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[size=large]Big Platform Upgrades Coming to Head-Fi Very Soon![/size]
Since around 2004, as Head-Fi ramped up on a fairly aggressive growth path, it had become increasingly clear that the site would need constant improvement, and more time and resources devoted to it. At times, I've run this site as more of a hobby for me, but it grew into a place where the community came to depend on a subset of audio manufacturers and resellers (big and small) to provide a lot of the gear that makes our high-end headphone audio / personal audio / computer audio hobby what it is. And many of those same vendors have likewise come to depend on this community to encourage and support the development and distribution of very cool new products to serve us. I can think of a good number of products that may never have come to existence if not for all of you doing what you do here, as a community. Some of those vendors depend on you for a substantial part (or, in some cases, most) of their livelihoods. While it's still a hobby to me and most of you, it is also now very much an important little ecosystem of enthusiasts and vendors; and with up to 700,000 visitors per month, Head-Fi has become a place that has long since outgrown anything I can simply treat as a hobby.
As a result of the growth, what time I have to personally devote to Head-Fi has been more consumed with administrative and business duties than to spending time on my favorite things to do here, which are to be an active community member, creating quality content with the rest of you, and doing more to focus on community-building. At the same time, improvements and upgrades to the site have been needed for quite some time, both in terms of design improvements, innovative tools for both managing the vast and deep content a community of many thousands has created over years and creating new content, and to improve site performance.
To that end, I'm very excited today to announce that, as early as tomorrow (if all goes as planned), significant upgrades and changes to Head-Fi are going to take place. Through a developmental partnership that was almost a year in the making (but with absolutely no change of ownership), Head-Fi is going to go from where we are now (which is largely where we have been for the last several years) to a new forum and content platform that will offer a more robust forum experience and functionality, as well as a more polished, elegant design.
What will be some of the new additions that you will see after the upgrade?
Will there be other changes?
As always, I want to thank you all for being such a vibrant, active community. You're the reason we have so much fun together here (online and in person), and you are also one of the big reasons more and more companies are designing and manufacturing products for our niche. You, the members of the community are the most important ingredients in all of this.
I also want to thank the Moderators, who put in a lot of their own time to keep the place operating smoothly, solely out of a passion for hobby and community. It is, for the most part, a thankless job, and I will strive to do more for them, to show them appreciation I haven't shown enough of, and to help make doing what Moderators do, easier to do.
And I want to thank the Sponsors for their continued support, without which this place couldn't exist. There are several new Sponsors joining us upon the re-launch, and I'll detail all of the existing and new Sponsors very soon after the launch.
Thanks in advance for your patience as we work through the migration; and for what I hope is your patience and open-mindedness as we move to a new platform. I think most everyone here will be as excited as I am about it, but I want to make sure to be open to structured, productive questions and feedback. So those things you end up not liking about it, please do more than simply say "I don't like it"--please explain the whats and the whys.
Now, to see some of what's coming, please see the attached screenshots. (Disregard the specific ads you see in the screenshots, as I believe those were targeted to another forum covering entirely different topics--they're placeholders so you can see where things go.)
Best Regards,
Jude
Founder, Co-Administrator
Head-Fi.org
Since around 2004, as Head-Fi ramped up on a fairly aggressive growth path, it had become increasingly clear that the site would need constant improvement, and more time and resources devoted to it. At times, I've run this site as more of a hobby for me, but it grew into a place where the community came to depend on a subset of audio manufacturers and resellers (big and small) to provide a lot of the gear that makes our high-end headphone audio / personal audio / computer audio hobby what it is. And many of those same vendors have likewise come to depend on this community to encourage and support the development and distribution of very cool new products to serve us. I can think of a good number of products that may never have come to existence if not for all of you doing what you do here, as a community. Some of those vendors depend on you for a substantial part (or, in some cases, most) of their livelihoods. While it's still a hobby to me and most of you, it is also now very much an important little ecosystem of enthusiasts and vendors; and with up to 700,000 visitors per month, Head-Fi has become a place that has long since outgrown anything I can simply treat as a hobby.
As a result of the growth, what time I have to personally devote to Head-Fi has been more consumed with administrative and business duties than to spending time on my favorite things to do here, which are to be an active community member, creating quality content with the rest of you, and doing more to focus on community-building. At the same time, improvements and upgrades to the site have been needed for quite some time, both in terms of design improvements, innovative tools for both managing the vast and deep content a community of many thousands has created over years and creating new content, and to improve site performance.
To that end, I'm very excited today to announce that, as early as tomorrow (if all goes as planned), significant upgrades and changes to Head-Fi are going to take place. Through a developmental partnership that was almost a year in the making (but with absolutely no change of ownership), Head-Fi is going to go from where we are now (which is largely where we have been for the last several years) to a new forum and content platform that will offer a more robust forum experience and functionality, as well as a more polished, elegant design.
What will be some of the new additions that you will see after the upgrade?
- A much-improved forum platform. The platform we are upgrading to offers the functionality you are used to, but with a much more elegant design, and with what will be greater ease of use for everyone, especially newcomers to the site. It also has a better tagging functionality that is used throughout the entire platform, helping to bring relevant content to the surface contextually in several areas.
- Integrated wiki/articles functionality. This will be used for a number of things, including the publishing of more editorial type content, FAQs, glossaries, projects, notes, documentation, and more. I'll say more about some of the cool ways this section will be used in future posts.
- A dedicated product review area / centralized product database. This area will be pre-populated with products from some product feeds, so the more boutique, specialized products will not immediately be represented in it. However, any registered member, manufacturer, or reseller can add missing products to the database. As active as this community is, I estimate it will probably take two to three months before virtually every product specific to our hobby will be represented within it.
- Before the developmental partnership was formed, I actually installed ReviewPost software here (Main Index - Head-Fi.org Reviews)--you never saw it because there isn't a single link to it anywhere (until now), and it never made it past testing. After discussions started for the partnership, and I saw the review system in place with the new platform, the plans to try to customize ReviewPost evaporated--there would be no way for me to customize ReviewPost to be as integrated and refined as the system we will have in place after the upgrade.
- Other cool new features will come with the upgrade, but I will refrain from trying to detail them all, and will go over them more after the migration is completed.
- Also, there is more in development, and, through the partnership, there is an actual platform product and engineering roadmap in place, one that changes as needed (I've seen it at work already), and one in which we are even planning improvements months--even years--into the future.
- Change. Change can be difficult. We've been using the vBulletin system for years now, and we've all grown accustomed to it. Some things will work differently than you're used to them working, some things will be in different places, and some things will simply "feel" different, especially at first. While we tried to keep a sense of familiarity--enough to help make for a comfortable transition--we, most importantly, tried to improve upon many things, so fully replicating the experience wasn't among the goals. With a dedicated development team in place, we will work to continually improve the experience and functionality in iterative steps.
- Some functionality present now will not be present once we update the site.
- The blogging platform will not be carried over in its entirety. With only a handful of regular Head-Fi bloggers, I decided to fold the content into the appropriate, corresponding sub-forums. We will still have a small number of Head-Fi bloggers, and may add more as the need arises.
- The Social Groups function is not present in the new platform. As with the bulk of the blogs, the content will be folded into the appropriate, corresponding sub-forums. (The Social Groups posts may not be immediately available at the time of the launch on the new platform. If not, it will be soon after.)
- The sort threads ability in thread view will no longer be available, with the intent to reduce clutter and the number of links. This was a seldom-used functionality. (I'm referring to the ability to sort threads alphabetically by title or alphabetically by thread starter username from the thread view screens.)
- The BBcode editor will be dropped in favor of an editor that is WYSIWYG only.
- Post icons will not be available in the new platform. (I'm referring to the icons you occasionally see placed in front of a thread in thread view screens.)
- Again, as early as Wednesday (tomorrow). If it does not happen Wednesday, for whatever reason(s), then it will be pushed to next week.
- The site will be down for at least part of the day of the transition. A maintenance page will be put up, notifying visitors that maintenance is being performed, and to please check back later.
Will there be other changes?
- Yes, again, some of which will be discussed more when the upgrade is in place.
- There will be a very substantial change to the current rules in place governing Member of the Trade conduct in the Main Forums. After the change, we will begin to migrate away from Sponsor Forums, and try a new set of rules in which Sponsors will be able to interact more freely with the community in the Main Forums. I will release more details about this (and a new set of rules and terms of use) with the upgrade.
As always, I want to thank you all for being such a vibrant, active community. You're the reason we have so much fun together here (online and in person), and you are also one of the big reasons more and more companies are designing and manufacturing products for our niche. You, the members of the community are the most important ingredients in all of this.
I also want to thank the Moderators, who put in a lot of their own time to keep the place operating smoothly, solely out of a passion for hobby and community. It is, for the most part, a thankless job, and I will strive to do more for them, to show them appreciation I haven't shown enough of, and to help make doing what Moderators do, easier to do.
And I want to thank the Sponsors for their continued support, without which this place couldn't exist. There are several new Sponsors joining us upon the re-launch, and I'll detail all of the existing and new Sponsors very soon after the launch.
Thanks in advance for your patience as we work through the migration; and for what I hope is your patience and open-mindedness as we move to a new platform. I think most everyone here will be as excited as I am about it, but I want to make sure to be open to structured, productive questions and feedback. So those things you end up not liking about it, please do more than simply say "I don't like it"--please explain the whats and the whys.
Now, to see some of what's coming, please see the attached screenshots. (Disregard the specific ads you see in the screenshots, as I believe those were targeted to another forum covering entirely different topics--they're placeholders so you can see where things go.)
Best Regards,
Jude
Founder, Co-Administrator
Head-Fi.org
