Website Updates (2018)

Some of the updates that have gone live today:

• Fixed a bug where a not found error was cropping up if one of the auto suggestions for search didn’t have an image.
• We temporarily (accidentally ) introduced GIF support for deal images. This has now been disabled as it had unintended side effects and made the automatically generated social media pictures that we create go a bit squiffy. GIFs do now however work again in comments. Hurrah!
• When clicking on a notification that someone replied to or @mentioned you the comment would almost, nearly scroll into view but not quite. This is now fixed - perfectly aligned comment goodness.
• We can now move posts between sections - so if you accidentally share a voucher as a deal or a competition as a freebie just give us a shout and we can fix this for you!
• If one of your posts ends up deleted (usually because the site has gone crazy and it’s been accidentally posted multiple times - whoops!) it’ll no longer count towards your post limit
• We’ve added a contact form to our contact page so that you can drop us a message more easily.
• You can now sort search results by relevancy (the default) or by date. All the search stuff will likely need to be continually tweaked so please do feedback on how good/bad it is!
• Fixed a bug where a post could become uneditable - thanks SteveMate for the heads up!
• Fixed a bug where editing a comment would lead to a blank comment - thanks again to SteveMate for pointing it out

Did you do the website yourself or was it outsourced? I wish I kept my skills up but I lost interest around 2010 when HTML5 was becoming popular. Would love to have had the skills to produce something like this, it is a great layout.

Awesome updates Kelsey. Fab job!

Kelsey I must say you have done an excellent job of coding this website and maintaining it.

A little (but hopefully significant) update this morning:

• Full search should be greatly improved! (this is when you click the search icon or hit return rather than just the search suggestions popup). The results should now be far more coherent and accurate plus they should properly sort by relevancy or date.
• Fixed a bug that prevented people from updating their user profiles
• The bonus competition category “Cash & Vouchers” went missing. After an extensive search it was found and reunited with it’s friends and fellow categories!

Snuck in a late night update to improve website performance/speed - it probably won't be immediately apparent if you use a relatively new phone or laptop but hopefully speeds things up for those with slightly older devices

Hi all

Just a little sneak peak of an update going live early next week.

New and improved chat section featuring (much requested) search and recent comments:

Another new round of shiny website updates!

The new stuff

• There were a whole bunch of things on the to do list for the chat section. The most popular of which was search. Well, we’re happy to say search has now come to chat! It’s the same search that’s on the main site so you’ll get auto-suggestions as you type as well as full results if you hit return / tap the search icon. Hopefully this will help you guys find previous threads and carry on the conversation. We’d love to hear how you find it! But, that’s not all, we’ve also revamped the look of the chat section. On desktop, we’ve introduced the sidebar - allowing you to filter by topic and see snippets of recent comments. On mobile, we’ve pulled across the filter bar from the main section of the site so that you can filter by topic.
• We now notify the original poster of a deal when their deal is reported as expired by someone. Hopefully this is a nice way to get a heads up that your deal may be expired - if it is we’d be eternally grateful if you could quickly hit “edit” and mark it as expired
• This one is to help out our mentors - if Bob spots that Jeff’s deal is expired and reports it, it goes into a big list of things for the mentors and us to look at and check. We’ve tweaked the system so that if Jeff notices it’s expired and expires it himself, it now removes itself from our internal reporting queue so there’s less to look at and check. Hopefully this means we’ll be able to keep LD more up-to-date!
• We’ve improved the reporting system - sometimes duplicate reports were getting through without a link to the original post (which made it rather difficult to check) this shouldn’t happen anymore… hopefully!

• Sometimes if you went directly to certain URLs (rather than clicking through from the homepage) the website would have a bit of a hissy fit. That’s now all sorted!
• Our lovely mentors let us know there were a few issues with the reporting tools - for example, we have a section where mentors can see every comment on the site but unfortunately it had started listing them oldest first rather than newest first. That’s now fixed!
• If you tried to @mention someone or add an emoji in a comment on the blog section things were a little… odd! Things are now much more normal

• A whole truckload of tweaks and updates to keep things running smoothly and as bug free as possible!
• We’ve adjusted the code that loads the little Facebook widget that let’s people like our page. It always should have been the last thing to load so as to not slow down the site but occasionally it was cutting in line. It should now really, genuinely, be the last thing to load!
• We had an issue where evil people were hijacking our URL redirector. That’s the thing you’ll see whenever someone posts a link in a comment - it gets converted from a link like this: http://www.google.com to a link like this: http://www.latestdeals.co.uk/go?url=http://www.google.com. We’ve rewritten the code that handles this and you’ll now see links convert from http://www.google.com to something like https://www.latestdeals.co.uk/go?link=123456789 each link now has a unique ID. This will hopefully help stop bad people using our links and harming our reputation with Google. That, in turn, should help more people discover LD via Google. Whoop! The reason we’re boring everyone with this update is that it required us convert all of the old links to the new format - it should all be fine but if you notice any links not working please just shout!

That's all for now but, as ever, more exciting things in the pipeline!

Hot on the tails of the last update a few bug fixes, tweaks and even snuck a sneaky new feature in:

Tweaks & new stuff

• Rockman, Deepak and a few others have a keen eye and noticed the images uploaded were a little fuzzy! We’ve changed the code to allow higher quality, larger images. Would be good to get your feedback!
• All that scrolling, especially on mobiles, is too much like hard work! We’ve added a little button to help you scroll back to the top of the page.

• If you went to one of the link URLs with a made up ID… e.g. latestdeals.co.uk/go?link=MADE_UP_ID the website would be like a deer in headlights and panic and freeze! That’s now fixed
• If an uploaded image failed to embed for whatever reason the link to it wouldn’t work either. All sorted now
• Occasionally comments in the new “recent comments” widget would escape the confines of their box and start overlapping onto the rest of the site. We’ve had a word and they’ve agreed to stay in their box from now on!

Top job Kelsey! Loving the update with the chat search and thanks for fixing the image upload resolution

Amazing work Kelsey . Just out of curiosity... Are you well versed in creating apps too? My bro and I are currently working on an idea to help people save money on groceries

Like the new look of the Chat section. Nice.

Good job Kelsey

Love the new look to the comments, especially seeing the latest comments on the left. Very useful.

*BONG*

Another update!

We’ve made some changes to the home page

• The homepage now defaults to listing the most popular deals, vouchers & freebies (rather than just deals). For a while we’ve not been sure how to handle this as often great voucher codes or freebies were hidden away. Hopefully everyone likes this change but we’d love you feedback - good or bad!
• We’ve rejigged the mobile view on the homepage to gain more space plus (in my little old opinion) it should be more functional and looks purdier too!
• Because freebies and deals are now intermingled we’ve added big “FREE” text to each of them so you now how much they cost (nothing! )

More bug fixes:

• Fixed the links on the stock checker pages to correctly go to the retailer
• Whoops! I somewhat lied before about uploaded images being bigger and more shiny. A little bug meant they were more or less the same as before - squashed and resolved now though

Another cheeky update:

1. We now “lazy load” the images for the “top posts” section of the website. What this means is that we only load the images once they come into view. So as you scroll horizontally along the top posts from the week the images will load in. What this REALLY means is that the website loads faster - yay!
2. Fixed a few bugs with the new mobile layout view to improve consistency between different browsers, phones and tablets

Whoops!

Can we all pretend the website didn't fallover? Sorry about that guys! Took a little longer to fix than expected, probably not assisted by the champagne & procesco tasting I was in the middle of when I lept dramatically in to action to restore the website. (That's about as exciting as a programmer's life gets )

Anywho, to cut a long story short the quickest way to fix things was to push out the latest website update a little earlier than expected. All the changes are below but please shout if you notice any oddities/bugs. Quite a lot of things have changed and the update has gone out a bit earlier than anticipated so bugs may have slipped through.

• Fixed a bug where images ending in “.jpeg” weren’t automatically embedded
• Removed the infamous “wang” from the list of naughty words! Vera Wang and all of her many products should no longer end up in moderation :celebrate:
• For new, non-logged in, visitors we’ve reduced the size of the website by over 50% (and so made things more speedy)
• We’ve added a new error message near the “share” button if you try and share a deal but something is wrong (e.g. the description is too short). Hopefully this will help those on mobiles who scrolled to the bottom of the form, hit “share” and seemingly nothing happened (as the error message was out of view further up the page).
• Fixed a bug that didn’t allow an ASCII smiley face after an emoji. For example, you couldn’t post a comment with: “Hello I’m super smiley : )”
• Fixed a bug where email addresses weren’t turning into proper, clickable links in comments
• If you create a list in a post description or comment you can now hit return twice to “break out” of the list formatting and return to normal text again. Much easier!
• You can now edit text links - just reselect/highlight the link and click the “link” button in the toolbar. The existing link will popup and allow you to edit it. Previously the old link just got deleted and that’s a bad user experience, mmmkay?
• Had another stab at resolving commenting issues for Android users - all fingers crossed!
• Tweaked code to allow linking to specific products on Euro Car Parts’ website. Their website bucks convention/wisdom/anything sensible and so changes had to be made to accommodate!
• Fixed a bug where things got weird if you put the original price/RRP as £0 for a deal.
• Actually, generally, really (promise this time) increased the size and quality of uploaded images.
• The competition section now correctly defaults to displaying competitions sorted by those ending first.
• Updated tablets in portrait mode to look/function more similarly to mobiles (for example, we’ve hidden the left sidebar and made more space for deals)
• Full search (when you hit return / click the search icon) now only searches within the section of the site you’re in - so, if you’re on “All” it’ll search for deals, freebies, vouchers and competitions but if you’re on the “Deals” section you’ll only get deal results.

Plus a whole shedload of geeky, boring internal changes to allow some more exciting stuff that’s in the pipeline!

Well done Kelsey ... some mommore prodpprodeprprodecco prosecco for you!!! (Although the text might sound like im under the influence of alcohol - but im not, till tmrw anyway)

Noticed that the discount percentage has been updated. Gotta say, that looks really nice.

Edit: The Dashboard has been updated too.

Time for another tech update!

• We’ve updated the look of the retailer’s pages so they more clearly stand out from the homepage. Quite a few people were ending up on a retailer page and not realising that they were just seeing “Tesco Deals” and not all the deals available on LD. The same thing is true of the tag pages too
• User profiles have been given a new lick of paint
• The dashboard is now the dashboard 2.0 We’ve also added in an introductory video to help explain points to new members.
• We’ve added a new option to specify if a deal is “in store only”. At the moment this just shows up on the deal page but we’ll add an option so that people can filter by this soon
• Shiny new font! We now use each device’s default font so that no matter if you’re on a mac, an Android phone or a Windows PC you should have a snazzy looking font that loads super fast and looks really nice
• Hold on to your hats because we’ve made the discount banner - you know, the thing that says “Save 25%” - diagonal rather than horizontal. #woah.
• We’ve changed the structure of retailer’s pages a little - we’ve separated deals and vouchers into two separate pages with the hope we can do better in Google with this approach. This probably isn’t too noticeable when just browsing the website but required a fair bit of jiggery pokery behind the scenes.
• By popular request, the competition page now defaults to sorting by the newest first!
• On that subject, retailer, tag and user profile pages now also default to newest first.
• We’ve given the red colour of the heart/like button a bit of a boost - it’s got a bit more panache now
• This is a bit of a bug fix - in order to show up in the autosuggest when you @mention someone the person has to have commented or shared a deal before. This didn’t previously count/consider if the person had just created a topic in the chat section. Now it does!
• Thanks to Rockman for pointing it out - we temporarily lost the ability to automatically pull in images from Amazon deals, this is now all fixed
• …Yet another attempt at sorting out the Android input problems - @nemosays if you could be so find to give it a go?

There is however a bug with editing things at the moment that I'm working to fix

Update: should be fixed now

Hey! Kelsey Thanks for the update. I really like it. Any chance adding Like button to comments please?

Embedded YouTube videos aren't working now?