Jan 2022

This is our first newsletter, we have been running for just over a month now, forum membership is excellent with 307 members (I have a test account, so I deducted 1 from the total). Activity is good and for the last 3 weeks we have averaged around 160 posts per day, with a peak of almost 200 posts. Considering membership was initially slow to get going, that’s really excellent.

So far we have:

  • grown the membership
  • grown the activity
  • Upset Vertical&*^%$ 🤣
  • Started to find our feet as a forum
  • I have submitted us to google, yahoo and bing search, we are starting to climb the rankings as our activity level increases
  • We have approximately 5 or 6 times more posting activity than the old forum
  • Settled on the extensions that don’t cause problems
  • decided on how to handle private messaging

Overall it’s gone very well and thanks to everyone who put up with all the changes as I experimented and got to grips with the administration.

We have some things to decide around the commercial directory function and retailer specific areas. I have checked the TOS of freeflarum and although we are well within them, I am not comfortable that we are following the spirit of them. In as much as providing free advertising for Retailers is using a free service to support their profits….even if such profits result in a “possible” discount advantage for members. I’m personally coming around to the view that we should (for coffee related Retail/commercial members):

  • Remove the commercial directory
  • Remove retailer specific areas
  • Retail/Business members should retain commercial against their name (so we know they are businesses
  • Allow them to take part in discussions, but not to use said discussions as sales pitches
  • If they want to sell something, or have a great deal for us…they can use classifieds like the rest of us
  • Unlike non commercial member classifieds, prehaps we should remove commercial members classifieds once the offer has expired?

I need to discuss the above with the other two mods over the coming week or so…but the more I think about it the more comfortable I am with this way forward. It’s important where we have a forum where we can discuss things freely and fairly, without feeling we might upset an “advertiser”. Primarily, this is our forum for our benefit.

Thanks

Dave

P.S. Tell anyone you know who is into coffee about us, hopefully we will still be here, even stronger than ever, if those who have still not transitioned from CFUK finally have enough of a corporate monetising the shit out of them. They don’t pay tax in the UK, care about the community, or it’s raison d’etre, they are definitely not a good thing for lots of forums, who lose their soul in the process.

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DavecUK changed the title to Newsletter 1 Jan 2022 .
5 days later
DavecUK stickied the discussion .
20 days later
DavecUK changed the title to Coffeetime Newsletters .

Feb 2022

Membership continues to rise, perhaps not as quickly as it should, but our search ranking is gradually climbing in the search engines, so we should see more people and the more unwelcome attentions of spammers. The forum is registered with anti-spam sites, and many known spammers are actually automatically prevented from logging on via shared information. So far, we remain spam free.

The forum recently had an update from 1.1.1 to 1.20, a major upgrade and the servers that host us have all had their software upgraded too (php, maria, nginx etc..), I think they added some disk space as well. I have noticed the forum speed has significantly increased since the update. It’s quite snappy now.

I have 1 donation to freeflarum still to take from a member, for the next donation round, so if any of you are thinking of donating, please do it in the next week. I’m considering just opening donation rounds every 3 months, to bundle more of them together.

Another thing that’s great is the engagement with topics that are not just coffee…which is as it should be for any community. People chat about a lot of things over a coffee and I personally find these side discussions rewarding and interesting to read, even if I don’t always have anything to contribute.

Some members have embarked on some great projects, I would like to mention them all but a few are: such as restorations, 3D printed accessories, creating a poor mans decent…I want to see some videos of it in operation and the addition of a drain valve for an Evo…which I think should be standard on all machines!

Activity on the forum remains good and a few days ago we exceeded our previous record for the number of posts in a day…The record now stands at 218 posts!

Crowdfunding - I added an area to discuss these often interesting ideas, coffee related or not.

Not much else I can think of to add for this months newsletter, things have gone well, we have a nice community here and may well pick up a bit more activity during and after Verticalscope migrate CFUK to their standard cookie cutter Xenforo platform, both during the migration, and after they slather it with google ads for everything and anything.

Dave, Patrick and Rob

P.S. I had to change edit time back to 10 minutes…I have raised the issue on the Flarum support forum about editing times.

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a month later
DavecUK unstickied the discussion .
12 days later

March 2022

It’s been an interesting month for the forum, lots of interesting subjects, not just coffee, but lots of things we will enjoy a coffee while doing. Reminiscing, Movies, Music, Beer and…….Pizzas. For me it continues to add interest and a community feel.

Membership is rising steadily, we always get 1 or 2 people per day….I think as we grow, the mesh of that net and internet presence will make this increase. Please remember to back link us in your social media accounts, so we become easier to find.

Spam - We have thankfully remained free of spam, considering we are the busiest UK forum, that’s quite incredible. perhaps we’re too stealthy to be noticed, perhaps some of the antispam tools are working better than I thought. In addition we also seem to be free of the incessant retailer spam that appears to be invading another supposedly massive, but deathly quiet forum. I don’t mind retailers becoming part of the conversation here, but they seem to be love bombing the other forum and fighting over who is an authorised reseller and who isn’t. I guess it’s good it’s happening on a forum with very little activity, and not here.

Lelit - There has been a lot of speculation about the corporate takeover and how that will affect machines and support. My personal opinion is, it would be madness to Breville to pay so much money and then kill the business, or change what has made it great. Lelit has done really well by being nimble, innovate and good value for money. They have sold a LOT of machines into the prosumer sector and for good reason, they are great machines. I think Lelit will simply dominate in the real prosumer sector, unless other manufacturers step up…fortunately, most of the ones I know are continuing to innovate.

Donations to Freeflarum - They seem to come in little bits, so I have decided to open a donation round every 3 months, rather than have loads of little payments to deal with. It keeps things a lot easier for me. I have not exactly decided how to do it, but I might use the countdown timer for that, instead of things like easter eggs. It was a test of the system and it seems to work quite well. If you see the donation option on the menu disappear, that will be why.

Forum meet up - I absolutely still want to do this, various projects have got in the way and a potential trip to ECM in Germany is also upcoming, not sure of the dates yet. I have not forgotten and will get some dates together soon. I will be good to see some familiar and not so familiar faces.

That’s it, it’s a quiet Month….enjoy the coffee!

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5 months later

August 2022

Direct donations to Freeflarum have worked well for me, I don’t have to handle the money transfers, nothing is made to me and I have no idea who has donated, just the amount given. This suits me very well as I feel it should be completely anonymous and that even I don’t need to know. It’s also easy and as I am basically lazy, it’s working for me. https://coffeetime.freeflarum.com/d/854-donations-new-process

We had a nice note from one of the main support team guys from Freeflarum, so I thought I would share it here for you all. It is tough for them as I know they struggle to keep the performance as they would like it, so the money helps them. Clearly though, we are making a difference. So thank you to everyone who has donated to them.

Coffeetime to be featured on the main FreeFlarum page(?)

Hi,

first of all, thank you so much for donating to FreeFlarum - your forum has donated the most euros so far, and it’s crazy! I wanted to contact you for some time now and thank you but I didn’t have the time, so I am doing it in this E-mail now. I am very humbled by your continuous commitment towards helping the FreeFlarum project stay sustainable for a long period of time! Sincerely, thank you for that.

While I can’t do much for your community in return (other than that it will have a special place at FreeFlarum, and also my heart), I am currently reaching out to owners of some of the most successful and awesome FreeFlarum forums.

As you might’ve heard, I am currently re-designing and re-coding a large portion of FreeFlarum. And it’s almost complete. I was just thinking of featuring some images of a couple of FreeFlarum forums on the FreeFlarum website (otherwise the page looks empty and boring). I am sure that some nice images will make people fall in love with Flarum, and hopefully they will choose it as their forum. This will bring more attention to Flarum, FreeFlarum, and also your forum (I will put a link to your forum under your image, so people can follow that), which means that everyone could benefit from this.

Here’s the current look of the re-designed main page at the development server: https://freeflarum.dev. Some things are still unfinished and in development, but the gallery is pretty much done, and will give you an idea of what I have in mind - I just need some images. I have attached a screenshot of your forum in this E-mail - this could be placed into the showcase for people to see.

I need to ask you if I may use this image of your forum in the gallery at the upcoming FreeFlarum page? I’m looking forward to your response

Obviously I am happy for us to be featured on their main page.

Other news

Membership continues to grow and the post count has stabilised at a reasonably healthy level, which should mean the forum doesn’t die from a lack of interest. I believe we are almost certainly the busiest coffee forum in the UK. As well as probably the best completely non commercial coffee forum 😉 but that’s a Carlsberg “probably”.

The classifieds section is going well, please read the post on how best to place adverts…I see many adverts with the text first, don’t, put the image first and then the image will appear in the new discussions list. Trust me it has more impact.

Moderation: Generally nothing much is required, there is a high level of antispam protection, so we really don’t seem to get any. I get the odd post flagged (thanks), but in general very little work is needed. The biggest PITA is when I am asked to split off bits of a discussion, but that’s not too often. So I want to thank you all for making the community a pleasant place to visit and participate in. Lets keep it friendly and productive, I have seen what happens to a forum when that doesn’t happen.

Definitely check out the knowledgebase and if you’re writing articles, perhaps try and write them there so we can make it more of a resource. It can be tricky to find the nuggets in posts sometimes.

That’s all for this month!

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DavecUK locked the discussion .
5 months later

Jan 2023

New for the new year

Sigep Rimini 2023 A huge trade show, it was very interesting it had a large coffee section and also an extremely large food section with baked goods, pastries, desserts, icecream and many things I couldn’t eat. The ACS stand had a collection of slushy and granita machines, plus their full range of espresso machines including the new Vostok one group lever which is almost out of prototype. Many people were interested in the new innovative pressure release system and also all the other features the Vostok has. The stand was well attended and I met some very interesting people.

We were also able to just discuss some changes, especially those which would benefit existing machines and potentially the new Vostok.

Minima - I think we found a way to add a drain valve (my little idea) to the brew boiler of the Minima, and make it convenient for customers the prototype of this system is being tested now. One of the important issues of course is the blue boilers have no low water protection, this means certain procedures have to be followed and draining and refilling blue boiler. Hopefully a future software change could help make this a lot safer. So in the future drain valves on both Minima boilers. Brew boiler drain valve setup below.

I’m hopfully getting a pre-production 1 group Vostok to test, and more importantly produce a user guide. So that those who pre-ordered get fault free machines and good guidance. Only one caviat…will it fit in my kitchen or not!

Vesuvius Evo Leva - Pleased to report visual evidence of drain valves on new boilers as standard.

Rotary Pumps - being tested as we speak Vostok 1 group will launch with the Rotary, Evo will require small modification to make pump an option.

Pressure/Time Leva vent system, together with shot and preinfusion timers will eventually come to Evo as an option.

Retrofit above options to Evo. Paolo and I are discussing if a return to factory, upgrade option may be possible. Some of these upgrades would be very difficult for customers to do.

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2 months later

March 2023

It’s been an interesting few months on the forum, lots of new members and some old faces. many new products hitting the market. There has been a general slowdown in the forum, so that has not helped things. The maintenance today was to try and fix that on the freeflarum side. Hopefully our donations will help greatly towards the extra costs and I’m hoping to send them a largish one to try and do our bit as one of the larger forums.

Changelog:

  • The server now uses twice as more vCPUs, as I have noticed that the CPU usage is very high which hangs some processes. I have upgraded FreeFlarum’s hosting plan, but I still have the option to revert back. I admit that I am not a hardware person at all, but I don’t have much options for scaling from our hosting provider, other than storage space and RAM (which are both fine ATM) - so, the goal is to see if this helps and if it’s worth additional 4 €/month. I did some calculations, and found out that the current donations could cover that, so let’s try it for now and see how it performs;

  • Upgraded Python to 3.11 for performance improvements on main FreeFlarum website (Python 3.11 claims to be between 10 - 60% faster than Python 3.10, which I actually find pretty noticeable on https://freeflarum.com);

  • Upgraded MariaDB to 10.11.2:

    • Also implemented slow query logging (all database queries that execute for more than 15 seconds will be logged - in case of a degraded performance, I may inspect this file to pinpoint which extension has non-optimized queries and create a new issue);

    • Tweaked MariaDB configuration for new setup;

  • All forums now use PHP-FPM 8.2.4:

    • Adapted PHP-FPM configuration to the new version;

  • Updated all Flarum extensions for all forums;

  • The (broken) language selector from the main FreeFlarum website was removed for now. I will likely look into i18n later when I have more free time. For now, enjoy a small replacement in a form of an Easter egg 😉

I created a test forum (to make sure new signups work properly) and also had a look at few forums, and they seem to be doing alright (if not noticeably faster than before?). If you notice anything out-of-ordinary, please let me know - your feedback is crucial to me, as I am taking a more hands-off approach to FreeFlarum recently due to my exams and other duties.

Next steps:

  • To better and more concretely identify issues with performance in the future, I will look into integrating some monitoring service into FreeFlarum. As more and more active forums are appearing, I see that this is an important step towards a more stable server infrastructure with less downtime. I will set it up this evening (there shouldn’t be any if not much downtime), so that I can assess whether these performance improvements are sufficient enough;

  • Update mail configuration to strengthen the quality of FreeFlarum emails, so that they aren’t marked as “spam” so often (this will potentially unlock the ability to include some long requested extensions that send email in large quantities, such as Follow Tags/Users, etc…). That’s for another day though (maybe tomorrow, maybe next week - but there shouldn’t be any, if not just a little downtime);

  • I will look into proxying all forums through Cloudflare to combat DDoS and spam traffic, if possible. I have noticed that many (Free)Flarum forums have a problem with spam. While solutions found in anti-spam extensions are usually enough to counter bad actors, not every forum has anti-spam measures put in place. Inactive forums suffer the most from spam - the spam counts towards the forum’s activity, which means that FreeFlarum will not remove them. On top of that, these forums eat resources that could be invested in other forums. Therefore I think that a global protection for all forums would be highly beneficial, both for forum owners and FreeFlarum. There is a catch though - Cloudflare doesn’t allow CNAME Cross-Users, which breaks custom domains, so I’ll have to find a way around that first;

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