Some nice minor improvements released this morning:

• New Spam prevention capabilities
• URLs in topics, answers, and comments now only get “auto-linked” if the author has 100 points or more.
• Media/slideshow topic improvements and fixes
• New “up arrow” instead of check mark on vote buttons
• Added more convenient topic management controls for admins on the group “overall results” page and on topic pages.

Notable Changes:

• Max image size for answers increased from 700x700px to 1600x1600px
• New lightbox system works better and accomodates very large image sizes (Thanks FancyBox: http://fancybox.net/)
• Fixes issue where main home page feed would ocasionally show a tag results instead of “All topics”
• Admins: Footer content is now placed outside the “page” are to allow more design flexibility.
• Other minor fixes and enhancements

Around 2pm MT today, we experienced a server crash. Engineers are working on bringing everything back to normal. I will update you on our progress here.

*UPDATE 3:40pm MT*
Servers are being put back online now and should be up shortly. We expect to be online again within an hour.

*UPDATE 4pm MT*
Grupthink-powered sites are back online.

Just a couple changes:

• Updated ajax topic list to be Google-crawlable
• Removed small Facebook icon next Sign In link due to user confusion that Facebook logins were required.
• Other minor updates.

Please help us by reporting bugs!

Thanks!

In the early days of Grupthink.com, we unintentionally allowed HTML formatting, and, to the dismay of many members, we had to discontinue that “feature” for security and design concerns. Today’s update, 4 years later, finally brings back formatting options for topic and answer authors, plus a few other important fixes and features! Enjoy:

• WYSIWYG Formatting of answer and topic descriptions.
• Code Syntax highlighting option for descriptions containing scripts such as PHP and HTML. Great for programming-relating topics and questions.
• Fixes search results not containing publicly-listed group topics.
• Improved, wider layout for media “slide viewer” topics
• Fixes group “Manage topics” feature not setting permissions properly.
• Admin: Featured topics now display prominently at the top of the home page
• Admin: New spammer locking controls for admins
• Fixes issue where images could be hidden in media “slide viewer” topics
• Improvements and updates to widget logo and styling
• Fixes many cases where topic widget could have styles overridden on third-party websites.
• Many other minor fixes and visual improvements

This update will occur tonight, 12/28/2010 at around 10pm MST. If all goes well, I expect downtime to last 30 minutes.

*UPDATE* DONE!

Please help us by reporting bugs at our Grupthink Bugs topic!

Grupthink has always been a great format to have group discussion or brainstorms about lists of things (opinions, ideas, complaints etc…). Though Grupthink resembles Q&A sites that have launched after we did way back in 2006 (eg, Yahoo Answers, Stack Overflow), Grupthink has always been more about questions that have lots of right answers rather than questions that ask for one “best” answer.

Until recently, we had little interest in accommodating “Q&A” function. Then, this year a couple of our clients said they wanted to host those kinds of questions in their communities in addition to the normal Grupthink-style ones. So, this update brings an improved option for topic authors to put their topic a “Q&A” mode. (Some of you may notice that this feature is a reinvention of ther “Author’s Pick” option we introduce a couple years ago.)

The most noticeable changes for Q&A topics include:

• Answers in Q&A topics don’t have “titles”
• The full answer and author “by” line is displayed on the topic page
• The answer that gets the top vote from the topic author will be highlighted as the “Best” answer

Updates in this release:

• Added Q&A topic mode and option
• Improved Topic List Feeds:
  • Group topics mention which group they are in
  • Private and “Panel” group topics get labeled as such
  • Q&A get labeled as such
  • Improvements to layout and behavior
• Fixed bug that would remove the topic image when the topic was edited
• Other minor enhancements

So, if you need advice or a solution to a problem, feel free to post a Q*A topic at grupthink.com and we’ll try this thing out! We have a number of other things we want to do to improve the feature, so it would be great to get your feedback in the meantime.

Finally, please let us know if you find any bugs at our new Bugs topic!

Expected downtime: 30 minutes Done!

- Steven

Today I’m releasing an update that improves the topic “feed” lists:

• Google-style loading behavior when changing tabs or pages
• Browser back button works intuitively, between tabs, pages and even going to topics and back to the list. Same for forward button.
• Bookmarking any feed page and tab now works as you would expect.
• More topics shown at a time

Expected downtime: 30 minutes Done!

- Steven

Today I’m releasing a patch that addresses the following:

• Fixes image-related issues affecting some new Grupthink-powered sites.
• Upgraded Jquery and JqueryUI

*Update* Done!

Today’s update brings the most significant change to our ballot behavior in a couple years and improves the layout of the topic and answer pages substantially. Here are the changes:

• Major ballot upgrade
• Ballot now dynamically slides in and out as you vote
• Ballot becomes scrollable with more than 10 answers in it
• Ballot automatically scrolls (if needed) as you drag your votes up and down
• Other effects added to make the ballot more intuitive and usable
• Veteran achievement fix #4 -The saga continues. Visiting your profile page should award you the correct level of cake for your Grupthink “age”
• Fixed “phantom vote” problem where seemingly random points would get added to answers after unvoting
• Improved “Author’s Pick/Best Answer” system. There is now a more prominent option to enable “Best Answer” functionality as you create a topic.
• Improved “Best Answer” display
• Other bug fixes and minor improvements

Downtime will commence at 11pm Mountain/1pm Eastern and should only last about 20 minutes.

*UPDATE* DONE!

Go to Grupthink.com…

Tonight I updated Grupthink to address the following:

- Fixes Veteran achievement not updating properly.
- Updates to link color and style throughout site.
- Improved main topic “feed” tab area.
- Other minor updates.