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Site upgrade work - feedback here

We are working to upgrade this site to have following new features

- A new 'theme' for better look and feel and navigation

- A 'group' based design so that we can support more cities and easily provide online presence to active citizen's groups

- A restructured home page for Bangalore site to give exposoure to active as well as new content

We dont have the luxury of separate site or teams for testing purposes. But we are doing our best to make sure that site upgrade work doesn't impact readers and authors.

If you encounter any 'defects' or problems using or navigating the site, please email us via the contact form, or simply leave a comment here.

cheers,

Praja Admin Team

blrsri's picture

my take..

1. Top Banner needs to be spruced up..the old one was good

2. Font guess is Times New Roman..think the old ariel was good

3.some how the allignment has gone awry..I see the laft nav and the right nav only and the content is rt at the bottom

4.should there be a file upload feature?

tech's picture

Rolled back for now

Sri, and others, we have rolled back site 'theme' changes due to discovery of a late breaking problem seeing the site in IE 6. Our stats tell us that about a third of our readers use IE 6, and thats too big a number to ignore.

Thanks for your patience folks, and sorry for the trouble. stay tuned, we will keep the site operational even while we work on upgrades this week.

santsub's picture

I can help

I can help in Creating Identity (like logos), banner and site architecture.. if you are looking for help. Please feel free to contact me.

tech's picture

wonderful offer

Thanks santsub, will contact you with details.

Folks, actually, we need lots of help. Some on technical side, and a lot on operating the site - moderating, tracking local bodies (Ex: watch BBMP/BMRC sites and posting updates). A call for hep will follow once this current round of site work is over.

 

 

kbsyed61's picture

I can help in testing and validation !

Guys,

 

I can help with the testing and validation.

 

 

adiraj_09's picture

Just a suggestion

Can we have some great landmarks of Bangalore in the background of our Home page which represents both cultural and modern heritage bangalore (Ex snaps of Vidhana Souda/ITPL/ISKON/Hebbal Flyover/BMTC Volvo/BIAL etc)
admin's picture

Look and feel and colors

Thanks for the suggestion adiraj. We have got some feedback via email about colors and banner in general. The colors and banners are not final yet. We are working on them right now. Meanwhile folks, please do point all problems related to structure and functionality you come across.
Thanks for the offer Syed. Please play around on this site, and on beta site and report problems to us.
Photoyogi's picture

New Design some ideas

I would agree with blrsri that the old top banner looked better. I understand that praja is running Drupal CMS there is an option in the users profile to allow the user to select the themes can we have that? Reg the file upload feature, its going to be quite resource hungry from the back end, would leave it to the FlickR / YouTube links. Might be good to have a report abuse module am looking at this as the site grows you will have a SnR issue (Signal to Noise Ratio) ;-) Admin side: Adsense anyone? To keep the site up and running (not sure if am stepping on someones toes here) Captcha -- will ensure you dont have Bots making new accounts its an admin nightmare. Personally I manage a Drupal Site for my community, and am keen on contributing some admin tips where it might add value. -- Praveen Sundaram AkA PhotoYogi

-- PhotoYogi

blrsri's picture

neat work!

The layout now including the title bar is quite professional..neat work!

One other suggestion is the 'recent comments' section..this can have the forum/blog title instead of 'by someone' or maybe both!

tsubba's picture

where

beta.praja.in or bangalore.praja?
blrsri's picture

rt nav on the forum/blog page

Sorry that was a suggestion..rt nav is not on the forum/blog page..was wondering if we could use that space intuitively!

btw the beta site is awesome macha!

santsub's picture

Beta Site

Its cool. I am sure you are still working on it. May be there will be more definition in terms of content placing and branding. Its very nice though. Are you using a CMS tool? or CM Portal I see three column layout very evident :) - just curious.

Thanks

santsub's picture

Are we changing the Mysore Praja Site too?

Born Bangalorean - love Bangalore and I want to see what I can do for the city in particular and our state to make it a better place.
admin's picture

CMS

Thanks for your feedback and curiosity Wink. We are using Drupal CMS and we have really enjoyed working with it. We are planning to post a 'credits' page soon after all the site upgrade issues are sorted out.
blrsri's picture

search issue?

When I try to use the search feature on the top banner..it appends '20' at the begining of the search string and this makes it render no results returned..

I use IE6

admin's picture

problem noted

Will work on fine tuning email subscriptions. Meanwhile please try to leave site specific feedbacks on this forum topic created for the purpose, or else we might miss seeing them.
admin's picture

Search issue - fixed

Thanks blrsri for letting us know! The error was due to an enhancement that worked great with Firefox. Now I have disabled that enhancement and hence search should be alright. -Admin
Naveen's picture

Google Search feature - Very thoughtful

Great work with the ready google search feature ingrained within the page.

This makes it much easier for all.

madhu_nr's picture

e-mail updates

Guys,

Is there a way to reduce the number of update e-mails from the site? I tend to get about 8 to 10 emails on the same topic, possibly one for every update to the thread. may be there is a way to send one consolidated mail per day?? is there any setting on the site that I can make for this?

 

Thanks and regards

Madhu

Madhu

blrsri's picture

refresh issue?


I am not sure if this is a issue..but one thing observed on both IE and firefox is a page refresh issue..scenario..
1. Read a comment on a forum/blog
2. Move to the home page
3. Click on another new comment on the same forum/blog from left nav
4. User taken to the page visited earlier(step 1) and not the new  page with the updated comment
 
This could be just a small config to stop making pageloads from cache or something..
 
admin's picture

problem with user profile page

Folks, we have a problem with the user profile page. When mentioning your website or blog page, you must type the full address starting with "http...". Otherwise, a bad website address gets generated.

While we will try to fix the problem, users may want to 'correct' their website addresses on their profile.

cheers,

Admins

idontspam's picture

Mobile firendly

Site doesnt render well on my pocket PC is it possible to have a mobile friendly version?
Photoyogi's picture

Reg rendering on mobile

Hi Idontspam, I use http://www.opera.com/prod... it came preinstalled on my mobile it works great! -- Praveen Sundaram AkA PhotoYogi

-- PhotoYogi

idontspam's picture

Already have a browser

I use windows mobile 6 and it already uses IE. Its just that the headers and the leftmost menu column wraps up ugly and I have to scroll all the way down to read text. THe text piece is quite okay but since there is a lot of graphics it takes time to load on my GPRS network. It would be good to have a replicated text only (no images) page where I can read & post from my mobile.
admin's picture

Mobile version

idont spam, we will surely work on a mobile version of the site but let us say that it is not the highest priority for now. We have more critical issues with the site now than we can handle :) Now, coming to what you can do in the meanwhile, you can install Opera since it is a faster and more standard compliant browser than IE. IE is a fairly buggy browser and most websites have to make hacks just to make things work with IE. We often have problems when the pages wont render on IE on desktop even with our standard compliant theme. The others (probably easier) way is to use the google's mobile converter. Just go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n , enter the website (and tick images off if you want) and you are all set! Disclaimer: I have not tested either of these.
idontspam's picture

Dont bother

Google converter was a lot faster and is a good suggestion except I couldnt get around to posting anything. It probably doesnt handle cookies very well and was asking me for uid password everytime. But good for just browsing anyway. Just checked... turns out Opera for mobile isnt free!
demolisher's picture

Ur site truly represents Bangalore..

Ur site truly represents Bangalore.. both developed in ad-hoc unplanned basis

:)

silkboard's picture

only difference is

We wont get any funds (your tax rupees) via JN-NURM :)
tsubba's picture

rofl

that was a fast. rofl. thanks for the laff.
admin's picture

Subscription feature - update

Subscriptions feature has received an update. Please change your subscriptions settings by going to 'My account' -> 'Subscriptions' -> 'settings'. Please do report bugs. Help on subscriptions is here.
blrsri's picture

login is erratic

there is some problem with login on all browsers..it logs one out after a comment is posted and in IE 6 it takes login pasword twice before one can log in..

Also on the left nav..the comments are shown with their title and name of the person who logged..however it would be very useful to have the context or the forum/blog that the comment has been done on!

shas3n's picture

Login issues

blrsri, I am unable to reproduce the error at my end so am not sure what might be the problem. Can you try loggin out, clearing all the cookies and re-log in? Thanks for the suggestion about recent comments. We will soon change the code so that each user can have his/her preferred way of seeing the site. Please bear with us till we test it all out. -Shastri

-Shastri

Naveen's picture

Site Upgrade - Same problems

 

There is a problem with login for me too - On all browsers, I need to login twice & logout twice !

On the left panel, earlier comments were shown with the thread they referred to, however after the upgarde, this is no longer the case.

Can something be done about this in due course ? Thanks.

 

silkboard's picture

A mail with more details

Naveen/Sri, and others - could you send shastri/myself a little detailed mail with problems you see. I too am unable to see the problems you mention.

Please do clear "cookies" (clean temporary internet files in IE, or ctrl+shift+delete in firefox) once and see if problem goes away.

tsubba's picture

thomson & thompson

same to same problems only. to be precise the only problems are same to same. it looks like it is looking for thomson and thompson to login.
shas3n's picture

Billions of billious barbecued blue blistering barnacles!

OK cut the suspense and tell me what exactly happens :P Is it that you give the uid/password and (it does not give any error and) the log in box is still sitting there staring at you like a dumb commenter on rediff message board? What happens if you dont give the password again but just click on any story anyway? Do you see comments box then? Do you see the appropriate menu items without giving the password second time? Does the problem still persist when you clear the cookies? I guess this is a consequence of the website software trying to be a bit resource 'kanjoos' when there are too many users. Now with increased number of users, it is acting kanjoos more often. It was designed to be easy on the servers when there are many people. But this clearly is a case of the treatment being worse than the disease. Well, the good news is that this can be overcome. Just have to make sure that we have to keep the knob turned somewhere between 'Kill the web server' and 'Make user throw monitor our of the window'. -Shastri

-Shastri

santsub's picture

Its Try and Try - Thompson

Shastry

Its nothing but it stares at you like you never entered the Login ID and Pswd. But in my case after 2 attempts its logged me in :) - so anybody has a different story>??>

shas3n's picture

try madi nodi

Please try now. Log out (log out twice if you have MPD)and clear the cookies before trying again. Have disabled page cacheing. Its frustrating that I can not reproduce the problem. So have no choice but to ask you folks to test. Sorry and thanks. -Shastri

-Shastri

tsubba's picture

request

is it possible to have printer friendly view for all content? some of the longer threads, if we can see content in a two column page or a single column page it makes for easy reading.
admin's picture

Printer friendly versions

Your wish has been granted :) You should now be able to see 'printer friendly version' link below each post that opens a printer friendly version of the page with the post, the comments and all the links used in the posts. Please let us know if something does not work as it should. -Admin
Naveen's picture

Feedback - Thundering Typhoons :)

 

Hi Admin Team -   Nice Logo & Images - the Namma Metro Way !

Unable to post feedback on 'Feedback', & hence posting it here (please move it where you think it fits better, if required).

When I Login, the Logged In confirmation (LogOut Icon) does not appear, unless I close IE6 & reopen it - the 'Post Comment' box, as a result also does not show up - so, I need to Login twice & at the bottom, my name is shown twice after this - this has been the case since the beginning, & I see a lot of folks, incldg TS logging in twice (their names appear in duplicate) - same problem ?  or is it for administrative reasons that they LogIn twice ?

Appreciate a reply when you have time, thanks.

 

Very good graphics

The graphics developed are very good and appealing towards the city's architectural heritage.

tango08's picture

Some suggestions

1. Prevent people from flooding the site with posts and drowning other contributions. How about a time limit between posts on the same thread? This will also keep a check on people who use this forum for chit chat or for frivolous debates. 2. Stop people from abusing this platform to drive traffic to their personal website.
admin's picture

Thanks Tangoo8

thanks for the feedback Tangoo8.

To run the site in as democratic fashion as possible, you have to give all a chance to speak. If some subject is popular, and fits with the site's moderation theme (refer to FAQ), it is okay.

But we know what you are saying here, we will facilitate discussions on civic subjects of critical interest and concern for our city, and we will do that by providing "deep" visibility to those on the frontpage. One way would be to have more 'tracking pages' or "issue pages". Stay tuned.

About users promoting their personal blogs, we can disable signatures, but even after that members can always paste a signature in their comments.

If members want to point out similar article/blogs they have written in past, pointing to those is always alright. We'd prefer that members use this site as the primary place to post their Bangalore civic issue related thoughts and suggestions. As a rule, cross posting is okay, but we'd request that members try to drive discussions on this site as opposed to personal blogs (because the single biggest aim of this site is to bring together like minded folks and potential activits).

Well, there will be more challenges as we grow. But we will keep at it :)

VishalMaharaj's picture

opinion

 

1) the "Home" , " Groups", "Bangalore" buttons need to be more pronounced and spruced up.

2) The main buttons somewhat look hidden/lost in the picture.

 

kbsyed61's picture

Screen gets smudged !

Recently i noticed that some of screens contents are getting smudged from adjacent frames.

 This can be noticed on

http://bangalore.praja.in...

 

Contents from "Your Vote -The New Airport At Devanahalli Should Be:" is getting superimposed on the comments section.

 

Syed 

tsubba's picture

sure

thanks syed for pointing these out.
admin's picture

Fixed

Thanks Syed, fixed this.
shas3n's picture

[site issues] Log-in twice - Fixed

Traced the problem to a wrong cookie setting. Apparently it was only for people who were accessing the site through 'http://praja.in' and not for 'http://bangalore.praja.in'. Fixed it. Please report if you still have problems. Note: there might still be issues with page caching (your computer not re-loading a fresh page after you log in) that still make you see the log-in screen. This can not be solved at our end but you can easily overcome this by pressing Ctrl+R (Command + R on Mac) in Firefox or Internet Explorer. -Shastri

-Shastri

anusha_singh's picture

Why dont you add Mangalore

Hi Praja is doing a lot to the people of Bangalore and Mysore.  At the same time why dont you add Mangalore into your city list so that the problems at Mangalore could also be adhered to and get resolved. 

Anusha 

always active

Anusha 

always active

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