Changes to DealerRefresh

[Alex Snyder]

You may have already noticed some significant UI changes here. The big one is the list of latest posts has changed. The old version was an outdated plugin that threw 656,267 errors since the last error log cleaning. It has been broken since 2023, but it is such a useful tool that we elected to keep it. It has also been holding us back from some site upgrades and maintenance.

Now there is Claude Code!

Working with Claude, we developed a native plugin that is now at the top of the forums. Now, we can start making more meaningful upgrades. The second one was to clean up the various navigations to simply things. Third, was to emphasize the current visitor count as it is growing.

There are a number of pipes to clean in the background now. After that, we plan to work on all sorts of stuff. Can't wait!

Thank you @craigh for hooking up Claude and all the infrastructure work you've done. Fingers crossed, we don't have to call you with an ooops.

 

[darrenstromain]

@Alex Snyder The Latest Post Times are off - says my last post was yesterday at 5.21 pm, but it was today at 1.21 pm.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Thanks - will adjust.


EDIT: Done!

 

[Zack_AF]

Nice!

Just FYI, noticed under the forum list section on mobile, you can't read the topics anymore as they get cutoff (using a mobile emulator on my laptop for the image below).

On my Galaxy S22, some of the topics don't display the first letter or two and you physically cannot click into the thread as that's the hyperlinked part unless I turn my phone horizontal, then it displays everything and can click in fine.

 

[Alex Snyder]

We can get that taken care of.

EDIT: Done!

 

[Alex Snyder]

Latest Replies Widget Updates

We've made a few improvements to the Latest Replies section on the homepage:

• Jump to where you left off — clicking a thread now takes you directly to your first unread post instead of the top of the thread.
• Thread labels — prefix tags (like REVIEW, PR & News, etc.) now show on each thread row, so you can see the category at a glance.
• Read/unread indicators — logged-in members will see a blue dot and a subtle highlight on threads they haven't read yet, making it easier to spot new activity quickly.

 

[joe.pistell]

ohoh... Alex and Claude Code are flexin'

 

[Alex Snyder]

Yup @joe.pistell - this is just the beginning. My initial goals are to boost SEO (which is already amazing) and push new visitors to become members.

Here is a teeny tiny change to kick off the morning. I changed the styling of the Xenforo "Notice Board" feature to be much more in-your-face. With yesterday's Visitors online widget, there are 3 calls to action on the home page to get someone to become a member.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Making some tweaks to the new Visitors Online widget. Combined it with the forum stats.



In building this, I realized our old forum agency had plumbed all the ad positions directly into the pages and not into Xenforo's own positioning system. We had to write a hack to get this new widget to show above the ads on the sidebar. I'm going to have to go back and do a MASSIVE clean-up job to get the ad positioning more manageable.

The stat is also plumbed into our new proposal tool, so if you're looking to advertise on DealerRefresh, you'll have a whole new experience there too. That was a gigantic job to automate it all. We used to use a tool called Proposify that had a hefty price tag and was extremely rigid in design choices and workflow options.



Now, we have our own subdomain (would have had to pay extra for that) on dealerrefresh.com with an email system for logging and site hosting all built into AWS. A database is automatically updated on Notion to track everything, and we even have a research call to do discovery work on prospects that help to generate personalized email copy.

All emails we send are pre-built into a mailto code, so Jeff or I only need to tap a link and then hit send from our own email client.

 

[Alex Snyder]

On the same goal of making things easier for new visitors to sign up, we have moved to a single navigation bar. Search and user account info are now in line with the traditional nav.

Before:


Now:


P.S. There are a few kinks to work through between our Staging site and Production site. I'm on those now.
P.P.S. After these kinks are sorted, I am going to get back on improving the widget at the top of the forums list with the most recent threads