I’m not a happy bunny.

Not only has the disk replacement taken place a day too early (see my comment to the previous posting, but the rebuilding of the RAID array is taking way longer than intended. I was told the work would be completed in about 1/2 an hour, with one hour as the worst case. Not too big a deal on a Saturday morning. However, this is Friday, and after almost three hours of downtime, the rebuilding of the array is only about 50% complete!!!!

Sincere apologies to anyone wondering where Carsurvey.org etc have gone to. Unfortunately there’s little I can do other than wait for the rebuild to complete.

In order to replace a faulty disk in the server that runs Carsurvey.org and related sites, the server will be down for up to an hour at around 0:00 and 1:00 PST on Saturday 26th August (08:00 – 09:00 BST). This is the quietest time of the week for the site. Fortunately the server has a mirrored RAID array, so there should be no data loss, and I’ll be taking additional backups shortly before the disk change just to be extra sure.

Apologies in advance for the loss of service during the outage period.

Over the last nine days, 176 approved visitor edits have been made to Carsurvey.org.

There have been a small number of malicious edit attempts, as I expected, but overall I’m very happy with how well things are working out. Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to use this new feature.

I’ve just made a number of small changes to this functionality, to make things work even better:

• The “Fix spelling and grammar” link is replaced with an “Edit awaiting approval” statement when an edit has been submitted, but not approved. This is intended to provide feedback on where edits have been received
• The “Thanks for improving the spelling and grammar” page you see when you finishing making an edit, now has a link that takes you back to the original review or comment

The next step is to add this functionality to the Members Area, so that spelling and grammar errors can be corrected before the reviews and comments are even published.

Whenever I see spelling or grammatical errors in a piece of writing, I find it rather uncomfortable to read. The same is true for writing that is not broken up into reasonably sized sentences and paragraphs.

To date, I’ve tried to help contributors to Carsurvey.org by providing some advice during the submission process, and spell checking of any contributions before they’re submitted.

I also do quite a lot of manual editing, to fix spelling and grammar errors that I personally notice. This unfortunately is limited by a problem that I like to describe as “Steven doesn’t scale”. There’s only so much time in the day that I can spend doing that sort of work.

I’ve now added a new feature to the site (inspired by the Wikipedia). Now anyone can edit a review or comment on the site (using “Fix the spelling and grammar of this review/comment” links), and then I get check out the changes they’ve made. Reviewing these changes will be much faster than actually making them myself.

Changes to spelling and grammar are what I’m looking for, but sensibly breaking up long sentences and paragraphs is also encouraged. Anything that changes the review or comment in other ways (additions or deletions for example) will be rejected. Adding a comment or submitting a deletion request are the appropriate tools to use in those situations.

Thanks in advance, to anyone who uses this feature to improve the quality of the site.

As I’ve been using the Member’s Area a lot myself recently, I noticed a significant omission in the features offered. There was no way to see how many reviews or comments were left for a member to vote on.

I’ve now fixed the problem by adding this information to the top of the reviews and comments pages in the Member’s Area. No more guessing whether there are 27 or 47 comments available for you to look at.

The larger comments queue has been of some help, but the queue is still filling up rather too often.

I’ve now added a link at the end of each comment thread (last post only), mentioning that the very latest comments are available in the Member’s area, before they appear on the main site.

The plan is that this will make more visitors aware of the Member’s area, and so reduce the number of times when the comments queue fills up.

Recently the comments queue has been filling up very quickly. This is mostly a good sign, as it shows the site is getting lots of contributions.

However, it’s sometimes happening so fast that the queue will fill up completely, before members or myself can clear the queue. To try to buy a bit more time before the queue jams up, I’ve just increased the comments queue size from 100 to 150 comments.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helps out in the members area. This change isn’t intended to create more work for any of you, but it hopefully will smooth out the large flutuations the comments queue has seen recently. The reviews queue max of 50 seems to work well (the site gets about 30 reviews a day), but the comments queue max of 100 seems to have been causing problems when the site is getting about 100 comments a day.

Not a big deal for most people, but Carsurvey.org, and the Mobile Phone and Motorcycle sites, have had changes made regarding error pages.

Rather boring I know, but basically I’ve cleaned up a lot of internal error pages, and replaced them with proper 404 pages. This is to make sure that any error pages don’t get mistaken by search engines or people as real pages.

I’ve done quite a bit of testing, but if anyone spots any errors (regardless of whether you think they may be related to this change), I’d appreciate it if you could let me know.

I’ve made some subtle CSS changes to the top left search box on Carsurvey.org. The text input box is now a pale yellow (rather than white), the Search button itself is bold, and the text size is a little larger. This should make the important search functionality easier to find on the page.

I’m planning to roll similar changes out to the Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites tomorrow.

The Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites are now back in sync with Carsurvey.org.

This means lots of subtle changes such as:

• Narrower navigation, so more space is available for content
• More sensible date formats
• Improved search functionality
• More straightforward CSS