Good to see you here. Are you finding the site ok now? There were a few problems with our ISP and server load around that time, but on the whole things are working fairly well now, as far as I can see.

We are waiting for the ISP to move us to a different server, which should help reliability. If there are delays on our side, it's probably because of certain plugins running, so it would help to isolate which areas of the site are slow and which are running normally. If you spot anything, can you report it here?

We're working on a new site design for the autumn, so this may help with the both speed and usability.

cheers,

Martin

Me again. Can anything be done to speed up the site? It still takes ages to load anything.

Seventypercent has been and continues to be a great inspiration to me, but the speed keeps me from quickly seeking it out. It would be sad if this were a deterrent for others as well. Especially at a time when so much is happening in chocolate!

Thanks and keep it up,

Alex

Thanks! Yes, I've been AWOL for a while now ;-) But I'm back and keeping up with the chocolate world (this includes working at a chocolate shop now).

And I've just noticed that the speed of the site has certainly picked up! I didn't mean to be a nag.

Another thing I noticed is that the site works better on my Mac at home. My PC here at work (where I shouldn't be logging in to 70% anyhow ;-) doesn't display the drop-down menus on the homepage correctly. They drop behind the photos and therefore can't be clicked or read.

I look forward to the new review section. Every now and then I like to check an old review on a bar by Valrhona, for example. BTW, have you noticed that the page numbers on the blog page and the review page don't work? I've clicked on page numbers to move on, but nothing happens.

Did you until recently tie-in blogs by other bloggers? That was interesting! Nice to see what is going on elsewhere. But there is so much going on! All these new chocolates from the US and whatnot. I'm having trouble keeping up. Thank goodness I've found ways to get my hands on these exciting new bars...

All the best to you and Happy New Year too!

Alex

Good to see you back!

We had some issues with the new
server - which was meant to fix all the previous issues, but didn't! The
site is now on yet another machine, which is proving much faster and
you should find it a lot better.

We're currently building a new
review home page, which will include easy searches by chocolate maker,
etc. All your points are valid and when we've finished implementing all
the changes and updates that are planned, hopefully you should find
everything as easy to use as before, if not better.

This then
gives us a much better, more integrated platform to from. It's all work
though, and takes time - if only I could disappear on a Caribean island
(with internet access) and spend a month doing everything! Oh well,
back to reality!

cheers and Happy New Year!

Martin

I'm not here as regularly as I used to be but thought I'd comment on the new site.

I like the new look, but have to check it out on a Mac before I can say more. There is still much to get used to, but the speed is definitely an issue for me. It takes quite a while for the site to open and when you click somewhere you have to wait a bit longer than I prefer. This seems to be a trend with some sites. Is it because of the Twitter link-in perhaps? 

Looks like a couple of things are still being worked on, so I guess it's too early to say more. However, I do miss the easy access to the reviews, for example. In the past you were able to click on a producer and get all of their reviews, now it looks to me as if the reviews are only chronologically ordered. Or am I missing something? Like I said, I still need to get used to the site, which is also a bit of a downside for me. The old site was a lot more user-friendly.

Sorry for all the negative points. I know a lot of effort has gone into making 70%.com fresher and more accessible. At the moment I'd say fresh - yes, but a bit clunkier.

Alex

Welcome to our new forum. We've now finished migrating everything from our creaky old software into our new all WordPress world.

The new software is much more up to date and secure, so we can also now welcome in new members to sign up - just use the links on the right in the sidebar.

Your existing logins and most of your personal details have been transferred to the new site. As your passwords in both systems are encrypted (even we can't see them), it was not possible to transfer these across, so you will need to use the WordPress 'Lost password' function to reset your password. (Try to log in and you will see this).

All the old posts and forums have also been imported, but as this is a new start, we welcome your suggestions and ideas for new sections and how we can improve the structure of the forum.

You logins are now completely integrated with the rest of our site, and this will help us bring you new features in the near future. You can already comment on any of our blog or feature posts using your forum login.

There were a few small items we couldn't bring across - you will have to resubscribe to any forums or topics for which you would like to receive email updates, and signatures are now always added to your posts if you have one.

We've also reset the moderator list, which was rather out of date. We will be reassigning moderators shortly and we will be looking for volunteers to help maintain our community - please contact us if you are interested or post a message here.

We still have some cosmetic work to do on the forum, so you should see gradual improvements over the next few weeks. There are also a few gremlins around, like post counts and 'latest post' being missing from the forum home page. We hope to have these all working soon. We will also shortly redirect any links to the old forum, which will still be around - but locked - for another week or so.

Please let us know if you have any new problems and once again, welcome to our new forum and what we hope will be a newly invigorated community.

Yours,

Seventypercent.com

The forum will very soon be moving to new software - hurray!

This will stop the spam, allow us to accept new members and bring you lots of new forum features and access to other parts of Seventypercent as well.

The new forum should be ready in about a week, maybe less. While the migration is taking place we've temporarily closed this forum. This is because we've already taken a copy of all the posts here and don't want you to lose anything.

We'll send out an announcement email when the new site is ready, or check back in a few days.

Thanks for your patience - things will be much better when we've moved!

Site Admin
http://www.seventypercent.com

Yes, really sorry, I'm trying to do what I can to clear up the problem while waiting to move the forum to new software, which should solve everything.

From what we can tell, the problem is that old user accounts have been hacked because someone's password has been stolen outside of the system - probably from that person's computer. There shouldn't be any danger to your email addresses - it's not the database that's being hacked, it's users' login details.

These accounts are then being used to post a huge pile of spam. That happens with almost any community software, the problem here is that Snitz - the software we have here - is old and does not have very good spam filters. There are addons that would help, but I really don't want to spend any time on them, because we want to move to the new WordPress forum software as soon as we can.

Christmas really caught me out as my eye was not on the forum, we'll try to keep on top of it from now on, and move to the new software very soon!

I hope now you find the place a little cleaner..

cheers,

Martin

Site Admin
http://www.seventypercent.com

Martin

Site Admin
http://www.seventypercent.com

quote:

---

We still need to port the forum to the new format and a new software platform.

---

"Porcelana: The Holy Grail of Pure Criollos" (Maricel E. Presilla)

There must be a way that it can be stopped

Aphrodite2

The Forum will continue to operate as normal on this address until we can transfer it over to new software, but this will now happen after Chocolate Week, as it's quite a big job. The intention is to transfer across all your logins and retain all the historical posts, which will be quite a substantial coding job.

The Chocopaedia will in time be fully integrated into the WordPress posting system, allowing us to open up the section to more reviewers and allow user reviews and comments.

In the meantime, please bear with us and keep on posting - the Forum is not dead and any posts you make will we hope be preserved for the greater good of all chocolate mankind!

Site Admin
http://www.seventypercent.com

"Porcelana: The Holy Grail of Pure Criollos" (Maricel E. Presilla)

As you may have noticed, forum registrations have been a bit cranky over the last year or so and prone to spam.

It has been our plan for some time to move to better and more up to date forum software, and we hope to make this move in the next month or so. This will give us a forum fully integrated with the WordPress software that runs 'The Pod', which will allow you to post and comment there as well as in the forum. The challenge with this is to copy over all your current log ins and posts, but I hope we will have time to do this soon.

In the meantime, we have switched off registration for new members, which was anyway broken after the last bout of spam attacks.

Apologies to all those waiting to join, I promise you will have a better and brighter service to sign up to very soon!

Martin

Martin Christy
Editor
http://www.seventypercent.com