Comments (constructive) on the New Forum Software

[vic newey]

On vic newey Said:

On JasonB Said:

I quite like having a latest relies list below the end of each topic, saves having to wait for the slow back button or clicking on “more latest posts” as we had on the old forum at the top and bottom of each thread as you read through the recent activity.

But this might well be part of or even the cause of the problem with slow page loading, it has to load multiple links to all the pages and links to the posters names, links to the board they are on etc. The previous forum had the ready built software to run it, albeit a bit outdated, whereas this one is seemingly home made

This is what I was exploring a couple of posts above this one.
The reason the “Latest Replies” Blue Button seems to work quickly, when the list is below a topic, is because it just appears to re-direct you lower down the screen, to when the topic was originally viewed; that is when the Latest Replies list was first compiled.

This screenshot illustrates the point; it’s a thread I had open for some time, whilst I was in the garage.
I’ve just clicked on the blue button at the head of the thread, at the time shown on my screen at the bottom right.
Note the time I clicked on the button, and the Latest Reply shown in the list; they are several hours apart.
If you fully refresh the page, then the Latest Reply list does update.

Bill

[JA]

On JA Said:

…………

Please could I view other people’s profiles. Also it would be nice to know how many postings on the forum they have made.

JA

You can, I explained it to Zan earlier In This Post, further up the page.
Just click on their Displayed Forum Name; the blue hyperlink below their avatar.
Yours is JA Mine is peak4, try clicking on my name as shown here

Bill

[Kiwi BlokeParticipant @kiwibloke62605]

Well done, everyone who has been working on this project! You’ve listened, and acted. The nightmare must be nearly over. It will never satisfy everyone’s requirements, of course, but it’s pretty well good enough for my non-demanding use: a bit more speed would help…

[Kiwi Bloke]

On Kiwi Bloke Said:

Well done, everyone who has been working on this project! You’ve listened, and acted. The nightmare must be nearly over. It will never satisfy everyone’s requirements, of course, but it’s pretty well good enough for my non-demanding use: a bit more speed would help…

+1 for that. Still finding my way, and getting used to some of the changes. but generally it now seems quite usable. Wouldn’t go so far as saying its an improvement over the old one though.

regards Mike

[peak4]

On peak4 Said:

On JA Said:

…………

Please could I view other people’s profiles. Also it would be nice to know how many postings on the forum they have made.

JA

You can, I explained it to Zan earlier In This Post, further up the page.
Just click on their Displayed Forum Name; the blue hyperlink below their avatar.
Yours is JA Mine is peak4, try clicking on my name as shown here

Bill

No I have not. Screenshot taken at 9.40am.

I cannot even view mine except when I edit it.

 

JA

[Mike HurleyParticipant @mikehurley60381]

I don’t find that unusual. Surely anyone’s personal profile should not be totally open to all and sundry. The cliciking on the forum name does take you to an ‘overview’ of the participant but no further. Seems right to me.

Mike

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Mike

I don’t know the “new-forum-speak” very well, but previously … profiles were intended to be a Public statement by that person.

MichaelG.

[Mike HurleyParticipant @mikehurley60381]

Open access to all fields in someone elses profile might be a privacy / security risk within the structure of the new software.

If a participant wants to make more of their own info visible then they need to go into the editor of their own profile, and change the deafault settings on items currently set as ‘Visible to : ONLY ME’ to ‘EVERYONE’.

Personally, I’m happy with the defaults on my own profile, but it’s up to the individual.

regards Mike

 

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Mike, you can select what anyone can or cannot see in your profile, but for some reason or other, others can’t see what you have selected at the moment, like your “about me” that you may have made. But of course you can select everything so only you can see it.

Regards Nick.

[JAParticipant @ja]

On the old forum I found the profile option very useful. If you do not want to give information about yourself you don’t put anything in the profile box.

JA

I gave far more weight to comments, information etc made by those who published their profiles.

[peak4Participant @peak4]

Good Morning @ja, if you head back to the screenshot I gave of Zan’s profile, you will see that the boxes I circled in fuschia pen were under the “Forums” part of his profile, and from here you can see what they have posted, and search within it.
The personal details under the  “Profile” part of his Profile page are not currently visible, returning the same error message you have seen.
Yes it’s correct, that at the moment, you can’t even see your own.
It’s a known problem, and has apparently been reported to the developers, but I’ve never found any formal response from anyone about it yet.
If you search my own posts, you will find I’ve discussed it several times.

I was responding specifically to this part of your question

“Please could I view other people’s profiles. Also it would be nice to know how many postings on the forum they have made.”

 

I can see how many postings you have made 1,617 at the time I took the screenshot;
You have started 47 new topics, and again they are searchable

 

You can access your own Profile tab within your own Profile, and whilst you can’t view even your own, due to the known fault I related earlier, you can edit it.
You will likely need to do this ready for when the fault is cured, since when the public details, contained within the old forum were transferred over here, some embedded text codes were also carried over as plain text.

To do that, Green Bar > Profile brings up your own

Scroll down that page a bit; leads you to here.

 

You can see what information can be hidden everyone/members/just you, etc, as highlighted in yellow

Nickname – red circle, I think might be irrelevant on this new forum; It seems to be the displayed name on the old forum, which was used to create your new user name on this one. Like me yours is quite simple, so transferred easily with just an @ sign prefixing it. Our actual old accounts were purely numeric, with the displayed name acting as a more memorable shortcut.

About Yourself – Blue circle was what was shown on the old forum, when someone tried to view my personal profile, which I’d made public. I needed to edit this as there were lots of surplus inserted formatting strings.
I still can’t view this myself, and neither can anyone else, until the bug is cured.

Display Name – fuscia circle, is the blue hyperlink below your avatar, and points to your profile page.
Like me yours is simple, and carried over directly from the previous forum. Eventually I will edit that to Bill Williams, but I’ll leave it for the time being as I’ve included many screenshots of my own profile, whilst trying to help others.

We really do need some feedback from Admin/Developers on this sort of stuff, and updated help pages.
I’ll bookmark this reply, as I’m starting to get fed up re-compiling and re-posting it.

Bill

 

[peak4Participant @peak4]

Excellent, please pass on thanks to the developers. Obviously we just had a recent forum outage, but rather than the previous Cloudflare timeout screen we had a genuinely helpful message.
Now users know they don’t have a local or ISP issue, and that the downtime is intentional. 🙂

Bill

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Here’s a real oddity … A ghost in the machine ?

Having been busy doing other things for a while … I came back to the forum and this was the thread that opened on my screen:

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/topic/topic-creep/

… I use the term ‘thread’ advisedly; because the whole thing pre-dates the new forum.

MichaelG.

.

P.S. __ I wonder where Circlip is these days

[Bo’sunParticipant @bosun58570]

Sorry Guys, I’m sure you’ve spent many hours re-jigging the ME forum, but I’m afraid for me, it’s a somewhat backward step.  Too many distracting and “in your face” adverts, plus it’s less than intuitive to navigate.

Have a rethink please.

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

I am afraid Bosun is correct, the old forum had its faults, but nothing like the new one. My visits will be drastically reduced.

Andrew.

[Graham MeekParticipant @grahammeek88282]

Whilst the overall appearance of this forum has improved since my last visit. Speedy it is not I have take 4 minutes from Log-in until getting to this page.

I tried to read the Privacy Policy, I had clicked to accept it weeks ago, but it just decided I should do it again.

I got the following message.

“”Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version “>= 8.1.0″.There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.””

I do like the bit about there being a “critical error on this website”

I will leave the troubleshooting WordPress to the professionals.

Regards

Gray

 

[Anonymous]

Interesting post from Neil in a previous discussion (almost 3 years ago) on updating the forum software. (The whole thread’s worth a browse.)

model-engineer.co.uk/forums/topic/plans-for-updating-the-archaic-forum/page/11/#post-527534

[Pete RimmerParticipant @peterimmer30576]

I very much like the new format compared to the recent layout. Whomever has been putting in the hours, well done.

[mgnbukParticipant @mgnbuk]

A new colour combination for a subject heading line appeared when I did a “Latest Posts” update – pale grey text on a light pink background. Who thought that one up – it is almost totally illegible. At least some gf the background now is a slightly less glaringly bright pale grey rather than bright white, so maybe some progress.

Still got really slow page updates here. It has got to the point that I click on a topic (or use the “back” function) the go to anothe wesite in anothet tab  & return later to the ME/MEW tab hoping to find that the page has updated. Dial-up internet sites from way-back-when were not as slow as this one is currently !

Nigel B.

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

Pretty much there now, it’s mainly just getting familiarity that remains, and fettling

One big remaining bug for users is the top bar locking when you scroll down on the latest activity page

Threads allow the top bar to scroll out of sight and this makes a page much easier for a user to review quickly

The locked bar makes it a pain to use and it’s a critical gateway page for workflows and comments

Otherwise we’re deffo looking a lot better

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

I can romp straight into a full page thread no problem and it’s much better than the locked bar system

[Graham Meek]

On Graham Meek Said:

Whilst the overall appearance of this forum has improved since my last visit. Speedy it is not I have take 4 minutes from Log-in until getting to this page.

I tried to read the Privacy Policy, I had clicked to accept it weeks ago, but it just decided I should do it again.

I got the following message.

“”Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version “>= 8.1.0″.There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.””

I do like the bit about there being a “critical error on this website”

I will leave the troubleshooting WordPress to the professionals.

Regards

Gray

 

I’ve chosen Gray’s post to use as an example to illustrate the point I want to make, basically many users here (and in particular Jason, Dave and Peak 4) have spent a LOT of time and effort in replying, testing, documenting and heaven know what else (for which as a forum user I am very grateful for), BUT where is the feedback from Morton’s or the development team?

As a user, each time I visit the forum I get more and more depressed and frustrated with its many problems, I tend not to report the things I find broken as I have no idea whether the same fault has already been flagged up and I do not want to the noise the moderators have to deal with.

I would have thought that a member of the development team could spend 10 minutes at the end of the day and update a ‘sticky’ that showed what had been fixed and what faults were still outstanding on the list to be fixed.

I am not interested in how well the forum is working now compared with how well it used to work, my comparison would be with other online forums but even more importantly, how it performs ‘just as a website’ compared with other websites. Currently this site is all but unusable for me for many reasons including,

1, Logged in unusable, logged out speed is acceptable
2, Appalling combinations of colours, font sizes and types, amidst a sea of white space ((does not have to be the colour white)
3, Spacing between lines of text is mostly too big (there are conventions and recommendations for this)
4, The height of each screen is stupidly tall! I can only view a vertical fraction of one screenful on my 16×9 monitor, I have to constantly scroll up and down (can I claim for wear and tear on mouse scroll wheel bearings??).
5, Notification emails (which trigger most of my forum visits) are not well thought out, the link they contain only occasionally take me direct to the post in the link.

I know its easy to criticise buy my gripe is not with the development team or the moderators but with Morton’s who appear to have behaved very badly in relation to this forum.

Is it my imagination or are there fewer advertisers now?

Ian P

[mgnbuk]

On mgnbuk Said:

A new colour combination for a subject heading line appeared when I did a “Latest Posts” update – pale grey text on a light pink background. Who thought that one up – it is almost totally illegible.

Nigel B.

That is a locked topic so you would not be able to post there anyway.

[Ian P]

On Ian P Said:

I would have thought that a member of the development team could spend 10 minutes at the end of the day and update a ‘sticky’ that showed what had been fixed and what faults were still outstanding on the list to be fixed.

There is separate software being used to log issues, comment and update their status. Aptly named “backlog”

[JasonB]

On JasonB Said:

On Ian P Said:

I would have thought that a member of the development team could spend 10 minutes at the end of the day and update a ‘sticky’ that showed what had been fixed and what faults were still outstanding on the list to be fixed.

There is separate software being used to log issues, comment and update their status. Aptly named “backlog”

I used the ‘search’ function but the only hit it returned was your post containing the word ‘backlog’.

I was unable to find any backlog Thread, Post, Topic or software (separate or otherwise). Where can I find it?

Ian P

[Author]

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