Significant site changes coming

[Brad]

With GottaDEAL in its 20th year, it is time for some long-overdue changes to the site and these changes will be taking place relatively soon (i.e. in the next few weeks if all goes well).

 

 

Since I'm posting this on the forum, let's talk about that first. I will be upgrading the forum software to the latest version. The version we are currently is pretty close to a decade old I believe. We're going to be doing some testing this week to see how smoothly the upgrade will go and if all goes well you will be seeing a brand new forum very shortly. We have a very big database so the conversion could be tricky but fingers crossed everything goes well.

 

To go along with this, the current forum app that some of you use is being deprecated. The new forum software has a much more capable mobile version (with newer features such as web notifications) so you really won't be missing much not having the app anymore and there is big upcoming software update for the forum that will make the mobile experience even better.

 

 

And then the main GottaDEAL site is also getting a refresh. With Black Friday becoming less and less significant each year, I've combined the current main site and the Black Friday site into one single site. That took a lot of back-end changes over the last few months. Rest assured we'll still be posting the ads and there will be a Black Friday page that has all the updates like the current Black Friday home page - most of the changes are behind the scenes to make things easier for us.

 

The new version of the site will also finally be mobile-friendly - something that should have been done years ago to be honest. I kept the overall design pretty close to what we have now because it's what we've had in various formats for the entire 20 years the site has been around and it works well. The new site structure will allow for new features in the coming years as well.

 

 

So that's about it. I'll try to give as much notice as possible when I have to shut things down for the move/upgrade/conversion but if you visit the site or forum and things look different or the site is down, this is likely the reason.

[Brad]

Just an update: we started a test upgrade of the forum and after some issues, it finally worked

 

The actual upgrade is going to take some time, as will setting everything up so when it happens you should expect as much as 2 days of downtime.

 

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up.

[Brad]

It's likely we're going to do the upgrade this coming week, so be ready

[Brad]

Looks like we're going to try the site update starting tomorrow morning, so expect the forum to be unavailable for the entire day tomorrow (Thursday) and possibly part of Friday as well.

 

Wish us luck