A big old feature update today. The activity feed for the site now runs from the same dynamic system as the rest of the site.

Which means:

• You can favourate and comment on activities properly
• You can post to groups and your timeline from the front page
• You can load more without leaving the main page
• The activity stream has a more consistent look
• I can start working on that backlog of other features I wanted to make

Other changes:

I’ve reduced the active groups list to three groups. This is so the activity feed appears higher up the page. I’m still workshopping ideas to make the feed more prominent without entirely removing the shortcuts. The other option is a sidebar, which I am hesitant to switch to now that everything else is working nicely.

Let me know your thoughts

As always, bug reports, complaints, thoughts, ideas, and other comments are most welcome.

Some of you have noticed some changes being made in Author Buzz UK. Under the hood, this is not a big change, but I hope it will go some way to making the site nicer to use.

Groups

Up until now, there have been blogs, groups, profiles, forums… Now there are only groups. Well, kind of.

All of the forums, including General Chat, have been moved to groups. Groups have been given categories so you can find what you want. Some of the group types are forum groups (where the forum is the group home page), groups for headlines by feed (aka “outside blogs”), group blogs (for groups with an attached blog), and some assorted others. Fan groups for fans of particular authors, poets, publishers, etc., publisher groups, help and advice groups, support groups, and writing groups.

All groups allow subscription by email.

The only downside of the change is that if you want to comment in General Chat, you will need to join the group. Anyone can add themselves to most groups whenever they wish.

New Decoration

I wrote recently about giving the site a fresh lick of paint. I’m still planning to do that. I want to create a custom theme that is light, fast, and suitable for all parts of the site.

With this change, I hope that the site becomes simpler to use. Join, add yourself to the groups you want, enjoy. As always, you can see the content only from your own groups on authorbuzz.co.uk/activity. Now, however, you can see all your forums there too.

Side effects

Given the order I went through the groups with, the last are now first, and the first are now last (ish). Regular activity should re-sort the groups over the next few days.

All the old links should still work. Like, for example, the old link to General Chat.

I look forward to reading any feedback you might have.

I am seriously considering redesigning the Author Buzz UK site with a fresh new theme built from scratch.

The site has a few broken bits that no one looks at and a lot of code that is never used. I am starting to wonder if a slimmer theme that does only the things needed for the site might not be such a bad idea.

Thoughts?

Twice, in the past, I have thought it would be nice if everyone’s stuff made it out onto social media. Both times, I have enabled syndicating forum topics. Both times it went badly.

We ended up syndicating spam that is easy to remove here, but hangs about in FediSpace forever.

A bit like this:

I’m sure there must be a way to revoke that stuff, but I’m not sure what that way is. So, until we can undo spam that gets syndicated, forum stuff will remain local only. If someone can help me figure out how to unspam social media, I think it would be nicer to take a poll to see if our active members even want our forums appearing on social media.

As you might know, you can see all the things you have subscribed to on https://authorbuzz.co.uk/activity/ – I found a “fatal error” bug there today. This type of error just means the code gives up and refuses to show you the page.

I fixed it.

Let me know if you see anything broken. That’s what I am here for.