WE'RE BACK!

[Justin Derrick]

Welcome back to the Content Manager OnDemand User Group Forums everyone!

We have a new URL, new server, updated software, better security, a dedicated eMail server, and some dedicated folks who are going to try and revive ODUG.

Here are the highlights:

 - We were very lucky and had a database backup less than 72 hours before the old site went down.  We didn't lose any posts or registered users.
 - Attachments were always a problem on the old site due to a problematic upgrade years before, but we'll do our best to restore the old data.
 - We've upgraded to HTTPS -- no more dire warnings of disaster for visiting the forums.
 - Search-engine friendly -- the new server permits search engines to visit and index our pages so we can be found more easily.
 - The latest version of the forum software is installed, and it looks a little different, but it works the same as before.
 - ODUG now has it's own dedicated eMail server -- if any of our messages should happen to arrive in your Spam folder, please 'promote' them them to your Inbox to show the mail servers that we're worthy of visiting your regular Inbox.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us as we get back into the groove, please comment below!  Please don't hesitate to give us some feedback about what you'd like to see.

-JD.

EDIT:  Just a quick note that attachments aren't working.  I'm going to try and fix it this coming week -- we won't recover any attachments, but we should be able to upload new ones (like screen shots and PDF copies of documentation, etc.).  Thanks again for you patience!

[bgroff]

Thank you Justin for getting us back up and running!

[Justin Derrick]

It's been about a month, and I'm just providing a little update on our status...

ODUG's mail server is working well, and our 'deliverability' is very good -- very few messages are bouncing back.  You can help improve our mail server's reputation by rescuing any messages from the forums that arrive in your 'spam' or 'junk' folder by marking them 'not spam'.  Thanks!

The forums have been re-organized, re-named, and their descriptions expanded to be more descriptive.   Some forums have been archived -- they will remain since some contain good information, but they're now closed to new posts and replies.  If there's a post you want to revive, send a message to me and I'll move it to one of the active groups.  As part of this organization, behind-the-scenes, we've simplified access controls.  Don't hesitate to reply here if you experience an issue.

Bugs continue to be squashed, but attachments are still being tricky.  As mentioned earlier, they weren't able to be rescued from the old site, but right now, we're still not able to upload new ones.  This is likely an overzealous security setting on the web server, I'll keep working on it.

Finally, there's going to be a few minor cosmetic changes to various areas of the site over the coming weeks, primarily to improve accessibility.  A quick check with a website auditing tool has shown that our colour scheme lacks sufficient contrast for folks who are visually impaired (some elements are already fixed!), and that the size of certain user-interface elements are too small to navigate comfortably -- you may already notice that the navigation bar is now larger and has more generous spacing!

Thanks again for your participation in ODUG!

-JD.