Important Announcement: TheSabre.com Site Updates

On Thursday morning, TheSabre.com will launch a site redesign. The reasons, notes on ad serving, and some message board changes are below, but the transition is scheduled for 8 a.m. and should be mostly seamless.

As always, however, if you have questions or find some bugs as you move around the site, please let us know!

The New Design

For those interested, here’s a quick rundown on the site design changes. At the end of August 2013, we launched a version of the site that served us for almost three full years. It looked like this:

2016AD_site_home001b

The August 2013 site design had many advantages for us with little change for you the fan other than some nice bonuses on the message boards. First and foremost, this design formatted itself properly on mobile and that was a huge deal for us because more and more people – and thus site visitors – were migrating to smart phones, tablets, and so on. That was a necessary step for the site.

The new design also cleaned up some code and brought our threaded message boards – yes a majority of our fans still prefer this style! – up to date there as well. All in all, it improved the home page with a larger feature photo, movable blocks, and improved ad space while also getting better on mobile.

So far, so good. However, while our threaded style got a facelift, it still didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles that so many fans have gotten used to on other forms of social media. Over the past two years, we did a lot of work in that area. We spent some time redesigning our boards to display differently on a phone and gave you the option to look at it in a classic threaded style or a more modern topic style on your mobile devices too. While we were at it, we introduced some other things like plus-minus voting, star ratings, and rankings for posters. More on that in a later section.

With all of that work done, we needed to pull the site forward again and that’s what you’re seeing now. Our company worked closely with John J. Donna, a programming consultant to Richweb, our site hosting firm and put together a site that we hope will serve us for years into the future. T

This design brings the home page up to date with other sports sites and trends by giving you a bigger, more splashy home page photo (or graphic) for the current featured article. The sequential articles list is still there, but the graphics and content blocks are bigger in general. There are easier spots to find us on social media – please join us on Facebook, Twitter, and more! – and to search the site as well.

There’s a new circle logo – again keeping with the times – too, but you’ll still see our classic text “TheSabre.com” logo in use as well outside of the main banner on the home page. One other home page change that may take a moment to get used to: menu consolidation. We had two split menus previously, but that is cumbersome and doesn’t work as well on mobile. So we fixed it.

Beyond the home page, we’ve made some font changes as well. Those are fairly minor. It’s the “Play” font, for those who are curious. Inside articles and pages, we use Open Sans.

The site is also leaner and faster. Prior to the redesign, for example, the home page was 1,900 lines of HTML code. The new home page is about 1,150 lines. That efficiency extends throughout the entire site, not just the home page.

Some Ad Serving Shifts

Another advantage of the new site design is that it enables us to better leverage available ad technologies. That’s really important for us as a business.

Here’s how the devices used to visit our site have changed in just six years:

  • July 2010: 95.99% desktop, 4.01% mobile
  • July 2016: 47.73% desktop, 37.29% mobile, 14.98% tablet

Crazy change right? You’re probably noticing the same thing in your own habits. Thus the design changes and mobile updates mentioned earlier. One problem: we averaged five ad spots on desktop, two or three on tablet and one on mobile (phone).

Obviously, we were losing ad impressions at an alarming rate, due to fewer ads being served on table and mobile. To solve the ad impression/revenue problem, we have partnered with a company named Sports Publishers Group. SPG has been on the site since earlier this summer. SPG worked with us to introduce more ads to the mobile platform, and to leverage ad technologies like using “sticky sidebars” to keep ads in view, then refresh them to increase impressions. They also helped us with strategies to place ads in new and different places. You’ll notice a few ads serving between threads on the message boards, for example; that’s new. We also now serve an ad at the bottom of our mobile page views.

In choosing to introduce new ads, we did our best to make them unobtrusive and avoid compromising the experience for people visiting the site. The Sabre does not serve pop-up, pop-under, floating, or other obtrusive ads intentionally. We see this as a community and we want you to enjoy your time here. We are a business, however, and the ad changes you’re seeing with the new site design are necessary for us.

There’s always a risk with serving more ads,. Clutter is a risk and trashy, poorly-programmed ads sneaking through is another. First things first: we do not like serving pop-up ads, takeover ads, or video ads (especially video ads that auto-play with sound). We only want to serve non-obtrusive “display” ads, which consist primarily of pictorial ads or simple animation – no flashing lights, no videos, no pop-ups, etc.

In working with SPG, they have honored our wishes by setting up ad serving campaigns with ad networks that exclude those types of ads. But the tricky thing about ad networks is that advertisers often abuse the networks or skirt the rules. Sometimes it’s intentional and sometimes it’s just a mistake, but when uploading ads, advertisers will often (for example) upload a video ad and classify it as a non-video ad … which means it gets served to our site when it’s not supposed to. Hopefully, these experiences are limited with the new design and we will work with SPG to iron out issues. There have been very few reported issues since switching to SPG earlier this summer.

Message Board Update: No More Downvotes

Alright, enough with the technical talk. Let’s get to what you really want to know with this new design: the message board updates. Based on feedback from the community, here’s information on the changes.

Removed: Downvotes, Star Ratings, and Rankings

We have removed the downvote (minus button) from the boards, as well as star ratings and points rankings. Our goal with the downvote button was to help identify ‘report abuse’ behavior issues, but the button was not really used that way despite our efforts to encourage it. The community quickly grew tired of random down votes, trolling down votes, and so forth. We heard you and axed them.

When viewing a post, you’ll see that we now have a Like button (more on that in a moment), but no more downvote button. You’ll also notice that under a poster’s name, there’s still a listing for their join date and number of posts, but star ratings, points display, and rank display have been removed as well. While we initially thought the latter would be light-hearted fun and a way to foster competitive good posting habits, we now believe that the star ratings and rankings have done more to divide the community and board discourse as well as encouraging downvoting habits to try to influence rankings. This is the best decision for the community.

If you are disappointed that the star ratings have disappeared, we’ve got something new for you, coming soon – keep reading.

Modified: The Upvote (the plus button), Points, and Voting Rights

The upvote (plus button) has been modified into a ‘Like’ button. It will still be a ‘+’ symbol. Next to the ‘Like’ button on a post is a display of how many ‘Likes’ the post has received.

All upvotes registered in the past, using the plus button, have been converted into Likes in our system. So every upvote you’ve ever gotten is still there; it’s just called a Like now. Any place where we used to display “Points” – which used to be all your upvotes minus your downvotes – we are now displaying “Likes.” That’s the total number of Likes you’ve received since we introduced the plus button a few years back, so all your huzzahs have been retained. This, we hope, will encourage good posting habits that create insightful dialogue about the Hoos

Lastly, anyone who is registered and logged in can now Like any post, anywhere. We used to remove voting rights if you had negative points (more downvotes than upvotes), but since there are no more downvotes, there’s no need to restrict voting.

Coming Soon: Achievements

Finally, with star ratings removed, some of the board’s best eye candy has gone away, so we’re introducing something new soon: achievements.

We’re putting the finishing touches on designing a system that will display badges commemorating how long you’ve been on the message boards, how many posts you have, how many Likes you’ve received, how long you’ve subscribed, and more. This will reward not only active posters like the plus/minus system did, but loyal long-time members that may not post as often too. We value all of our community members and appreciate your loyalty to the site. We heard your feedback on the rankings and believe achievements are much more in line with what the community likes and wants. We learned from re-seating ya know!

The new achievements system will commemorate all your hard work and give you bright, shiny, colorful medals to pin to your profile and show the world all that you’ve accomplished.

We’ve worked hard on all the changes – and we still have work to do – but if you find any bugs or unexpected behavior, please let us know, and we’ll do all we can to fix it soon.

Thanks, and we look forward to your feedback … we think 🙂 .

3 Responses You are logged in as Test

  1. Awesome. Keep up the good work. A fan since it was virginiabasketball.com and virginiafootball.com

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