New Forum Fun, Questions and Glitch Reports

Count me as a victim of the name glitch. Yesterday my avatar, join date, etc. were there, even though my name has been changed from Heinz 57 to heinz_571. Today I have no avatar and it says I joined yesterday.

I believe this occurred because there were different email addresses associated with your existing forums account and your account with the main site. I tried to merge them, but thatā€™s not working for me, so I have an inquiry in with the developers. I donā€™t want to just willy-nilly try to delete this account outright to free up the email address in case that will negatively affect your log-in with the main site. Please hold ā€“ looking into it further!

You know what? You are so far OFF COURSE itā€™s not worth the time and aggravation. This is nowhere close to being ready to roll out. I tried to set up some preferences and what I got was a list of threads i started. I picked four threads to monitor and that showed up as a hodgepodge list of threads mixed up in no particular order. I click on buttons that take me to some other off the wall ā€œfeature.ā€ When I tried to set preferences I got a couple of sentences like we will send you a list of new posts. Iā€™m not interested in notifications with Mostly Useless information.

I want what we had before. It doesnā€™t have to be identical. The features people want badly, pages for example, or an easy way to create preferences or a nice clean list of topics in a particular forum? They should have been on top of the list when this project started. They should have been required as part of the contract. If they had to be created from scratch they should have been done first. It sounds like there are all sorts of problems with 'ā€œfeaturesā€ no one cares about. We canā€™t use the same basic functions we had on the old board, like paging or search. They have been bumped in favor of the fancy-schmancy stuff that is already out there and doesnā€™t take much effort to customize.

ā€œWoo-hoo! Great! Iā€™ve got a whole bunch of new gizmos to figure out how to use too,ā€ Thatā€™s nice. Enjoy them. Iā€™m not interested in gizmos to fool around with, nor am I the only one. I have to scroll down a 100+ replies with additional responses hidden under someoneā€™s reply that should be treated like any other reply in chronological order.? That software developer sold a package that takes way too much effort to use and is chasing people away. I might be the next one.

They may be working hard to ā€œget things up to speedā€ but they arenā€™t doing it to appeal to those of us who want a convenient, easy to use package. They need to put the fancy stuff in a sealed container and store it in a secret location. Then, as I said earlier, they should be shut up in a room until paging and the rest of the basics are ready to release. Then they can open the container. These ā€œguys and galsā€ sound like a bunch of amateurs. I

Now Iā€™m going to go to the barn to play with my horse.

10 Likes

Did you possibly log in yesterday using your username and then today with your email address?

I think these issues are stemming from conflicting email addresses in the system for forums accounts and main site accounts, so Iā€™m trying to ID where the behaviors are coming from.

Thanks!

Yesterday, I logged in by entering my username and password. I clicked the ā€˜remember meā€™ box at that time. Today, I came here, noticed I was not logged in so I clicked ā€˜Log Inā€™ and that was it - it logged me in without my having entered anything today.

Iā€™m fairly sure my original login was created with a hotmail account, one that I no longer have, however the email showing on this new name is my current gmail account (the name@ part is the same on both).

Are you looking for something like this?

If so, you can go to each individual forumā€™s list of threads in several different ways.

  1. Click on that forumā€™s name from the homepage
  2. Click on that forumā€™s name from the menu next to your avatar at the top right of the page.
  3. Select the forum you want to go to from the drop down menu that says ā€œall categoriesā€ on the home page

If you let me know more information about the preferences youā€™d like to set or what youā€™d like to see, I can even go in and set them for you.

The hidden responses you referenced are available to read two ways in every thread. They appear in chronological order in the thread just like they used to on the old site. In addition to that, you can also opt to click the ā€œrepliesā€ tab under a post, and that will show you all the comments that were posted in direct response to that post. If youā€™re not interested in viewing them that way, just read on like normal, and youā€™ll come to those posts later on in the thread where they appear chronologically.

Search will be back ASAP, but the developers found that search queries were one of the things bogging down the site so much that it was completely unusable, so they temporarily disabled it while they did troubleshooting.

The lack of pages definitely takes some getting used to, as instead of advancing the thread in chunks of 20 posts, scrolling down, then loading the next chunk, you just scroll or use the bars on the right side of the page if you want to fast forward or back. Thatā€™s an inherent part of the platformā€¦sort of like a FB feed. Right now itā€™s probably extra frustrating because the loading times are slow, so hopefully youā€™ll be able to establish more of a comfort level once itā€™s working smoothly.

Again, if there are particular preferences youā€™re trying to set that I can help you with, please let me know. Hope you had a good visit to the barn!

4 Likes

Thanks! Thatā€™s helpful information about the auto-log in today. Iā€™ll pass it on now.

1 Like

I found a setting to include an option to filter threads listed by ones youā€™ve posted in yourself. I think that should be a good addition, right? Check it out on the home page, and let me know if you like.

2 Likes

I come to COTH from my laptop, so I can see better, but once in a while I am somewhere else and use the iPhone.

I tried the iPhone this morning and, other than login being cranky and slowww, it finally worked.
Cruising thru the forums now is easier on the phone than it was before and can see things better, surprised about that.

As for navigating between forums and threads, everyone needs to get used to how this platform works, not to scroll but to click on that black bar above to go to the top, use the left hand C, even when big in the header, not just in the black upper line.
Not easy to remember that after spending all those years scrolling, but I bet we will get there, some day.

How to navigate seem a bit like one of those IQ tests where you have several choices and some are tricky ones you never are sure if you got it right or just were showing how dumb I am not getting it, even if it has been explained plenty. :roll_eyes:

I will say, this is what we have to work with, is free, is what it is.
We should help make it better, best we may, whatever it takes.

Thanks, @Moderator 1, hope your head is not spinning too violently by now, along with that grey wheel. :upside_down_face:

2 Likes

Sorry this does not work. The avatar click only elicits a reminder about ā€œnotifications.ā€

Respectfully request that when I hit ā€œreplyā€ that I am not dumped completely out of the forum. Yes. Rickrolled back to the Chronicle home page (not even the forum main page). Also - not able to log out using the avatar - clicking on the avatar only brings up the reminder that I have ā€œnotificationsā€ - the ā€œnotificationsā€ were from last summer (or year before summer, not sure what year); also the ā€œbotā€ seems to think Iā€™m new. So. I did try to read some of the forums without logging in, for a while last night, because it is so difficult to actually log in (if I never see another circling wheel it will be too soon). However, between every post what I saw was an invitation of sorts from Chronicle Forums to sign up ā€œas you are new here.ā€

glad itā€™s not just me. I donā€™t even know for sure who Iā€™m quoting here (sorry all) but Iā€™m appreciative of the effort everyone has gone to in this. Iā€™ll give it another day or two but so far in my forays into the forum (lol) itā€™s too frustrating to be fun. I apologize for being so negative but it all looks like a bunch of randomness that takes forever to load. I canā€™t figure out what is better about it. (Yet?)

4 Likes

I only use my username to log in, and there should be only one email associated with this account. (I am supposed to be halt, not halt1). I also have a gmail email account.

I was wondering if it was year registered related. A few of us had similar registration ranges.

Sorry, this is awful. So many issues - not sure where to begin. Agree with all of the above poster issues - very clumsy, slow, forever to load anything, spinning circle of death, cannot see topics or previews or pages, very cumbersome to navigate. What you had before was light years ahead of what you ended up with now. Please return to the previous version.

8 Likes

You see this when you click on your avatar:

image

See how your user name is there?

image

Click it.

Then click log out.

image

1 Like

You have to click on your username (just to the left) when it takes you to the ā€˜notificationā€™ window. That should switch tabs to a menu that has Log Out at the bottom. It took me a minute to find it too, I didnā€™t realize the username was also a tab.

1 Like

I do not know what @theresanAppfurthat is seeing but I will say that sometimes when I hit my avatar it spins for so long that I am not able to get to my user name. So maybe that is what is happening to them.

I dunno - it took me 30+ secs to load the Off Course forum, more than 14 secs to load a single post and another 14 seconds after hitting the Back button to return to the forum.

Thatā€™s glacially slow.

1 Like

@SBrentnall I think part of the difference between your experience and what SmartAlex posted earlier today is that things seem to be getting slower as the day goes on.
I have not timed anything but it certainly seems slower than it was this morning.

I agree, it is getting slower and slower to respond, one more glitch for the i-worker bees to attend to, please.