Hi folks,
Just so you all know what's happening, I thought it best that I post regarding impending changes at Lush HQ.
We have again partnered with the HQ Group (who set up the mobile site for us) and they will be helping with the ongoing development on Lush going forward.
Gav will be stepping aside due to personal commitments as soon as we upgrade to the new platform in the next 3 months or so. He has done a brilliant job with the site over the last decade and a half, but is no longer able to allocate the time and energy to maintaining and developing the site.
Right now behind the scenes there is a whole team of developers working full time taking all the bits that make this site great and coding them onto a new platform. What I mean by that is the new home will be familiar feature wise, but also benefit from being a lot more up to date and mobile responsive. All the forum posts, content, GIFs and anything else content wise that is on here will move over.
The chat will join their global service which means that we will have our own Lush protected rooms that no-one other than site members can get in, but members will also have the ability to chat with 1000s of other members from all over the world in global rooms if you want to. We used a cut down version of their chat on the old mobile platform, but you never had access to the global chat (which rocks!).
The new forum will be mobile responsive so you don't need to scroll on your phone. They are just making sure all the forum signatures etc., will work on it. Every category, sub category, and post will be there.
Story wise they are pretty much copying every feature on the site, voting, scoring, tags, badges, competitions etc..
Groups will be improved, but once again also feel familiar with the tags to navigate etc., and you'll have the ability to list events if you want to.
Profiles are probably where you will notice the biggest changes. There will be better albums, media etc.. There is also the same kind of friends, following, followers features, but the layouts will be a bit different to be mobile responsive. They are also copying all the badges, stories, and other functionality over that we have. What they can't do is have animated GIFs as backgrounds although there is a customizable panel at the top. It's to do with Google page load times now as most people view on mobile devices these days and we will be penalized for slow loading pages.
Still on the profiles, there is a really good filter tool that will save you getting unwanted attention from other member groups as well. For example if you don't want attention from single males it will filter them all out of everything so you can focus on seeing activity and feedback from user groups you want to.
I have been told that, "Development will be ongoing for at least the rest of the year making feature upgrades as well as site speed improvements etc. We have a mission critical priority list to get through in the next few months, and only after that is done can we move on to any other features."
Having stuck with the same design and technology for over 15 years, I have to say I'm very excited to see the new site in action. Functionality, speed, responsiveness, features etc. will all be greatly improved.
I will post further details as things progress.
Cheers,
Nicola
Matriarch
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