Dec 21 2010

Groundspeak Forums Got A Makeover

By northernpenguin

The Groundspeak forums came back with a mainly cosmetic update last night. Logging in, it’s quite easy to notice the entire forum has a much nicer look and feel to it. The core functionality appears to be pretty much the same, though there are performance enhancements in the background. This will hopefully get rid of those forum timeout messages and duplicate posts that have plagued the system for years.

Jeremy posted this to describe the update:
As you may have noticed, the forums underwent a complete renovation on Monday, December 20. It was long overdue and will hopefully come with some much needed performance enhancements. There is still some drywall dust and spent nails around the place, so we’ll likely be making adjustments for the next couple of days. However, all the content for the last 9 years is still here and ready to search. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation! Jeremy & Elias

Sadly, while the RSS subscription is more prominently displayed, it is still limited in that you get the first post of a topic only – no subscribing to replies in the forums via your favourite newsreader.

A wonderful development is the mobile device support. The forum detected my iPhone and switched to a touch  friendly layout, optimized for the small screen. This also worked for me running on my Android device. It did not correctly detect my Blackberry Bold 9700 (OS 6), or my Windows Mobile Device (Touch Pro2) and produced the desktop version of the forums on those devices.

Forum upgrades have been requested by the community for years and the responses of “it’s coming” had taken on an almost Duke Nukem: Forever persona where it was widely believed we’d never see an actual update.  This upgrade kicks off Groundspeak’s major site update with the rest of the pieces falling into place later today.


Related Posts:

Categories: Geocaching Sites
tags: , , , ,
  • Geotrailguy

    MUCH better via mobile than before. I still would have preferred tapatalk to their new implementation but it’s still a big improvement.

    BTW, how many cell phones do you need? :)

    • northernpenguin

      Well, turns out there IS a mobile app for the Groundspeak forums – Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see an IP.Board app for iPhone/iPod.

  • northernpenguin

    The Blackberry is my work device, the iPhone is my personal device.
    The Touch Pro2 is my old device, and since it has WiFi I can still dabble around with it (and do things like reboot it to Android).

    I agree that the mobile is a world of improvement, and will only feed my need to check in hourly :)

    Tapatalk would have been a big improvement, who knows maybe they will add that some day. I may add that to the “Feedback” section on Uservoice, after I check that the board software is actually supported by Tapatalk.

  • Avernar

    You can now search for three letter words!

  • Juicepig

    Everything Geocaching should have a Duke Nukem Persona, IMHO

  • http://www.cacheatnight.com TeamVoyagr

    It doesn’t work on my Torch. So it looks like Groundspeak continues to ignore us Blackberry Users.