Welcome to Sharper Iron ‘23

Welcome to the latest iteration of Sharperiron.org. Since nobody knows what iteration we’re actually on, ‘23 it is!

First, thanks for your patience over the down time. Second, thanks for your continued patience as we work out bugs, finish construction in places, and tidy up a lot. Third, thanks for being a Sharper Iron reader, or—if the shoe fits—participant.

If you’re new to the site and attempting to register, the process may move a little slower than normal for a while. Though we’re working on our email configuration to eliminate things that tend to trigger spam filters, be sure to check your spam folders and mark SI emails as ‘not spam,’ if your email app has that feature.

Sundry Notes

• Foundry and New Posts: Both of these sets of lists and filters are now on the Forum home page. New Posts has been renamed Recent Comments.
  • The New Posts RSS feed has also changed. See About Feeds.
  • Forum home has lots of little filters and such, so check it out.
• Forum categories: There are no longer a bunch of ‘containers’ you can’t select with selectable sub-lists of ‘forums’ within them. Instead, we have seven broad Forum categories. You use tags to narrow your post down further.
• The “Like” and “Dislike” response links available to logged in users have been replaced with upvote and downvote icons. The up/down vote concept is less feeling-oriented and a bit more vague. That’s the intent. Alas, the old like/dislike tallies have not been migrated. (This is not impossible, though, and might happen retroactively down the road.)
• Flag for moderator attention: This is on the “won’t be long” do list.
• Search still has a page and currently appears, a bit awkwardly, in the Forum menu. As of this writing, there is no comment search tool and no user search. These are on the “won’t be long” do-list. The page is designed as a single search field with facets for narrowing down results. The search tool has roughly a gazillion configuration options, with lots of opportunities to make it powerful or break it. So you all are beta testers.
• Polls: All polls from the old site are closed, but aggregated in the Forum. New polls are created separately, then you make a forum post and add it to your post. Some instructions are included on the Add a Poll form.
• Notification and registration emails: This seems to be working now, though we’ll know for sure after more people use it. As in the past, you have to post a comment to check the box for notification of future posts. Changing that is still on the long-term do list. A simple subscribe checkbox is more complicated than one would think.
• Private Messages: The new system is under construction, but should mostly work. Improvements are on the to do list. You’ll see your old messages there marked “imported.”
• RSS users: We won’t really know if those are working until content starts posting and some time passes for things to queue up and be processed. So we’ll see what happens and, no doubt, tweak. Since Facebook and Twitter get their SI stuff via RSS, some of that might look a bit wonky for a while.
• Also on the do list: Build a tags page of some kind.
• If you have difficulties or see problems not already noted here or in the comments, or have suggestions, feel free to post in the comments. If you can’t log on, and the contact form isn’t working, send an email to editor.sharperiron@gmail.com — or just wait a couple of days, if you don’t mind. Things will slowly normalize.

Thanks again for your support of SI and for your patience over the coming days as we get settled into the new platform.