TAY software upgrade - Feedback requested!

First I would like to say thank you Marcus for running the site.

It would be great to have the ability to upload KMZ files along with with photos. Embedding youtube and other videos, as mentioned by mikerolfs would be great as well.

For me the most important thing in any upgrade is to avoid breaking links to old posts.

Certain other local sites (which shall remain nameless but which have more than one "C" in their name) have done a terrible job of this.

Ideally, the URL of a thread or individual post should never change.

Beyond that, I favor keeping the monthly organization of the trip reports. It makes it easier to find things (sort of like a journal) and it helps move the discussion along. Topics in previous months tend to die out pretty quickly as people move on.

I visit TAY frequently, so I don't really need it, but some sites (NWHikers.net is one) have a "notify of followup post" feature that lets you know if somebody has replied to a thread that you've participated in. Might be nice, but it would also be good for frequent visitors to be able to turn it off.

Thanks Marcus! (and anonymous helper)

I visit TAY frequently, so I don't really need it, but some sites (NWHikers.net is one) have a "notify of followup post" feature that lets you know if somebody has replied to a thread that you've participated in. Might be nice, but it would also be good for frequent visitors to be able to turn it off.

Are you looking for a profile-level setting for this, or an individual thread setting (or both)? The latter is currently available and I think you can achieve the former with a few changes to your notification settings in your profile.

w.r.t. migrating to the cloud, think it through before you move. Hosting + storage for forum data can get expensive quickly. But the tradeoffs in scalability, reliability and support/maintenance might be worth it. One thing to consider would be providing image hosting backed via a cloud storage service (e.g. Amazon's S3). The APIs are easy to develop such a feature with and then the problem of TRs losing their photos when the hosting service goes under or URLs change vanishes.

I agree with adding a feature to easily embed streaming video - most modern message board platforms support this (e.g. TGR's forums).

Other than that, just keep it simple and don't make too many dramatic changes all at once!

Also to note if you end up using AWS S3, I work for aws and support it for all of our customers if you run into snags.

Marcus,

Sounds ridiculous when I say it but I like modern emoticons. If the forum had the ability to redirect (or directly host, but I imagine storage req's would skyrocket) all kinds of other files like movies, GIFs, KMZs, etc that would be great too.

Your individual work is much appreciated by me. If upgrade cost is an issue I'd make a donation if you pass the PayPal basket around.

Total non-essential wish list items, but there are some very smart skiers and Seattle is a tech town now so I'll throw them out there.

1. A map with tours on it that links to a list of all associated TR's going back in time. I'd like to be able to search by area (visually) rather than just by name, so that if I'm curious about an area I could just pull up the map and see if anyone had been there before.

2. a way to cross reference trip reports with a database of weather data a bit more efficiently than it currently is, in particular snow fall data vs. road access coverage. I'd imagine that in time, someone smarter than myself could create a bit of software that could guess the probability of you driving to a given trailhead.

regarding realistic requests, I'd second whoever asked for on-site photo hosting. It'd be great if TAY would store photos and their associated trip reports together forever.