months has a vaguely workable navigation system Please check it out and see what you think.

[Tusky]

Looks nice,

For some reason I expected recent and first (back in time) navigation to go on the left. Might just be me.

Is there any way to have a "contents" or similar page?

[Jubal]

Mm. Now you mention it I'm not sure what I'd expect. Maybe I should check what similar websites do?

As for contents, that is probably doable, or alternatively we could stop just having full articles per page and have a show/hide thing for each so you get the title and first few lines on a ten article page or something. Not sure what's ideal there.

[comrade_general]

Have to agree with Tusk; left is back, right is forward.

[Jubal]

OK - duly reversed Thankyou for the feedback!

[Jubal]

I did some tweaks to the front page, thoughts welcome - the CSS is a bit janky (and you might need to manually reload it by refreshing https://exilian.co.uk/style.css to get the extent of the changes.

I got rid of the weird hanging bracket on the left, which seemed to be from a call to load jquery in that I think was superfluous since we seemed to have two calls to load the same file, one written with some odd outdated javascript (which I commented out in the fil and I haven't noticed anything breaking as a result).

Also, I made the menu buttons bigger and moved them to the centre and put horizontal rules around them. The idea is that this makes it easier for people to notice the existence of the articles section & forum. I'm wondering about adding a "join us" button to the site menus too which just points to registration for the forum...

[Glaurung]

It looks to be working OK for me. There was a moment's slight disorientation when the menu buttons weren't exactly where I expected them, but I will no doubt become accustomed to the new look quite quickly.

I'm not sure that a "Join us" button on the front page is beneficial - it relates only to the forum, which potential new members won't see until they click on the link, and the forum pages themselves each have a login/register section.

[Jubal]

Good good. I ended up with a bit of pale blue space above the top horizontal rule that I put round the menu, which wasn't intended but I don't know how to fix it. And yes, it looked odd to me too when I did it but we've definitely had discussions in the past that concluded that it really wasn't obvious enough that the forum etc is where people should be being channelled to, so hopefully it is an improvement.

Re the Join button: that's mostly true, with the caveat being the mailing list, which I manually fill with emails scraped from forum accounts - and our other stuff like the pubs is mainly advertised said mailing list. But I take the point.

[Glaurung]

Re the Join button: that's mostly true, with the caveat being the mailing list, which I manually fill with emails scraped from forum accounts - and our other stuff like the pubs is mainly advertised said mailing list. But I take the point.

Would it be worthwhile (and possible?) to have a "Subscribe to our mailing list" button? Granted there would then have to be some sort of reconciliation process between directly submitted e-mail addresses and those from forum accounts to ensure people weren't getting duplicate e-mails - but could the list system itself handle this?

[Jubal]

It may be worth thinking about: Mailchimp should be able to reconcile email addresses. I'd probably want to find some new way of segmenting the list to account for non-forum-members as a group, so I could e.g. send them emails asking them to join the forum, and didn't send them any emails explicitly for forum members, but that should be possible. Worth looking into sometime: we can discuss it tomorrow.

[Jubal]

Website security certificate updated: this is now a manual four times a year job :/

[Tusky]

Are you able to use Lets encrypt? Can do automated renewal with certbot https://certbot.eff.org/

[Jubal]

No, that's the problem - when our hosts switched to their new cpanel system they removed their Let's Encrypt support. I'm using the ZeroSSL free package.

[Jubal]

ZeroSSL updated again - will next need to be done in late February, this certificate expires on March 1st.

[Jubal]

We had some downtime this morning because a) I didn't get the renewal done on time and b) it turns out ZeroSSL will only do free renewals three times, so I found a third-party site that runs a service to generate certificates from Let's Encrypt's certbot, and so now we have a Let's Encrypt certificate for the next ninety days. Sigh. Should all be running fine now anyway.