Weight Watchen Blogs! & Boards

I don’t know if you guys saw my post about the hacker but we were attacked last night. Then over night we were attached by some crazy SPAM blast that took our home page hostage. MAN! It just makes me so mad that there are mean people in the world. I mean, can’t everyone just leave us alone?!?!

Anyway, it’s seems to be over now. I took care of the SPAM and the hosting company tool care of the Hacker. You may notice some inconsistencies as the hosting company had to roll back to a backup-ed version.

So this has propelled me to release the new community a little early. Both of these things probably wouldn’t have happed if we were on that system. Not that it’s impossible to anything to go wrong but the security is much higher and I’ll be paying for support.

I will post an update and progress in a few days.

Thanks you guys for understanding and begin patient with me.

-Roni

Hey All!!

I’ve been working feverishly on the new community. It’s becomming quite an obsession to be honest. I love it!

I have learned so much already and the community features are even better then I thought! Here’s a quick update…

• You will have a “My Page” where you can change the theme, add blog posts, widgets, photos, your favorite RSS feed. You could even display your own blog feed (from another blog) on your “My Page” and continue blogging where you are blogging while participating with the community! How cool is that?!? :~P
• The Who’s online and chat features are working like a charm!
• I’ve designed a whole new look and created the same board structure there that we have here (although they will be called forums-which I actually like better).

Once I feel ready to have you guys test, I will send you out an invitation first before announcing it on my main page and opening up registration to everyone. This way it will give us a chance to create and custimize our main pages and become orientated. I would also love to get feedback from you as well!

And have no worries, I do not plan on shutting down this blog community. I will continue to host and support it. I will just prevent new sign ups once the new community is live. This way I don’t have to manage the spam blogs anymore.

If you can’t tell, I am SUPER EXCITED. I’m having fun developing it and I can’t wait to share it with you guys!!

I’ll post another update soon!

You guys ARE the best.  Ok… here’s what I think I’m going to do (this after some planning last night).

• I am going to create a new community on the new system (as I said this may take a some time).
• Once it’s finished I will invite all of you to join
• blogs.weightwatchen.com will remain active for a few months. After which I will not allow any new sign ups, but I will keep the current blogs active so you can access your old posts even linking to them if you want.

Sound like a good plan?!?

I have to admit, I’m SUPER excited about this!

Ok, everyone I have a real serious question for the community.

You may or may not know I’m a one women show. I’ve created and launched the community all on my own and it is larger then I every thought it would be. I stayed up many a night staring at computer code trying to figure out weird bugs, stressing over upgrades, and adding new templates. The community requires a pretty hefty time commitment and where I used to be spending that time reading and meeting all of you I now spend it fighting spammers, debugging and worring about running out of space on the server.

Anyway, I think you know where I’m going with this.

Honestly, my intent with the community was to offer people a friendly environment where they could blog about thier weight loss jounrey as I did, make some new friends along the way and reach their goals. I truly believe blogging made all the difference in my weight loss success.

Ok, I’ll get to the point. I want to upgrade us. I’ve been researching other community platforms and I think I found one that is perfect!! It offers all of the community features I’ve wanted to add here but haven’t been able to becuase of time and my techical knowledge. Hoever, just with everything in life there are some pro’s and cons.

The Pros! The new community would have….

• Member profiles with pictures
• See who’s online
• CHAT!!!
• member blogs
• forums
• upload media
• Users can have blogs elsewhere and still JOIN and be active by placing badges on their other blogs. (I have seen this as a problem of ours for awhile)
• Easier to share photos
• More user friendly
• Weight loss tables are easier to add (no more visual/code displays)
• Uploading images would be easier.
• I can build widgets easier - like a weight tracker!!
• This ones for me…. Management of the data would be easier.
• Super easy to sign up
• A main page that would show all activity in the community, not just blog posts.
• built in SPAM CONTROL!!!

The Cons

• No way to import users
• You’re blog posts can not be imported (at least I can’t find a way - although you could manually copy and paste)

I know the pros are really out weighing the cons but those are really 2 big cons, I think. For me not bing able to upload my currents posts would hurt a bit but I’m not sure it’s a deal breaker

So I pose the question…. Should we upgrade if it requires you to sign back up in a different system?

Be honest. I want to hear all your pros, cons, thought, complaints, questions, etc.

OH! and this wouldn’t be an overnight thing, it would probably take me a month or two.