What's Ricochet?

We're a right-of-center community -- one that's united not just by shared principles, but by a desire for a smart, civil and above all lively discussion of the world around us.

Do we all agree on every aspect of policy? No. Do we all march in lockstep with RNC talking points? Of course not.

But, deep down, we're all basically conservative or libertarian. We each dissent from the current, leftward drift in national policy, and we want to see something done about it. And what we're creating, above all, is a strong, unapologetic, civilized, inviting conservative meeting place.

Please join us!

Ricochet Blog

Joined
Feb '10

Busy System Admin

Further Upgrade Headaches

Nov 30, 2010 at 3:22pm

Many apologies up front.

We're still finding bugs after our software upgrade last week. After we hit several of them, we tried reverting to the previous version of the software, but that introduced other bugs, most notably & nbsp; codes all over. So we don't really have a viable backwards "downgrade" path, and we'll have to keep the latest version of the software and work through the bugs one by one.

We wanted to let our membership know what is going on. So here is the current list of major bugs we've found:

Users cannot upload a new avatar.
Some users cannot edit anything on their Profile except their password. When they change their password, the system shows an error, though it does still save the new password.
Login problems. These have partially been fixed, but some issues remain.
After logging in, you are redirected to the home page rather than the page last visited.
You may see & nbsp; codes in your comment when you edit it. Ignore them for now, or replace them with spaces if they force your comment to go over the word limit.

Comment (19)
· UnfollowFollow (1)
· Flag
· Edit
· Promote
· Delete

Joined
Feb '10

Busy System Admin

Server Software Upgrade

Nov 22, 2010 at 6:34pm

Many of you who have been members of Ricochet long enough have experienced the dreaded "login problem." Sometimes (about once a month?) the site will simply log you out and keep you out for a day or two at a time, no matter how many times you log in again. We have not been able to reproduce it in-house long enough to debug it, and it comes and goes; it's been a bit of a ghost problem. We love our content management software platform overall, but we were not sure if it was to blame, or if it was the interaction between other layers in the server software stack.

A month ago, a new release of the software came out. We decided to upgrade, as we were now two versions behind. We were hoping this would resolve this problem and others. Thanksgiving week seemed to be a good time to do it, as traffic is a bit lighter.

After testing the upgrade on a development server all weekend, this morning I rolled out the upgrade on our production servers. No matter how you test, however, you can never reproduce the exact conditions of a running site with a significant amount of live traffic. We immediately found that the login problem actually became universal: no one could stay logged in, or it seemed sporadically to log you in and out.

So, first of all, apologies to all of you who had to suffer through that. I rolled the servers back to our original version, but to really test and debug the problem, I had to switch over to the upgraded version several times throughout the day. I finally realized I needed to upgrade another component of the server software stack, after which the problem seems to have gone away.

Our server is now running on the latest version of the content management software, and the login problem seems to be resolved. We hope it is resolved for good, but do please let us know if you run across it again.

There are many things for which each of us can be thankful if we care to think about it. My job as architect, sysadmin and lead developer of this site is hard at times, but I mostly love my work and am very thankful for this opportunity. I hope each of you is somehow enriched by Ricochet.

Thanks for being readers and members! You are the reason we are here, and the reason I get to work on such a great site every day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Comment (22)
· UnfollowFollow (2)
· Flag
· Edit
· Promote
· Delete

The Logo

Keeping Up

Nov 19, 2010 at 1:14pm

Let’s say you drop in on Ricochet over morning coffee, read a few conversations, add a comment or two, then go on with your day. Later, you come back to see what’s new, and to see how the conversations you read earlier have progressed.

If you’re like us, this involves a test of memory:

“Let’s see, did Duane Oyen’s post have 53 or 57 comments?”
“I did read Claire’s post, ‘Dressing for Turkey’… didn’t I? And was it a recipe or fashion tip?”
“What was the last comment I read on that post by Marybeth Hicks?”

You don’t need more things to remember, do you? Well, we’re here to help.

For starters, we’re working on adding New Comments Indicators to conversations: little, bright orange numbers that appear right after the total number of comments. So if you read a conversation in the morning that has only 23 comments and then in the afternoon it has 35 comments, you’ll see “Comment (35)(12)” at the bottom of the post, with the 12 in bright orange.

Note that we’re not basing these calculations on when you last visited the site, but on when you last opened each conversation. This, I’m told, involves some nifty technical gymnastics. And we have to implement this so it doesn’t delay loading the main information on your page. The net result is that (a) you’ll immediately know if there are any new comments; and, (b) you’ll see which conversations you’ve already read. Eventually, clicking on the New Comments Indicator will take you to the page where the new comments appear, with the new comments highlighted in some manner.

This feature will be restricted to members for mainly technical reasons: we need some way to identify each reader so we can calculate and serve up all these customized numbers, and we see cookies as presenting reliability and performance issues. So, users have to be logged in, and the only mechanism we have for this is through membership.

We have other features planned to help navigation, but I’ll save their discussion for another post.

Comment (5)
· UnfollowFollow (1)
· Edit
· Promote
· Delete

The Logo

Why "Main Feed," and How Will It Change?

Nov 11, 2010 at 2:26pm

We changed the name of the "All Conversations" tab to "Main Feed" because it had become inaccurate: our home page no longer has all the conversations; some of them are in the Member Feed section.

That said, the Main Feed won't change much, and it's our intention to keep it as Ricochet's center stage. Over time, we expect to see about 60% of the conversations initiated by contributors (it was 100% until a few weeks ago), with the remaining 40% divvied up between conversations initiated by partners (like this), news items (like this), and, of course, members (like this).

The Logo

Revealing What Half the Country Already Knows

Nov 11, 2010 at 11:52am

As the above Inside Ricochet box suggests, Ricochet is based on the premise that conservatives have been consistently mis-portrayed by some of the loudest voices in our culture: broadcast news celebrities, editors at urban newspapers, activists, entertainers, university humanities professors, etc. Not all of them, of course -- the Wall Street Journal and Fox News are notable exceptions -- but the sense one gets from watching SNL, seeing a movie, reading the New York Times, listening to NPR or getting a BA degree is that conservatives are ignorant at best, evil at worst.

Well, our experience has been the complete opposite. Everywhere we've looked, in every industry and community, in offices and neighborhoods across the country, we've encountered smart, clever, savvy right-of-center men and women – accomplished, thoughtful voices from the conservative end of things.

And that's what Ricochet's about. Revealing the broadly-conservative community as we know it to be, and making sure we're able to keep out the few bad apples who give conservatism a bad name. Since launching a few months ago, we've been enormously gratified at the quality and civility of the conversations on site, and now we want to start giving our members a greater voice.

The member feed page we’re introducing today is one step in that direction. We'll add more to this in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Comment (3)
· UnfollowFollow (1)
· Edit
· Promote
· Delete

Joined
Feb '10

Busy System Admin

Introducing "Inside Ricochet"

Sep 7, 2010 at 2:07pm

We're launching a new sub-page on Ricochet.com-- "Inside Ricochet." If you're curious about where we are going with the site, about upcoming features and known issues, and any other Ricochet news, this is the place to come!

Comment (6)
· UnfollowFollow (1)
· Flag
· Edit
· Promote
· Delete

Pages:
1
2
3
4

Upcoming Features

Private Messaging

Status: Completed

Simple, private member-to-member messaging.

Keywords / Tags

Status: Not Started

The ability for Members and Contributors alike to add keywords or tags to their Conversations. This should allow people to find them more easily. In addition, this will allow us to place a list of "Related Conversations" at the end of each Conversation, generated automatically from the similarity in keywords between conversations.


© 2012 Silent Cal Productions	Help • About • Contact • FAQ • Code of Conduct • Terms & Conditions • Privacy • Store • Site Map • DMCA