AUK Finances and Website Project was: AUK Chairman Statement

[Arry-R]

, the annual maintenance fee is enormous IIRC.

I believe a sum over £2000 per month was quoted at Stirling
Last Saturday. Or some £25,000 per year approximately to cover looking after the site. Or in other words with say 8500 members then just under £3 each.

[grams]

This table appears in the most recent board papers (costs per annum inc VAT):

1st Line Support
£2,340
2nd Line Support
£12,240
Maintenance
£14,400
TOTAL
£17,980

Anyone notice the minor mistake?

(also none of these things are hosting. Place your bets what they might be charging for that)

[Greenbank]

I'd be surprised if the hosting wasn't covered in the £1200/month maintenance fee, but that's just a guess.

If I'd have known it was going to end up with these kinds of figures (initial outlay and ongoing support/maintenance) I'd have been tempted to tender for it myself.

[grams]

I'd be surprised if the hosting wasn't covered in the £1200/month maintenance fee, but that's just a guess.

That's described as two days per month "bug fixes, simple enhancements" at £600/day.

If I'd have known it was going to end up with these kinds of figures (initial outlaw and ongoing support/maintenance) I'd have been tempted to tender for it myself.

Back of the queue!

[321up]

The detail of how the transition will work hasn't been settled yet.  But in general, I'm supposing the highest-level 'subheadings' as shown in the aukweb blue sidebar will each either work in one site or the other.  So - Joining, Calendar, Perms, DIYs etc.  It's technically possible (and occasionally necessary) to get more fine-grained than that (sub-sub- or sub-sub-sub-headings) but I think both sides will want to avoid that as much as possible.
Calendar seems fairly well-developed on the new site (if you like that sort of thing) so is obviously one of the first general areas where aukweb will switch off and simple forwarding into the new site Calendar will occur.  But the Home page itself might transition quite early in the process too - ie aukweb.net will simply forward to audax.uk - and after that it's down to the new site developers to provide access to the old where appropriate (eg Results, Members, Organisers).

If it's important to you, I'd recommend you bookmark the link to the aukweb page you want ie https://www.aukweb.net/events/download/

Or perhaps AUK could make it easy for us and preserve the menu to all the pages on aukweb.net ?  Perhaps under an 'old website' top level menu?

I gather that we are not the only people who find the calendar and perms event information less accessible on new audax.uk than the old aukweb.net site.  Is there any technical reason why AUK could not continue to provide links to allow people to choose which site they use (at least whilst aukweb.net is still in service)?  It seems to me that would be a trivially easy thing to do and would cost very little or nothing to implement.  Is there any technical reason why the old style pages could not be hosted on the new platform when aukweb.net is retired?  Please explain how AUK can justify removing access to the old style pages when this will make the information less accessible to some people.

An alternative would be to redesign the calendar events and perm events pages on audax.uk so the information is easily accessible to everyone.

[whosatthewheel]

I pay 22 quid per year to Wordpress... 

[Redlight]

In regards to the new website... quite clearly there has been no big announcement yet, someone leaked the new website address and we are being used as guinea pigs to test the site and iron out any issues before an official release - and nothing wrong with that given the subject matter.

To clarify, the website address wasn't leaked. As the work-in-progress version was being shown to attendees at the Reunion last weekend, it seemed only right that it should be made accessible to any member so that people could try it out and give feedback - as many have done. That was my decision, in the knowledge that there was still a fair bit of work scheduled to bring the "back end" up to requirements and that anyone trying to use the site to enter rides, etc, would find that it wasn't yet fully-functioning.  It seemed better, to my mind, to do this, with the exisiting site still operating, rather than "launch" the new site with a lot of fuss and risk members not being able to use it straight away. 

That said, some of the feedback has been very helpful and has identified things that weren't on the schedule so at least we can get them dealt with before the site becomes "official". 

[Bianchi Boy]

Just looked at the event list. There are just too many things against each entry. Simply distance, date, time, ride name and location would be enough. What all the boxes and blank screen areas about? Needs to be slimmed down to the Must in MSCW analysis.

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk

[Manotea]

The old system can't be be turned off but the web pages will become progressively unavailable (forwarding) as the new site develops.  Seems only right, to me.

If I was responsible for maintaining the old system I might agree but as I'm not I don't.

The success of the new system will be measured by its takeup. Turning off the old system for no good reason negates that.

Fact is we're going to be dependent on the old system for event entry and admin purposes for quite some time to come.

So discussions about turning off the old system are beyond premature.

In the real world systems set to be superceded are generally allowed to whither on the vine or at least proper notice given to the point where withdrawal is simply not an issue.

Regardless of whatever approach is taken, all of this might have been thought through, consultation taken and appropriate guidance offered.

(For example, some process for reporting issues arising and the programme for addressing them would have been helpful...)

As is, we have a project which has cost x man years and £100k+ released apparently with no notice or preparation.

Not so much a soft launch as a humpty-dumpty launch...

[Ben T]

Ah hah !  Obviously turned custom errors off. Should be remote only in production. Amateurs 

[Doo]

A really rather splendid site if you don't mind me saying...

[JBB]

Looks OK to me, from a very casual glance.  But I'm a very very very infrequent user of the old site.

The colour coded distances don't work for me, but my colour vision is terrible so hey ...

I clicked on My Audax then View Membership and it crapped out with an unhandled exception (Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.) & stack trace.

Edit: 

If you go to https://www.audax.uk/sitemap/ there's a placeholder showing that shouldn't be there  "____(End of Get Involved)"
Also the prefix hypnens are a bit unsightly, as in "---Top Tips"

The elements on the sitemap are text  and not links to the named pages.
The elements in sitemap do not match the menu drop downs.  Or - more strictly - they nearly do, but not quite.  eg Affiliation, Insurance and Strategy are on the menu but not the site map; History of PBP is on the site map but not the menu.  The Menu item "About audax" is mirrored on the sitemap by "Get involved".  THere are numerous other discrepancies.

On the choose a ride page https://www.audax.uk/choose-a-ride/
The links to DIYs and ECEs are prefixed http: not https:  Therefore the browser throws a wobbly when you click them

It's still rather arcane.  Audax is full of obscure codes and abbreviations.  That's part of the fun.  But this site doesn't go out of its way to explain them.  One example: https://www.audax.uk/results/rrty-roll-of-honour/ This page does not explain what RRtY stands for.  It explains that to qualify you need to have completed "a validated Brevet de Randonneur" each month for 12 months.  But it doesn't explain that "a validated Brevet de Randonneur" is actually a 200km bike ride.  There are other examples too...

OK, one last minor thing.  On search calendar events, you have to enter a full postcode (eg AB1 1AB).  Many, if not most, postcode searches (eg store locators) will allow you to enter just the outbound portion of the postcode (AB1).  I don't know whether the geolocation service that the site uses supports this, but it would be a nice to have.

Right that's it.  I'll take my nitpicking hat off and leave it alone now.

That's not nit picking. All of this should have been caught at System test by the supplier.

[whosatthewheel]

still not picked up by google... I would have thought after a week and a lot of traffic, it would be somewhere on page one.

[Greenbank]

still not picked up by google... I would have thought after a week and a lot of traffic, it would be somewhere on page one.

It requires people to link to the new site, I doubt many people have done that as it is still in "soft launch" mode.

It'll pick up as people move to the new link, and when it gets tweeted about, as that will generate more links to it (albeit mostly from one site [Twitter], but a site that is popular).

[frankly frankie]

That's due to an inconsistency in the aukweb data.  One ride has the facilities codes separated by spaces ('correct') and the other has them separated by commas.

[Chris S]

still not picked up by google... I would have thought after a week and a lot of traffic, it would be somewhere on page one.

One reason for that is the lack of SSL support. Google downgrades any site that's HTTP-only; and will soon ignore them completely I think.

[Greenbank]

HTTPS is in the Real Soon Now (TM) bucket though.

[Chris S]

HTTPS is in the Real Soon Now (TM) bucket though.

 

With the advent of LetsEncrypt, there's no reason whatsoever not to default to https.

[Greenbank]

Ah, they must have done it recently as I checked the other day.

Ah yes, certificate valid from 27 November 2018 so they've finally gotten around to sorting it out.

[Ben T]

If you set a URL with an invalid event id the website barfs rather than displaying a nice error page, eg https://www.audax.uk/event-details?eventId=999999
As BenT says above if you set custom errors to RemoteOnly then users in the real world will get a nice error page rather than a technical splurge.

that's your own fault for not setting your object reference to an instance of an object. 

Also I tried to enter event 2147483648 this morning and it didn't even get that far

[citoyen]

That's due to an inconsistency in the aukweb data.  One ride has the facilities codes separated by spaces ('correct') and the other has them separated by commas.

...which is because organisers have a free text field to enter this information rather than, say, a series of check boxes.

Someone earlier (maybe in a different thread) asked why we don’t give users a free text field to enter their address. This example highlights why not.

[FifeingEejit]

Removal of entered rides from your calendar is on aukweb too, it's a good question though why would you want to?

[Greenbank]

If I knew I wasn't going to make the event any more (and had told the organiser that so he can reuse my space, and not expecting a refund, etc) I'd want to remove it from my calendar. So I can see why it could be useful for some.

[Bianchi Boy]

Just been pondering the difference between farther and further and found the item below -

"The quick and dirty tip is to use “farther” for physical distance and “further” for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It's easy to remember because “farther” has the word “far” in it, and “far” obviously relates to physical distance."

So maybe it is correct after all the hand wringing.

BB

[JonJo]

Anyone else not able to log into the old site? Doesn't recognise my creds but I definitely haven't changed them. Apologies if posted in wrong thread but I thought it may have something to do with the new site.