Comments (constructive) on the New Forum Software

[Ketan SwaliParticipant @ketanswali79440]

Hi Nick and Phil,

That security process is a Cloudflare feature. It is robust, as I mentioned before. When we implemented it a few years ago for about a month, it drove me, my web developers and my customers crazy. We experienced all the issues mentioned above with speed/page change/login. The related data analysis reports from CF were also suspect. Ultimately we removed CF and chose a different route.

Ketan at ARC.

 

[JasonB]

On JasonB said

JA’s profile shows “coming soon” as he has used an image of that text as his avatar.

 

I can read his profile as a mod, will try as a basic member

Thanks for that clarification, Jason

I will try to post a screenshot of the error message that I am getting as one of the riff-raff

MichaelG.

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Ketan, yes it’s starting to get my goat, and I think it’s more intrusive than the adverts, which at least they have related merit.

Regards Nick.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

[Anonymous]

 

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Thanks Michael, just trie dit myself as a peasant and got the same.

 

Admin please take note. It has been usual to be able to view a members Profile message, often useful as it can give an idea of location etc. Would have hoped that it shows this text that I can see as a Mod

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I get that same message if I even click on my own profile.

Regards Nick.

[Ketan SwaliParticipant @ketanswali79440]

In my case, if I use the QUOTE feature, it puts my post into moderation. 🙂

[Nicholas Farr]

On Nicholas Farr said

Hi Ketan, yes it’s starting to get my goat, and I think it’s more intrusive than the adverts, which at least they have related merit.

Regards Nick.

Hi Nick,

The adverts are a separate issue.

For me, the banners are OTT, and to some extent remind me of HMEM forum. It is something I am taking up with Mortons. On the Desktop, for me, it looks like a specific advertisers website rather than ME forum.

The irritation is the continuous pop-up of an advert (no disrespect to the advertiser) on the responsive mobile phone platform, which even after you cancel the advert, pops up again when you change page, or depending on your phone iphone/android, it pops-up every time you scroll up and down on a page!. You wouldn’t know of ARC, Sarik, Cowells existence on the mobile phone in portrait mode, unless you scrolled to the bottom of the page.

ARC has requested for its advert to be removed, pending a reasonable solution.

Ketan at ARC.

[JasonB]

On JasonB said

On Roy Vaughn said

Have the images which I uploaded on the old site been deleted, I can’t find them?

Also, how do I access my posts?

 

See this reply about albums

Click “profile” on the green bar and the default page that comes up is your activity (posts)

Just one post there, does this mean that nothing from the old site has been copied over?  Surely we have not lost all that invaluable material accumulated over the years (I don’t mean mine)?

P.S. The notification via email does not appear to work yet for me.

[JourneymanParticipant @journeyman]

Just one post there, does this mean that nothing from the old site has been copied over?  Surely we have not lost all that invaluable material accumulated over the years (I don’t mean mine)?

P.S. The notification via email does not appear to work yet for me.

No, all the old posts are still there and any images that were in them are still attached. Finding old posts is another matter, pressing profile on the green bar brings up your posts in the new version of the forum but doesn’t seem to include the older posts.

John

[speelwerkParticipant @speelwerk]

Does not look very user friendly to me, hopefully will get used to it. Niko.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

I posted a Gif as a test and some random unparsed html appeared this is a screenshot.

[pgk pgkParticipant @pgkpgk17461]

Hi Ketan, yes it’s starting to get my goat, and I think it’s more intrusive than the adverts, which at least they have related merit.

Regards Nick.

Ditto. A lot about the new forum will be a matter of familiarity but I’d guess most of the slowness is Cloudfare

pgk

[Roy Vaughn]

On Roy Vaughn said

On JasonB said

On Roy Vaughn said

Have the images which I uploaded on the old site been deleted, I can’t find them?

Also, how do I access my posts?

 

See this reply about albums

Click “profile” on the green bar and the default page that comes up is your activity (posts)

Just one post there, does this mean that nothing from the old site has been copied over?  Surely we have not lost all that invaluable material accumulated over the years (I don’t mean mine)?

P.S. The notification via email does not appear to work yet for me.

Hi Roy,

looks like the new site Profile is only showing posts since go-live, which I think is a bug.

According to the Moderator Dashboard, you have made no posts at all.  I think that’s also a bug!

However, if I use the Moderator Dashboard to look for Topics started by your good self, it finds three, which could be right.

I think the posts have transferred OK, but are difficult to find.   If you can remember which topic they’re in, your posts should be accessible through that route, though it’s pretty cumbersome.   Searching for ‘Vaughn’ is easier, but I’m not sure it finds everything.  I had over 10000 posts on the old forum and searching for SillyOldDuffer comes back with 5399 hits.  Hmmm.

Gold star for finding at least two, maybe three, serious bugs in one go!  I’ll report them – a new reporting system was set up earlier today and I have get in and to learn how to use it!

Investigating your email problem – watch for a Message

Dave

 

 

 

 

 

[JourneymanParticipant @journeyman]

I note that the ‘Number of Posts’ function seems to have gone AWOL. Whilst not critical I feel it helps a bit to know whether the ‘poster’ is a regular, prolific or one off writer. Perhaps adopt a ranking system that some forums use so we have eg.
Moderator – Guru – Contributor – Newbie
or some such ranking system. Just a thought

John

[JasonB]

On JasonB said

Green bar being mentioned is the one along thetop with “forums – Profile – etc” just like the old forum had. You don’t get the orange onein the screen shot below, just the green

Sorry Jason,

The Green bar I see now, I thought you were talking about the Date, Reply,Quote bar. By the way your screen shot did not show. As regards Orange I cannot comment as I don’t see that.

Regards

Gray,

[JourneymanParticipant @journeyman]

Agree with others that Cloudflare is causing more problems than enough, particularly the slow running.

John

[Ketan SwaliParticipant @ketanswali79440]

Dave (SOD)

It is difficult to say how many of the so called bugs are really bugs, or due to CF (Cloudflare). This is something we came across.

Once you do something – an action – it is supposed to update something in your account or somewhere on the site. There will be a delay whilst CF checks to see if it is happy with what you did, but because of the delay, the place which is supposed to update failed to do so because of possible time out creating an internal error.

The only way the developers will be able to check if the bugs you report are really bugs is by testing the site (on test site) outside the protection of live site which is currently using CF, to ascertain what is or isn’t a bug.

So it is my belief that if the site developers try to fix the bugs on the CF linked live site, the results will be variable because of the different site connection speeds. It might work for them, but fail for the user and so on.

Ketan at ARC

[JourneymanParticipant @journeyman]

I note that the Right Column is largely empty. As the forum is using WordPress with the bbPress plugin perhaps when things calm down a bit some research might go into populating the column with some of the more useful WordPress widgets and plugins for example ‘latest posts’, ‘suggested posts’, ‘Search by Month’

There are loads of options and could add a good deal of usability to the forum.

John

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

The “latest posts” button seems to log you out

[JAParticipant @ja]

I have just used the search facility to look for something on the laser cutting of steel. I got just over 2800 results!

It appears to find every instance of the word laser. Is this meant to happen?

JA

[Ketan Swali]

On Ketan Swali said

Dave (SOD)

It is difficult to say how many of the so called bugs are really bugs, or due to CF. This is something we came across.

Once you do something – an action – it is supposed to update something in your account or somewhere on the site. There will be a delay whilst CF checks to see if it is happy with what you did, but because of the delay, the place which is supposed to update failed to do so because of possible time out creating an internal error.

The only way the developers will be able to check if the bugs you report are really bugs is by testing the site (on test site) outside the protection of live site which is currently using CF, to ascertain what is or isn’t a bug.

So it is my belief that if the site developers try to fix the bugs on the CF linked live site, the results will be variable because of the different site connection speeds. It might work for them, but fail for the user and so on.

Ketan at ARC

An interesting point, and quite possible.  I’m not party to Morton’s technical solution and can only guess based on previous painful experience.

Website services timing out because of network or security gateway delays could cause the dreaded ‘undefined behaviour’, which often explains why some bugs mysteriously come and go.

I have no experience of Cloudflare other than as a user here.  The way it repeatedly asks me to confirm I’m human mid-session is very annoying, not least because it wastes about 20 seconds every time!  However, poor performance could be hardware, not enough memory or cpu, or slow IO etc.  My money is on software issues – things in the configuration that whack the server, such as wasteful database queries, inadequate buffering, too many bells and whistles, inefficient plug-ins, garbage collection problems, or higher payloads than the designer expected.  Time will tell.

Dave

 

 

[JA]

On JA said

I have just used the search facility to look for something on the laser cutting of steel. I got just over 2800 results!

It appears to find every instance of the word laser. Is this meant to happen?

JA

Try using inverted commas as in ‘laser cutting steel’ – came back with 122 entries

John

[Journeyman]

On Journeyman said

I note that the Right Column is largely empty. As the forum is using WordPress with the bbPress plugin perhaps when things calm down a bit some research might go into populating the column with some of the more useful WordPress widgets and plugins for example ‘latest posts’, ‘suggested posts’, ‘Search by Month’

There are loads of options and could add a good deal of usability to the forum.

John

Only empty because ‘Newest Topics’ and ‘Active Topics’ have been removed temporarily as part of the investigation into performance problems!  ‘Active Posts’ was similar to what the old forum provided, and I hope it comes back soon.   In the meantime, the Blue ‘Latest Activity’ button top-left is a work-around.

Dave

[Author]

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