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Welcome to the new GoKunming.com!

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GoKunming, circa early 2006
GoKunming, circa early 2006

It's creeping up on four years since the last GoKunming overhaul, and it's time for an upgrade. Like the last time around, it's a pretty big change, but hopefully you'll find it much more useful - and usable.

It seems like it was only yesterday...
It seems like it was only yesterday...

Here are some of the changes we're excited about:

Search Function
The new search function not only works much better than before, it also sorts results according to whether they come from articles, forum threads, classifieds or listings.

Classifieds
We've made some changes to our free classifieds section that will hopefully improve the user experience while minimizing spam. For users who haven't posted many classifieds, this may mean waiting a business day until your ad is approved. Also please take a look at our new classifieds sections before you post to ensure you've picked the correct one.

Forum Subscriptions
You can now subscribe to forum threads by RSS and email and be notified when somebody posts on a thread you're interested in. You can do this when you start a thread or by going to an existing thread and clicking "RSS" or "Subscribe."

Photo Gallery
The photo gallery has a new navigation interface that should be a major improvement over the gallery's previous incarnation. We've also removed the vast majority of pics from the previous version and will be adding new photos in the coming weeks.

Speaking of the gallery, GoKunming is now looking for a photo editor to manage our gallery and contribute photos. If this sounds like something you'd be able to do, please contact us.

Personal Messaging
Many GoKunming users have asked us when we're going to add a personal messaging function to the site, so we've added one. To use it login and click on a user nickname or find them through the new search function. You can also create a private message through the new dashboard section.

User Profiles
Clicking on any registered user's nickname will allow you to see all their comments, reviews and other on-site activities – except expired classified ads – so that you can get a better idea of what kind of posters they are. This is especially handy in separating the haters from the even-handed.

Events sidebar
From now on, you can view all the upcoming events in the GoKunming events calendar by browsing with the handy new arrows on the events module on the left-hand side of the home page and most other pages within the site.

Ads
As you may have already noticed, we've increased the size of our sponsor ads and moved the right-hand side ad to the left side. As before, there are three rotating ad spaces with a maximum of 10 ads per location – if you're interested in promoting your business or event to our constantly expanding audience, feel free to drop us a line via our contact form.

We know things have changed quite a bit, but we're confident that the new version of GoKunming will provide a better user experience than its predecessor. We also believe that with your feedback, we can make this new version even better. Please feel free to leave your thoughts as a comment on this post, or send us your thoughts through our contact form.

Lastly, thank you to all our readers, advertisers and anyone else who has supported the site over the last five years – this site could not exist without you.

© Copyright 2005-2024 GoKunming.com all rights reserved. This material may not be republished, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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I love the background color! It's nice on the eyes. I haven't navigated around yet. Good Luck to the New Go Kunming look!

Hi,

One idea I've had for this website is to have a restaurant critic page. It baffles my mind the amount of places in Kunming that have a tip jar but no suggestion box. It's like no one is willing to make their place better, but if there were a featured critic on a popular website then maybe their quality of food and service would improve, b/c let's face it, most western food falls on the average to below average scale, so maybe they need a kick in the rear.

Just a thought from one KM resident of 5 years, and of China for 10 years.

jpinchina

Living in Belgium,and having Kunming as my second home town,this website provides me with news I need.But I still hope there can be more news out of Kunming(in English of course).
The updating of this website proves that people are busy with it.
Keep going.

Dirk

Looking good! I like the background colour.
And the search funktion works great.

Good work!
Thanks to Chris, Matthew and Dan.

Sandra

I like the colour scheme and the initial layout. However, the forum / posting features are basic - especially the layout of posts contained (constrained) in a frame, hard to read and follow, and has a mid-90s feel.

Appreciate if you could look at the possibility - based upon feedback / user-polls - of moving posts to the left-side of the screen, and have threaded posts.

The introduction of a PM [personal message] feature is much welcome, although sadly I expect the necessity of terms and conditions of usage due to "douche-bags" who cannot play nicely and may (ab)use the feature to send a series of abusive messages.

Cheers!

It's great!!! Love it!! Great job!

The layout seems a little unbalanced, but not bad. I think it's because some text that doesn't have it's own boxed in background seems lost, like it's just floating around. Forums need to be updated to have threaded posts.. a rating system would be great. Even if it would something as simple as marking posts as "troll/flame" or "off topic".

Desktop site is looking great.

However the mobile site still doesn't work for webkit browsers such as iphone safari. I believe a lot of android phones also use webkit browsers. Text is just too small. If you could vary the font size depending on the browser that would be great. At the moment I can either view the really tiny text and strain my eyes or zoom in and have to scroll left and right to read every sentence.

Interesting that several people commented on liking the new background color. It's a fine color, but I find reading white text on a dark background quite hard on my (young) eyes. If the text of features and news at least could be still in dark text on a light background, that would be better. While lots of personal blogs seem to prefer bright text on a black backround, I don't see many mainstream news sites that don't use dark text for article content, I don't know if this is just habit from the days of paper and ink or if there really is something easier about focusing on darker words on a lighter background.

[UNF]

is it possible to get an 'ignore' function installed so that you can block the posts of a particular poster? It helps with dealing with trolls

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