Media Websites

BBC.co.uk - site cutbacks & beyond

Split from bbc.co.uk (May 2016)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
LL
London Lite Founding member
Neil Jones posted:
I managed to hop onto the whatismyip.com site while at the library and the IP address reported to the site comes back as one that does map back to the UK. I can get to bbc.co.uk/news on the same browser on my phone on my home internet connection (Daily Mail still seems to think I'm in the US though even on my home connection).

There must be something about the configuration of the council's setup for WiFi public internet through the libraries that confuses the BBC site and makes it think I'm elsewhere. It's minor in the grand scale of things though Smile


It may be down to a deliberate reconfiguration of the setup by the council to stop customers using the service to access iPlayer which requires a tv licence to watch. Library budgets are tight enough without having to fork out for a licence for each site.
CW
Charlie Wells Moderator
Noticed a change on the BBC News header links this morning. There is now a 'Newsbeat' link which points to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat. Currently the old http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat site still exists, albeit with a main article about Newsbeat moving to the BBC News website.
IT
Ittr
Charlie Wells posted:
Noticed a change on the BBC News header links this morning. There is now a 'Newsbeat' link which points to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat. Currently the old http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat site still exists, albeit with a main article about Newsbeat moving to the BBC News website.

The old site is gone as of January 30th 2018.
PA
paul_hadley
BBC Weather now diverting to the new Meteo pages.
JA
JAS84
No it isn't.
PA
paul_hadley
It was for me at the time of posting.
PE
Pete Founding member
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/0
DO
dosxuk
As posted in the weather thread, it's not a switchover, it's a rollout. Some people will be seeing the new site, others the old.
VM
VMPhil
I think web developers call that A/B testing.
DO
dosxuk
VMPhil posted:
I think web developers call that A/B testing.


No, that's where you are testing new ideas and want to statistically measure whether you're making an improvement. If you wanted to test whether having different colours to the temperature icons is a good idea, A/B testing, with an attached survey, is the way to go about it.

This is a rollout - where you slowly ramp up the number of users on a new version, which gives you a chance to balance resources (you don't need to have enough servers to cope with the full user demand of both versions for a start) and the ability to rollback if you suddenly discover a show stopping issue (which never happens, honest guv).

A switchover would be when you switch your whole user base to a new version in one go and hope for the best. Something that should be terrifying to any developer working on a non trivial system.
bilky asko and VMPhil gave kudos
MD
mdtauk
Microsoft employ A/B Testing with apps and with Windows itself.

28 days later

AG
AxG
Charlie Wells posted:
Noticed a change on the BBC News header links this morning. There is now a 'Newsbeat' link which points to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat. Currently the old http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat site still exists, albeit with a main article about Newsbeat moving to the BBC News website.

Just going back to this, but why has every update to the BBC News site only applied to the frontpage? Since the site was redesign in 2015, the frontpage has had its width increased, dropped Free Sans for Arial, a new white breaking news strap, and Newsbeat added to the navbar, etc. None of these as far as I'm aware have been applied to any other part of the BBC News site bar the new Newsbeat site.

Newer posts