Earlier this morning, we published an update to MaplePrimes that includes two new features as well as some significant efficiency improvements. Highlights of this update include:

Best Answer

Of all the feature requests that we receive, this has been the most popular, and we're excited to see how it is used! Simply, this new capability allows a member to select the 'best answer' from a list of many. This best answer, selected by clicking on a new trophy icon, will always always appear at the top of the list of answers.

Having your answer selected as 'best' will reward you with 7 reputation points, as well as make you eligible to receive one of two new badges to show off your question-answering prowess!

Tag Management

Improving how tags are managed within MaplePrimes has been another long time request from members, and we have made some significant improvements. The first thing that many will notice is that the interface for adding tags to a post or question is now easier to use and (hopefully) faster.

More importantly, however, are the new management features. For starters, only members with a reputation of at least 100 can add brand new tags. If your reputation is less than 100, you can only select from the extensive list of pre-existing keywords. In addition, members with a reputation of at least 50 can now manage tags for existing content by clicking on the new 'Manage Tags' button. It is our hope that this feature will help increase the value of tagging within MaplePrimes by optimizing the commonly-used keywords, and we encourage everyone to take advantage of this new capability!

Efficiency and Stability Improvements

You should notice significant speed increases across all pages within MaplePrimes. On average, page load times have sped up by a factor of 2x, and many times higher in some cases. In addition, interface changes and optimizations have dramatically reduced the file size of many pages, which will make them more responsive in general.

As always, thank you for making MaplePrimes the amazing community that it is! We are hopeful that you will enjoy these improvements, and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Yesterday afternoon, we updated MaplePrimes. The purpose of the update was primarily to squash some bugs and improve user experience.

Highlights of the update include:

• The ordering of replies has been corrected, as described in this post by Carl Love.
  
  
• We fixed a problem whereby some members were unable to attach a file to a question or post.
  
  
• Flagging a comment now works correctly.
  
  
• Broken images that were appearing on some of our older posts have been restored. In addition, some older posts had incorrect dates, and these have been restored.
  
  
• Some embedded links to user profiles or messages were resulting in errors, and have been corrected.
  
  
• After receiving a badge, members will now be notified via a pop-up message.

A number of other small improvements were made as well.

As always, thank you for letting us know when you encounter a problem, and please continue to do so. We take note of everything that you report, and we try our best to prioritize and take care of the issues.

Bryon

Earlier this week, we updated MaplePrimes with some fairly extensive changes that improved site performance. While MaplePrimes behaved as expected for most, a few people experienced some problems logging in, and a few other issues were also reported. If you are a MaplePrimes member inconvenienced by these issues, I apologize and thank you for your patience, and also for reporting the problems. I've had some conversations with a few different members, and your help in describing and diagnosing the problems is very much appreciated.

We have been working hard to resolve these problems, and I'm happy to report that most have now been taken care of.

• The log-in function now works as expected across all browsers. If you are still having problems, you can visit http://www.mapleprimes.com/logout.aspx to force a log-out and reset your browser cookies for MaplePrimes, which will also correct the problem going forward.
  
  
• We have corrected the problem where links to uploaded files were resulting in 404 errors.
  
  
• We have also corrected an issue where the ordering of posts in a user's profile page was done incorrectly.

There are a handful of smaller problems that we continue to work through, and if you notice any other issues, please continue to let us know, either by posting here on MaplePrimes, or by contacting me directly.

Bryon

Earlier today, we posted an update to MaplePrimes that introduces some improvements, and also addresses a few issues. The most significant & noticeable improvements are speed related, and the performance of virtually every function/page on MaplePrimes has been improved dramatically.  The average increase is approximately 2x, but some pages (for example, Recent Questions or Unanswered Questions) benefit from much greater increases!

Other issues/enhancements include:

• There was a problem where MaplePrimes would occasionally send multiple notification messages when a single reply/comment/answer was added to a thread that you are subscribed to. This no longer occurs.
  
  
• MaplePrimes has been added as a clickable option under 'products' when asking a question or creating a post, and MaplePrimes-related topics are now grouped together.
  
  
• The lag between when a new thread is created and when it appears in the right-hand side bar (this lag was often multiple minutes) has been eliminated. 
   
• We added a data-integrity restriction such that if an answer or a reply has been added to a message, that original message can no longer be deleted. Formerly, the original author was able to remove their post, and subsequently all related comments, at any time.

There were a variety of smaller issues corrected as well.

We hit a couple of small bumps in the road during the implementation of the update (for example, there was a temporary issue where replies or answers didn't work), but we believe these have been taken care of. If you encounter any additional issues, please let us know.

We hope that these enhancements and fixes continue to make MaplePrimes more enjoyable to use, and I'm looking forward to your feedback!

Bryon

Last week we added a new feature to MaplePrimes that provides the ability to sort the answers to a question by votes (default setting), or by date. Based on a few of your suggestions to that post, we have enhanced this feature today.

First, you now will notice that there are three options for sorting:

• Sort by votes
• Sort by date (oldest first)
• Sort by date (newest first)