BBC Internet Blog - David Williams

Trialling search on BBC message boards

David Williams David Williams — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:12:04 +0000

Today we are trialling a search feature for BBC messageboards.

Initially, we will trial this on the Food messageboard with a three month history, which means that these search results will include comments from the past three months. You can find this on the right hand panel on the board in a box called 'Search recent posts'.

The team will be monitoring the database traces carefully to measure the impact on performance. Once we are confident that search is not affecting the ability to deliver the other services offered by DNA we will start to enable search on other messageboards which have been migrated into the new templates.

I've asked Mark Neves, the lead database engineer on the team, to provide some insight into how we delivered this and you can find Mark's blog post here.

David Williams is Product Lead, DNA, Audience Publishing Services, Programmes and On-Demand, BBC FM&T.

Changes to BBC Message Boards: Updates and fixes

David Williams David Williams — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:05:01 +0000

Today we are building the release candidate for the next version of DNA which includes a number of updates for the BBC's messageboards.

This will be deployed to our internal staging server for final testing ahead of a release scheduled for next Wednesday.

Here is a list of items that will be addressed:

- "Reply to" post to work across all pages.

- Posting frequency message to be correctly displayed instead of 'blocked'

- Posting frequency countdown to work correctly

- Remove confusing text when 'post is being moderated'

- Change to the correct set of emoticons for messageboards

- Empty pages on a Forum when number of threads was a multiple of the number shown.

- Large negative numbers to be eliminated from 'new posts' count on my discussions page.

- CSS fix for tiny column widths on Safari browsers

- Remove excessive amounts of pagination buttons on Forum page

- Fix an issue where an error prevented the posting button working

- "Stars" return for online users

- Main column width to be increased slightly

- "Reply" and "Report this" links location move to reduce accidental clicking

- Back to top button to be added

- Emoticons in brackets causing bad formatting of posts

- Each messageboard will be able to supply custom set of emoticons

- Editors and notable posts now highlighted.

- Last contribution on my discussion page to be a link

- An issue where the incorrect title of a messageboard is being shown

- Fix a typo in help text

- Fix an issue where centre column overflowed into the right hand panel when links where at the start of a post

- Fix an issue where threads were sometimes incorrectly being shown as closed

- Display name wrapped to two lines and shortened for long names

I'll keep you informed on further developments in future posts.

Thanks

David WIlliams is Product Manager, BBC FM&T Social

Changes to BBC Message Boards: Update

David Williams David Williams — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:20:22 +0000

I thought I'd just give a short update following my last post about message boards.

I will try and make this as free from jargon or 'techie' speak as possible, even though this is the internet blog, where we occasionally get a bit 'geeky'.

I'm not going to deny there are some bugs that need fixing or there are some extra features you'd like to see.

In the release deployed on Wednesday we delivered a number of fixes:

· Fixed an issue with link (url) translation.

· Increased security by preventing the submission of malicious code in posts.

· Tidied up some general formatting issues in posts.

This release is half way through our current sprint and there are more items being worked on presently.

I'd also like to point out my team isn't just working on messageboards. We're a small team that has many projects to work on. In addition to the messageboards we provide the comments on blogs, moderation tools and backend services to manage complaints, services for BBCiPlayer social features, 606 and h2g2 articles and forums.

We're also working on a significant project involving data mining/business intelligence technology that will allow us to have more detailed insights into how moderation works across all the BBC's social media services.

Additionally we are looking at various ways we can enable search across messageboards and blog comments. I'm not just talking about the Food or Archers messageboard, this is across all user generated text content across the whole BBC.

Originally we had this feature and it worked well when the scale of user contribution was small. As this has scaled up it has become an interesting challenge for us.

Indexing dynamic content compared to statically published pages is a real challenge. We have multiple levels of caching to prevent us being overwhelmed by search engines (bbc.co.uk receives 10% of UK internet traffic) and to stop them killing our ability to deliver content (and we also prevent spiders/web crawlers visiting us), so to enable search on our 250 GB database isn't a small feat.

It's something we are tackling though, and we need to find a solution that is cost effective for the license fee payer and can be supported across the various services live operation so it's as reliable as possible.

David WIlliams is Product Manager, BBC FM&T Social

Changes to the BBC Messageboards

David Williams David Williams — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:20:00 +0000

I'm the current Product Manager for the technical team delivering BBC messageboards. You may have noticed we have recently refreshed the boards.

We had two main objectives when we began work on the messageboard refresh project:

Bringing the visual design in line with the visual refresh happening across the rest of bbc.co.uk and that the messageboards have a consistent format that is familiar to audiences from around the site.
Providing the hosts of the messageboards a simple to use, yet powerful set of administration tools enabling them to be kept more up to date and relevant to the audience.

In delivering the first we developed, what we call internally, the vanilla skins that produce semantically marked up and accessible HTML with basic styling. These follow the visual format of the refresh occurring on other areas of the BBC website and a standardised layout. Each messageboard can optionally be configured with a CSS file that applies the look and feel of the host site.

For the second we developed a brand new administration tool with a task oriented interface that allows hosts a straightforward way to manage their messageboards. This includes the creating and archiving of topics, setting opening and closing times, specifying the custom CSS file mentioned above and the various banners and navigation elements.

However, we didn't want to just update what already existed with a fresh lick of paint, so we added new features such as:

The ability for a host to pin a topic to the top of a topic list page so hosts can highlight items of interest to the audience.
A panel showing the most recent discussions across the messageboard so the audience can see where the active conversations are taking place.

Delivering the new Messageboards

Any non-trivial software project requires a process in place to ensure successful delivery. The team responsible for the messageboards product, like many other at the BBC, uses Scrum, an agile software development methodology.

As Product Manager, in Scrum terms I fulfil the role of the 'Product Owner', representing the stakeholders and the business on the team. Our stakeholders are many and varied and include representatives across all divisions of the BBC and ultimately our audiences.

Scrum is an iterative process and each iteration is known as a sprint. During the sprint the development team focus on the objectives outlined in a planning session, except in the case where major bugs are discovered or reported. In that instance the team will focus on squashing them as soon as possible. The definition of major bug typically includes instances where the service is completely unavailable.

Our sprints are two weeks long and at the end of each we review what has been delivered, examine whether business or product priorities have changed, and plan appropriately the items we will work on next. This includes reviewing all bug reports we have received, feature requests from stakeholders and including those of high priority into the sprint's work. Approximately once a month we release all the work that is completed.

Major sources of feedback for us are from those using the product every day and every feature idea and bug report makes its way into our product backlog where it will receive a priority with the other items there.

Some notes

The team delivering the messageboard product is part of a larger team, known as Social within FM&T, that is responsible for many of the social elements appearing across bbc.co.uk.

One part of the platform the messageboards are developed on is known as DNA, as eagle-eyed members of the food messageboard have already identified here, and it is indeed named after Douglas Noel Adams. h2g2 was the first product built on the platform.

Thanks for reading.

David Williams is Product Manager, BBC FM&T Social