Welcome, everyone, to the new Times for The Times!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Announcement

I would like to thank everyone for their patience.   The grand opening of our new site is finally here, and our community on Live Journal is no more.

If you would like to register here, you will find the appropriate instructions under Help/User Tips in the menu at the top of the page.   As before, registration is free,  and anonymous comments are still permitted.

As you look around the new site, you may be surprised to see many months of content, extending back to October of 2006.   Yes, we have loaded in every single  post from Live Journal, including the comments.   So we are starting in this new location with almost 10,000 posts and over 300,000 comments.   We have tried to make the site as seamless as possible; for example, if you click on the name of a current blogger, you will see every post by that blogger going back to their very first blog.

It certainly has been a long effort.   We started working on this site in early March,  and for the past two weeks the bloggers have been posting their blogs to both sites as the development team continued to work on the final touches.   Our development team consisted of Johninterred, Starstruck_au, and me, with Jackkt as the lead tester.

We have tried to keep as many of the useful features of Live Journal as possible, as well as making the site look very similar to what we had before.

So how do you like our new site?

** Update** – I have sent email invitations to 548 addresses, and gotten back only 7 undeliverable messages, as well as 2 out-of-office replies.

132 comments on “Welcome, everyone, to the new Times for The Times!”

  1. Fantastic. Very well done and a huge thank you to all involved in the marathon effort!

  2. Looks great so far! Well done everyone. Apparently I now need to add an avatar…

  5. Congratulations! A great job well done.
    One comment: on my desktop next to the URL is the comment “Not secure”. Is this a cause for concern?

    1. I had the same “not secure “ warning but using the link in the next comment solved this, thanks.

  7. Many congratulations to all concerned. I am a regular reader, often in order to get an explanation of the parsing, but a rare contributor to the blog – hence no avatar. The individual bloggers perform a fantastic service to the site and are especially valuable to those like me who are less expert.

    1. I heartily endorse Barry J’s comment. I may even now try to be more active myself!

  8. Thanks Vinyl and the team for delivering on this very challenging project (and I know a lot about web infrastructure projects from a 20-year career doing ‘em). Celebrate and be very proud of what you’ve achieved.

    My appearances on this board have become a bit intermittent recently, because I currently have a cataract problem impacting my vision, making it difficult to read some web pages. I am aware that Windows and browsers both offer dark and high-contrast themes, these help to some extent – but actually The Times crossword pages are some of the worst – high-contrast themes simply cause every square to go completely black. I tried pointing this out to the Times support crew, but they sent me a corporate-bland response, saying my observations would be sent to the relevant team, but making no fix commitments whatsoever. I notice that the new TfTT setup appears to observe Windows high-contrast settings but (unlike sites such as Twitter) not browser dark themes.

    Anyway, congratulations on what you’ve achieved – I look forward to making full and regular use of the new site in due course. I was referred the other day for surgical cataract treatment, and I’m hoping I will be able to read the clues comfortably in a couple of months, maybe even solve them comfortably with six or seven years’ practice.

    Many thanks and best regards

    1. Best wishes for successful surgery! Friends who have had procedure are very pleased at how much vision has been improved. My cataracts are still at an early stage and only slowly clouding so no surgery yet. Always enjoy your comments so hope you are back up fully operational asap.

    2. Sorry to hear about the vision problems. Good luck with the surgery. Meanwhile I will put investigation into browser dark themes on “enhancements list”.

      1. Thanks John. Regarding respecting “browser dark” themes:

        1. This behavioural characteristic appears to be very niche – as I mentioned, Twitter does it – but that site no doubt has a team of UI experts tweaking it to the nth degree.

        2. The new TfTT setup is actually more readable for me than the old one, using a larger font, black-on-white compared to the old smaller blue-on-white for comments. I can read it OK without using a system-wide high-contrast theme. It’s the actual puzzles that trouble me more.

        Accordingly not looking for priority attention – do it if you want to but low priority.

        Regards Denise

  9. Great job all, looks good. Pleased to get rid of the ads which somehow escaped my adblocker.

    Well done!

  10. Great work by all, and many thanks for getting it sorted and up and running.

  12. THANK YOU ALL SO VERY MUCH!
    I will certainly feel a lot safer now, can only begin to imagine how much of your free time has been has been devoted to this exercise. You all deserve a “gong” in the next Birthday Honours List!

  14. Fantastic! I am really looking forward to learning from and contributing to the new platform. My heartfelt thanks to all who have made it a reality.

  15. Thank you – finally I get to see the Sat answers – Java script (0) before! Site looks rather good…. Trish Sarson usually anonymous

  16. Congrats and well done for all the hard work. I can’t imagine how much went on behind the scenes.

  17. Thanks – I have no clue myself about this computer\internet business so am in awe of what you’ve accomplished! Congrats to everyone involved.

  18. Thank you for keeping this going. I won’t need to keep pestering Wasagasman to explain the answers.

  27. Well done everyone. Nice to have a site free of adverts. I will try to remember to comment more often on this site than I did on the old one.

  28. Thank you all very much for creating this site. Very much appreciated.

  29. Indeed! Thank you.

    How long after registering do I expect a confirmation email? It has been ~15 minutes and nothing yet (checked the spam folder).

    1. You (and a handful of others) were shown as “Pending”. It may be a mail server issue preventing the email reaching you. I have manually approved you (and the others) so you should now be able to login and add your avatar (if you want one).

  31. Thank you Vinyl1 and your small team for making this happen. Your dedication is much appreciated.

  32. Excellent, can’t see anything wrong with it (except a mini-point below) and it all looks very smooth and neat. Well done to all who produced it.

    My only observation, and it’s really nothing important, is that the avatars are rather smaller (and possibly more distorted) than before. It may be a very simple matter to make them a bit bigger, but if not then it’s really not worth bothering.

    [I’m just trying out the ‘Click to edit’ thing. Looks fine. There seemed to be a countdown beside the button, so do we have a certain time to edit, after which tough titty?]

    1. About avatar sizes… We have stuck to the theme default to start with. Increasing the avatar size is on the enhancements list and should be fairly straightforward to do, but we’re avoiding any changes for now until we’ve been running for a bit so we can pick up any issues that arise in one go. The theme we have based the site on is ‘adaptive’, i.e. changes to fit various form factors (try dragging your browser edge to make the width smaller to see what happens) so any changes need to take that into account.

  35. A web site that’s shiny and new!
    I bet that’s not easy to do
    Hope there’s room here sometimes
    For my terrible rhymes
    To all those involved a THANK YOU!

    2. So I’m an infrequent reader of this blog, but find it very useful to check up on strange clues (of which I thought there were more than a few today – Monday 16th). This site must have taken a lot of work to get up and running, and it’s remarkable how well tested it is! Thanks to all concerned. As to why I replied to this comment – the quality of the limericks is always impressive when I see them!

  36. Thanks from your founder, for what looks like a complete transfer with comments, for what must be something close to 10,000 reports.

  37. Many thanks to all concerned for what must have been a considerable amount of work.
    Everything looks great, and no more Cyrillic to jar the mind thank goodness.

  38. Great job, guys! Thanks; I can’t begin to imagine the work it took to accomplish this.

  40. Many thanks to all involved. The old site has been a source of immense pleasure and education, and I’m very grateful to have access to the new one.

  41. Well done on getting this new site up and running. I look forward to visiting frequently.

  42. Thank you so much to everyone involved, and many congratulations on a wonderful job – it’s looking great 😊 PB

  43. Pardon me, just testing to see if my avatar appears…

    …and it does. Happy face.

  47. Many thanks to everyone involved in the creation of the new site. Massive respect to Johninterred, Starstruck, Jackkt and of course ‘chapeau’ to the boss Vinyl1. Very grateful!

  48. A question: One thing I liked about the Live J blog was that we were informed when someone replied to us; what about now?
    Incidentally, thanks to you guys I’m now able to see the Glossary–for some reason I was always denied access to it–and I discovered that I’m in it!

    1. Thanks, Kevin It is not something that is built into WordPress but is on our list of potential enhancements to build.

      1. On the LJ blog, a reply was indented and colored, making it easier to see that it was a reply. Could something like that be done here?

      1. As a long time lurker this is as good a time as any to post for the first time to congratulate and thank all concerned for the tremendous job in creating the new forum.

        We’re very well rid of taking the Russian rouble 👍

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