LEB/LET Improvements & Feedback

jbiloh

Hello Everyone,

The work continues to improve our community and the websites behind it. I wanted to provide a review of what we've done the last two weeks along with what is coming the next couple of weeks:

Completed in the past two weeks:

1. New hosting platform setup entirely on virtualized resources at numerous hosting providers.

2. CloudFlare setup and migrated for both LEB and LET

3. Low End Box WP and plugins all updated.

4. Low End Box moved to new hosting platform

5. Low End Talk environment prepared on new hosting platform, migration scheduled for 2/16/2020 -- Updated, this was completed as scheduled tonight!

6. Low End Talk plugins updated

7. Low End Talk email fixed and SSL fixed

8. Low End Talk registration fixed

9. New writer hired (and discussed rules with her so mistakes happen less often)

10. Hired community member Northern (on discord) to write 4 tutorials per month

11. Discussed future of LEB and LET and my commitment to making our community better with @trewq at length and discussed specific ideas we could implement. Started the same conversation with the balance of the moderation team.

12. Fixed the LET help desk (which we'll officially start using shortly, pending convo with the mods)

13. Got on Discord so I am readily available to anyone who needs me

14. Updated and cleaned up the LEB help desk

15. Removed all references to Deluxe and ColoCrossing

16. Removed all static banner ads

17. Reduced the amount of ad positions available through BSA to increase the value to our advertisers

18. Shuffled some content positioning to make LEB and LET a little cleaner

19. Updated some of the old LEB content pages to make things more consistent and uniform.

20. Answered a whole lot of questions on LET and Discord

21. Posted this thread on LET and a thread on LEB asking for feedback

22. Gained access to all social platforms and posted on Facebook for the first time

Additional Items Completed as of 2/21/2020

Completed:

1. Low End Box email subscriber form on the main page is fixed. It will now send you a confirmation email upon joining and then send you notices each time a new offer is submitted.

2. A second Low End Box tutorial writer from our community has been hired to provide paid content.

3. A social integration has been completed for Low End Box so that posts are automatically pushed to Facebook

4. A voting system to allow users to rate offers has been added to Low End Box

5. Prep and testing is underway to update Low End Talk's vanilla installation, which is scheduled for next weekend.

6. Work continues to troubleshoot why nested comments are not working on Low End Box... working theory is it's CloudFlare related

7. Low End Box and Low End Talk email are now sending via Amazon SES

8. The Low End Talk helpdesk has been cleared down of all old tickets and all new tickets have been replied to, or nearly all. Thanks to our mod team for their great work there.

9. The Low End Talk helpdesk now properly sends email confirmations upon ticket submissions to the end user

10. The Low End Box helpdesk has been cleared down and all old tickets replied to and closed. We've received a lot of new offers recently so we're going to be working to get those written up the next few weeks

11. More work has been done to clean up the back ends and remove old static ads from HVH, ChicagoVPS and ColoCrossing

12. We've been making changes to Low End Box offers that do not conform to our rules or have other issues (thank you community for pointing these things out).

13. We are investigating a bug with the mobile LET theme

14. We are monitoring the loads on the new hosting platform and making changes as needed to make sure the websites stay super fast and stable.

In addition to all of that we are still working to make a bunch of other changes as previously described. More is on the way.

For the next couple weeks we have the following planned:

1. Removing the email mailing list block from Low End Talk

2. Simplifying the Low End Talk header

3. Allowing comments on the threads generated on Low End Talk from Low End Box as suggested by our community members

4. Cleaning up some of the announcement threads so that the main view of LET is cleaner

5. Posting content written by our community members on LEB

6. Hiring more community members to write paid content for LEB

7. Improving the SEO of LEB and LET

8. Monitor and tweak the new hosting platform as needed

9. Ease up on some of the Cloud Flare rules to make sure no one is getting hit with 503's, etc.

10. Work to make the mobile version of LET better (I need suggestions here)

11. Research how we can improve the LET search function

12. Update Vanilla and fix a few back end issues

13. Setup the social integration between LEB, LET and Facebook and Twitter

14. Consider posting LET offers on LEB as suggested by our community members.

And of course I am eager to hear more feedback on all fronts.

Thanks for the efforts so far folks!

thedp

somik

I see you really are trying to fix this mess.

Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

jbiloh

somik said: Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Help me better understand what you mean here.

uptime

@jbiloh said:

somik said: Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Help me better understand what you mean here.

https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts-deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1

EDIT2:

https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161608/another-ex-alpharacks-guys-hosting-company-project

thedp

Mention notifications are not being mailed it seems.

jbiloh

thedp said: Mention notifications are not being mailed it seems.

Today we switched email over its permanent home at Amazon SES (no longer self hosted). If the problem persists past today let me know.

somik

@jbiloh said:

somik said: Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Help me better understand what you mean here.

Something like this, but personalised for LEB. Include their "star" rating in all new posts that they make.

It's the same concept booking.com or agoda.com has been using for their hotels for years. Before I get a hotel for my destination, I can check what other users experienced.

jbiloh

@somik said:

@jbiloh said:

somik said: Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Help me better understand what you mean here.

Something like this, but personalised for LEB. Include their "star" rating in all new posts that they make.

It's the same concept booking.com or agoda.com has been using for their hotels for years. Before I get a hotel for my destination, I can check what other users experienced.

I'll look around to see what type of plugins exist.

Thanks for the idea and explanation!

entrailz

Can we make it so when you go back on mobile to the home page it doesn't take you to the top of the page but instead at the same point you was at? Can get a video if need be.

Jord

@entrailz said:
Can we make it so when you go back on mobile to the home page it doesn't take you to the top of the page but instead at the same point you was at? Can get a video if need be.

I've also noticed this, it's very annoying.

Falzo

@Jord said:

@entrailz said:
Can we make it so when you go back on mobile to the home page it doesn't take you to the top of the page but instead at the same point you was at? Can get a video if need be.

I've also noticed this, it's very annoying.

+1

t0ny0

+1 - super annoying indeed.

jbiloh

entrailz said: Can we make it so when you go back on mobile to the home page it doesn't take you to the top of the page but instead at the same point you was at? Can get a video if need be.

Could someone with more CSS experience help me understand how we would handle that in the Vanilla?

FAT32

@jbiloh said:
Could someone with more CSS experience help me understand how we would handle that in the Vanilla?

Basically you should remove this from the injected script, I don't think this is a correct way to hack this:

MasonR

Is @Nick your tech friend that's helping you out with the technical aspects?

jbiloh

MasonR said: Is @Nick your tech friend that's helping you out with the technical aspects?

No

On a separate thing, does anyone know why in-line comment reply on Low End Box might not be working? I have a suspicion that it might be Cloud Flare related.

jbiloh

@FAT32 said:

@jbiloh said:
Could someone with more CSS experience help me understand how we would handle that in the Vanilla?

Basically you should remove this from the injected script, I don't think this is a correct way to hack this:

I've got a developer friend who might be able to help lend a hand here, too. Thanks for the feedback.

MasonR

@jbiloh said:

MasonR said: Is @Nick your tech friend that's helping you out with the technical aspects?

No

Okay. Reason I ask is because it appears that someone from CC still has admin access to the LE* properties. Not that I think he would do anything nefarious, but if you're trying to distance yourself from CC/Deluxe, a good initial step would be to remove the privileged access of their employees.

jbiloh

MasonR said: Okay. Reason I ask is because it appears that someone from CC still has admin access to the LE* properties. Not that I think he would do anything nefarious, but if you're trying to distance yourself from CC/Deluxe, a good initial step would be to remove the privileged access of their employees.

Good thinking, thank you.

rzlosty

Another vote to fix scrolling to the top when you go back ASAP. It's been like this since forever and it does my tits in.

Ty

ScienceOnline

@MasonR said:

@jbiloh said:

MasonR said: Is @Nick your tech friend that's helping you out with the technical aspects?

No

Okay. Reason I ask is because it appears that someone from CC still has admin access to the LE* properties. Not that I think he would do anything nefarious, but if you're trying to distance yourself from CC/Deluxe, a good initial step would be to remove the privileged access of their employees.

do not be naive, they are always the same people who manage LEB, Biloh and Fabozzi, they have scammed with 25 proven fake brands and now they try to start again, no serious company needs to hide the name and surname of the employees, only the delinquents are hiding , they manage to do it because nobody sues you for 50 dollars and probably in their state the judiciary does not act ex officio but only on a complaint for such cases, in my country such a scam, made publicly would not have gone unpunished even without the lawsuit of a customer, here we are not in the field of opinions, the thing was reported and known to Fabozzi and Jbiloh well before its epilogue, who has been here for years knows that this scheme had already been implemented a few years ago with dollarvps and other fake brands, dollarvps was in the name of a Buffalo pizza maker and the scam was identical to the most recent one, who was there can confirm

jbiloh

somik said: I see you really are trying to fix this mess.

Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Today we added a module to Low End Box to allow people to rate offers. Right now anyone can rate an offer, meaning you do not need to be logged in. We may also enable an official Low End Box rating in the future but for now we are leaving it 100% community votes.

We'll see how it goes.

We also setup Social media integration for Facebook today so LEB posts automatically get pushed there.

somik

@jbiloh said:

somik said: I see you really are trying to fix this mess.

Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Today we added a module to Low End Box to allow people to rate offers. Right now anyone can rate an offer, meaning you do not need to be logged in. We may also enable an official Low End Box rating in the future but for now we are leaving it 100% community votes.

We'll see how it goes.

We also setup Social media integration for Facebook today so LEB posts automatically get pushed there.

That was quick! However I was talking about rating the host itself, not just the offer. This way, once the offer gets a lot of bad rep, they'll just create a new offer with blank slate.

thedp

@jbiloh said:

thedp said: Mention notifications are not being mailed it seems.

Today we switched email over its permanent home at Amazon SES (no longer self hosted). If the problem persists past today let me know.

Still not receiving mention notification mails.

jbiloh

@somik said:

@jbiloh said:

somik said: I see you really are trying to fix this mess.

Would like to see a consolidated list of reviews for hosts. Currently LEB offer reviews are based on their latest post. There isn't any list of providers and reviews. So there is no way to tell which host doesn't have the best intentions.

Today we added a module to Low End Box to allow people to rate offers. Right now anyone can rate an offer, meaning you do not need to be logged in. We may also enable an official Low End Box rating in the future but for now we are leaving it 100% community votes.

We'll see how it goes.

We also setup Social media integration for Facebook today so LEB posts automatically get pushed there.

That was quick! However I was talking about rating the host itself, not just the offer. This way, once the offer gets a lot of bad rep, they'll just create a new offer with blank slate.

This was the closest thing I could find. It does have a feature to have a author rating as well which could be used to mention the rating of a hosts prior offer as of the date of author.

For now let's see how this goes and we can always come back to it.

Jord

I've found another bug, I've just come to check LET. I clicked on @jbiloh Support Desk announcement thread and read through it.

Before doing this it showed me that I had some unread posts. On that thread and this one.

Now when I go back to the homepage I went to check this thread, and it's now no longer showing the unread posts. It's cleared them and made it look like I've caught up even though I haven't.

jbiloh

@Jord said:
I've found another bug, I've just come to check LET. I clicked on @jbiloh Support Desk announcement thread and read through it.

Before doing this it showed me that I had some unread posts. On that thread and this one.

Now when I go back to the homepage I went to check this thread, and it's now no longer showing the unread posts. It's cleared them and made it look like I've caught up even though I haven't.

When did this start happening?

Jord

@jbiloh said:

@Jord said:
I've found another bug, I've just come to check LET. I clicked on @jbiloh Support Desk announcement thread and read through it.

Before doing this it showed me that I had some unread posts. On that thread and this one.

Now when I go back to the homepage I went to check this thread, and it's now no longer showing the unread posts. It's cleared them and made it look like I've caught up even though I haven't.

When did this start happening?

About 5 days ago.

FAT32

@Jord said:
About 5 days ago.

Sometimes it happens to me too, but not sure about why.

Jord

@FAT32 said:

@Jord said:
About 5 days ago.

Sometimes it happens to me too, but not sure about why.

Could it be Cloudflare caching it?

jbiloh

@Jord said:

@FAT32 said:

@Jord said:
About 5 days ago.

Sometimes it happens to me too, but not sure about why.

Could it be Cloudflare caching it?

I think that is possible. I will tinker with the CF settings.

We are going to update the vanilla version on LET here in the next few days as well, so once that is done we can tackle any remaining bugs. Plus the new ones that come from that upgrade.

Jord

@jbiloh said:

@Jord said:

@FAT32 said:

@Jord said:
About 5 days ago.

Sometimes it happens to me too, but not sure about why.

Could it be Cloudflare caching it?

I think that is possible. I will tinker with the CF settings.

We are going to update the vanilla version on LET here in the next few days as well, so once that is done we can tackle any remaining bugs. Plus the new ones that come from that upgrade.

Yeah it's doing that for me all the time now, it's rather annoying.

jbiloh

Couple updates from the last few days of work guys:

Completed:

1. Low End Box email subscriber form on the main page is fixed. It will now send you a confirmation email upon joining and then send you notices each time a new offer is submitted.

2. A second Low End Box tutorial writer from our community has been hired to provide paid content.

3. A social integration has been completed for Low End Box so that posts are automatically pushed to Facebook

4. A voting system to allow users to rate offers has been added to Low End Box

5. Prep and testing is underway to update Low End Talk's vanilla installation, which is scheduled for next weekend.

6. Work continues to troubleshoot why nested comments are not working on Low End Box... working theory is it's CloudFlare related

7. Low End Box and Low End Talk email are now sending via Amazon SES

8. The Low End Talk helpdesk has been cleared down of all old tickets and all new tickets have been replied to, or nearly all. Thanks to our mod team for their great work there.

9. The Low End Talk helpdesk now properly sends email confirmations upon ticket submissions to the end user

10. The Low End Box helpdesk has been cleared down and all old tickets replied to and closed. We've received a lot of new offers recently so we're going to be working to get those written up the next few weeks

11. More work has been done to clean up the back ends and remove old static ads from HVH, ChicagoVPS and ColoCrossing

12. We've been making changes to Low End Box offers that do not conform to our rules or have other issues (thank you community for pointing these things out).

13. We are investigating a bug with the mobile LET theme

14. We are monitoring the loads on the new hosting platform and making changes as needed to make sure the websites stay super fast and stable.

In addition to all of that we are still working to make a bunch of other changes as previously described. More is on the way.

That's all for now. Just wanted to keep everyone informed.

Thanks guys

SCAM_DONT_BUY

@jbiloh Looks like you're really trying to make a change here, so take another issue. On the register page, if you input a "/" in the username field, this happens:

I'm not sure what this is, but it doesn't look too healthy to me.

jbiloh

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll look into what's going on there.

jbiloh

Look what's back:

In the next few days I'll be removing that ugly waste of space email signup box, too.

thedp

There are still ads on the mobile site.

jbiloh

@thedp said:
There are still ads on the mobile site.

The two on the footer are staying.

jsg

@jbiloh

While I understand perfectly well that some still are not happy and that indeed lots and lots of crap still need to be cleaned up ...

it has become clear that you don't just talk anymore but in fact act.

This is very valuable and important because it's the only way to regain our trust and give us a basis to consider you to be an asset to our community rather than a talking-only liability.

A lot of us have bashed you (and you deserved most of it based on our past experience) but it really seems that you are genuinely interested in making LET into a great place again. I want to thank you for taking all the criticism calmly and for actually working to clean the place and to earn our trust.

Thank you! And please continue that route.

jbiloh

jsg said: While I understand perfectly well that some still are not happy and that indeed lots and lots of crap still need to be cleaned up ...

it has become clear that you don't just talk anymore but in fact act.

This is very valuable and important because it's the only way to regain our trust and give us a basis to consider you to be an asset to our community rather than a talking-only liability.

A lot of us have bashed you (and you deserved most of it based on our past experience) but it really seems that you are genuinely interested in making LET into a great place again. I want to thank you for taking all the criticism calmly and for actually working to clean the place and to earn our trust.

Thank you! And please continue that route.

Thank you very much for the feedback and compliments.

Every day I try to make at least one thing better around here. Recently, because there is just so much to fix and improve it has been more than just one thing .

Thanks for being a part of our community!

jsg

@jbiloh

It seems that @teamacc is very unhappy with some things. And I take that very seriously because teamacc has proven long and often enough that he values our community and that he is (was?) willing to put considerable efforts into LET.

I might be wrong but it seems to me that you are indeed changing LET constructively but that you at the same time fall back into the old "talk, talk but do nothing about it" pattern in certain areas, especially when real and credible action is required against scammers, even serial scammers.

Do us - and yourself! - a big favour and start to actually kick out those scammers!

Maybe it will change some day, but as of now you are but a mouse next to a giant, teamacc, in terms of credibility. If someone like teamacc loses trust in you, many will follow him.

jbiloh

@jbiloh

It seems that @teamacc is very unhappy with some things. And I take that very seriously because teamacc has proven long and often enough that he values our community and that he is (was?) willing to put considerable efforts into LET.

I might be wrong but it seems to me that you are indeed changing LET constructively but that you at the same time fall back into the old "talk, talk but do nothing about it" pattern in certain areas, especially when real and credible action is required against scammers, even serial scammers.

Do us - and yourself! - a big favour and start to actually kick out those scammers!

Maybe it will change some day, but as of now you are but a mouse next to a giant, teamacc, in terms of credibility. If someone like teamacc loses trust in you, many will follow him.

Can't please everyone but we're working hard to make our community better every day.

@teamacc has been helpful in pointing our some things that need to be addressed but he doesn't get everything right, either.

I appreciate the contributions of all of our community members.

joepie91

Footer's still there.

jbiloh

joepie91 said: Footer's still there.

I got the FTP logins setup with the firewalls yesterday and gave it to the developer today who is making CSS changes, etc.

Should be gone soon.

Neoon

The question I have in my mind is, why now? and what brought up the idea to "save" LET/LEB from the dead?

SCAM_DONT_BUY

Neoon said: The question I have in my mind is, why now? and what brought up the idea to "save" LET/LEB from the dead?

Lots of money to burn. If he does this a few months ago he could've been a lot more successful.

Neoon

@SCAM_DONT_BUY said:

Neoon said: The question I have in my mind is, why now? and what brought up the idea to "save" LET/LEB from the dead?

Lots of money to burn. If he does this a few months ago he could've been a lot more successful.

Well, to me, it sounds like greenwashing and doing maintenance, that is overdue since a decade.

Brings up old memories, of a company wordpress, that got hacked on a weekly basis, all they did was just restore the backup and here we go again.

jbiloh

Neoon said: The question I have in my mind is, why now? and what brought up the idea to "save" LET/LEB from the dead?

As of a few weeks ago I own Low End Box and Low End Talk (Deluxe/ColoCrossing no longer owns it). So now that I own it and have control I am fixing things up nicely for the community.

Neoon

@jbiloh said:

Neoon said: The question I have in my mind is, why now? and what brought up the idea to "save" LET/LEB from the dead?

As of a few weeks ago I own Low End Box and Low End Talk (Deluxe/ColoCrossing no longer owns it). So now that I own it and have control I am fixing things up nicely for the community.

Well, you still work for colocrossing right?

jbiloh

Neoon said: Well, you still work for colocrossing right?

I do have an advisory role. I am not an employee.