Some updates

[Tony (admin)]

Football season is approaching soon! I’ve got a lot going on in terms of improvements I’m working on for the site and mobile app. I spent about 20 hours this past weekend working on updates and modernizing the Sports Schedules, Pick Em, Predict the Score and some theme updates. I’m also working on adding some new features to the website.

I’ll be switching servers and doing a major operating system update soon as well, so I’m having to go through the entire site code and make sure it is updated and won’t blow up when the move is done.

If you have any ideas, improvements, bugs, suggestions… now’s a great time to let me know.

[ProudUte]

Thanks, Tony, for all you do.

[MDUte]

Love UteHub, thanks Tony!

Couple of ideas: 1) would be cool to add the ability to insert gifs/emojis ; 2) would be cool if we could upload our own pics from our phone/laptop to posts. 3) if there’s a thread you’re really interested in following, it would be cool to have a “subscribe to get notifications” on that thread so you don’t have to go back and hit refresh all the time.

Lastly, as you’re going back through the app, if there’s anyway to make a couple of checks on the following: 1) make it so both Twitter and X copy/pasting works (right now you have to change X to Twitter to show up, 2) punctuation works the same on PC as in the app (right now, I might post something on the app and it will show up as one gigantic paragraph even though I created paragraphs when I posted. So I find myself going back into a post to edit it with </ p brackets to break up paragraphs. 3) same thing when I post a tweet through the phone app or YouTube clip, it will show up as a hardcoded link so I go back and just hit edit and resubmit and then it shows properly on the 2nd time.

Thanks so much!!

[Tony (admin)]

Love the ideas. I can discuss each one below.

1. Are you talking about say on FB or somewhere you click on an emoji icon and like 200 of them show up and you can click one to insert it?
2. Same with gifs as above? Because if you have a URL of a gif, you can paste it using the image tag.
3. There is a built in subscribe feature in the website which I removed. Reason being is the website was sending out thousands of emails a day to “subscribers”, many of which bounced or were flagged as spam, making the site’s online reputation degrade and causing emails to be blacklisted. Not sure how to get around this.
4. Twitter/X links. Yes. Planned. Twitter does preview, but x links don’t yet because the name change is so recent and the “engine” that drives the forum posts hasn’t been updated to preview X links. That will be coming I would assume.
5. HTML, paragraphs, and mobile are tricky. The mobile app does not use HTML, so it can be difficult to make posts look the same on both the website and the app. I agree this could improve, and it has improved over the years.
6. The goal is to have youtube and other links auto-preview. Sometimes it doesn’t work because of URL shorteners and other factors. Definitely a place where some improvements can be made.
7. Uploading of images, gifs, emojis, videos or whatever. Because this site has NO advertising (thus no advertising revenue) and donations don’t cover the cost of operation (last year), I can’t justify allowing users to upload data and start eating up giant amounts of cloud/server storage space, which increases operational costs. That’s why images and videos must be linked from other sources.

Thanks for the input.

[MDUte]

Oh yea, thanks for clarifying that. I didn’t even think about the increase in hosting cost from the large amounts of data that inserting gifs and emojis would drive upwards. Definitely makes sense. Other apps and sites I’ve used have the emoji icon you can click on and then a group of the major emojis pop up to select to insert inline to your text. But that’s what you’re talking about where that drives up the amount of data and therefore the hosting cost, correct? And same thing if we uploaded a pic from our phone or laptop to a post would again drive up the data and hosting cost, correct?

[Tony (admin)]

Having a library of emoji’s/gifs wouldn’t really increase costs since they’d already be uploaded once and the user could just pick one. But users uploading photos or videos is where the costs could get astronomical.

[chinngiskhaan]

The only thing that matters to me is that the site functions during football games. Last year was a major improvement, but it could still use some improvement.

Outside of that I have no suggestions.

[CityCreekUte]

During the games would be my biggest thing. I had a lot of trouble with the new replies to game threads updating without having to do hard refreshes and losing the current stuff without tons of scrolling

[Tony (admin)]

Yeah, when thousands of people hitting the site, doing a hard refresh probably makes things worse and pushes your submission to the back of the line. 

[Author]

Posts