Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Lithium Upgrade v7.7.1
OdiousEncounter wrote:
Even worse, clicking a link on the dev tracker only takes me to the top of the page that a dev posted in, whereas it used to jump me directly to the post. I now have to keep scrolling and looking for red names on the side. Very irritating.
Li-Deltan wrote:
Riis wrote:
Mac Internet Explorer, latest version:
save password does not work
smileys do not work
idle for > 5 minutes = log out
cannot text color
advanced search function completely broken now. I cannot search for anything past 6/26 it seems.
I mean this constructively, but this is easily the worst forum software I have used in 10 years of forum hopping. I am curious what the "redeeming quality" of such a aggressively user-unfriendly forum system is?
RbT
Sorry to hear you're having problems.
It appears that you are not running the latest Mac Internet Explorer. We made changes specific to IE 5.2x. You appear to be running: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.14; Mac_PowerPC). The latest version is 5.2.3 I believe. You can get the latest from
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx#IE.
That said, Microsoft has officially announced that they will no longer be supporting IE for Mac. While the product is not end of life, we're seeing diminishing numbers of IE for Mac users. We recommend the use of Safari 1.x for Mac and/or FireFox 0.8+ for Mac. (I have a Powerbook and use both. They both work great.)
If you're still having issues, feel free to contact me.Message Edited by Li-Deltan on 06-09-2004 03:43 PM
I will be frank, I do not like this forum system. That being said, you have definitely just inspired quite a bit of loyalty out of me. You have easily convinced the more reasonable set of the forum community of your sincerity in trying to give us a quality forum experience. To help you with why so many of us feel this forum system is unfriendly, let me explain my usage behavior, so you can see why I am frustrated frequently.
Step one: I load the forums. I am always informed I need to be a member. Frequently, upon logging on, I have to log back on three to five times as it always tells me it "can't validate my forum ID" or it "is trying to validate through log-in server." If the recent changes addressed this, thank you.
Step two: Should I get on (often, my forum time is in limited chunks, and I have to run off a lot to teach, to do housework, take care of my kids, etc.), I check my bookmarks and subscriptions. My forum usage behavior is, in my opinion, gated by the number of subscriptions and bookmarks I am allowed. Also, as a user, I feel a little confused as to haow Subs and Bookmarks are different, and how they may have funcitonality that I may use.
Step three: Ahazi forum, where I scroll past my forty or so stickied threads to scan page one.
Step four: I head back, and hit dev tracker. Often, I open a second window and send that one to Ahazi forum. At Dev tracker, I read all non-Test Center threads. I expect to be taken directly to the dev post in question, and to have the thread marked read when I am done with it.
Step Five: In my second window, I scan several forums, opening further windows as needed. As you know, should I post in one of those forums, it will send that window to one of the currently active forums I have open in ANOTHER window. This is frustrating.
Step Six: And this is where I am most frustrated. I go to advanced search, and do a forum search for my name used in posts. My goal is to see the latest times my name was used in quotes or when people are talking about me so I can reply. Before the changes, I had about 2900 instances of my name in the forums. It generally arranges them by some effort at date from 6/26 on. Should I attempt to click on any subheading, like "Date," it cuts off all but the OLDEST 300 posts. This makes such sorting abilities useless. Thus, I have to scroll to the bottom, click the little arrow, and look amongst the last page. Now, often times, these posts are arranged roughly by the most recent, but often, there will be posts as old as a month ago mixed in. To make sure I scan properly, I always have to manually have it list them by 100s and go back five pages or so. I have found posts from as recently as five minutes ago five pages back.
What is critical to me is the ability to sort by date, and not lose the posts that interest me. Some solutions: date range field, and an ability to search by PHRASE.
Other major annoyances: While this browser does not have a WYSIWIG mode, my home computer's browser does, and in this computer I find that should I wish to provide a link, I must switch to HTML, and post from there. A linking ability is critical.
Further, should I go back to edit that, I have to manually reenter the ENTIRE set of links. I have a post in which I attempted to provide links to every RP story on Ahazi, but after two updates, I wearied of reentering every HTML tag each time.
The lack of ability to stay logged in is extremely annoying. Most days, I come to my 30 minute break, spend 25 minutes logging in (and finally being "verified") and then have to do some work. When I get back, I am logged off.
You can see why we do not like these forums as they exist. If your commitment to quality is as great as you have been indicating in today's thread, then I hope you take into account the items I presented so many of us can have a better forum experience.
RbT
IgescaStorm wrote:
It looks good... auto login worked immediately (for the first time since months)... hooray!
Oh, like above mentioned:
- no forum description under the title in Dev Tracker.
- Klicking on Title in Dev Tracker, takes me to the first post (maybe because "Auto to the first unread message" checked?)
Another problem:
For a new line by writing message, if i hit SHIFT+ENTER, it does not make a (brake), but a "space". Then I have to hit enter again,and it makes a newline under the first,with one empty line between (p). Then i have to hit "Backspace" to jump back to the wanted line.
LeBob wrote:
hey, also, while we have the attention of you Lithium guys........... it'd be nice if the Reply to an IM included the original message........ I often find myself copy and pasting the message into a reply cuz I and the other person will get confused as to what we were talking about lol
thanks much
You mean so?
Just use the chat bubble next to the smileys and the message will be quoted! :-)
um how about fixing sony error after i surf around a bit and have to delete temp files and cookies to continue reading and surfing the boards? this gets annoying big time. after looking at a couple of pages i start to get errors of page not found or you are not authorize. which is lame cuase i am and my settings are correct and nothing wrong with them.
constantly deleteing cookies is messing up my yahoo home page cuase it erases my password and have to relog. and same with the boards i have to relog to station almost everytime i come here cuase i get stupid errors of page not found and have to delete everything again to see anything.
i never had this much trouble with any other mb except this one.
Personally, I'll be happy with 'sucks less.'
Q-3PO wrote:
we can’t guarantee perfection
dev tracker changes are really starting to annoy me!!!!
Links no longer reference the specific message posted by the devs. It just brings you directly to the message and leaves you searching through the post for the devs response. This is in addition to the tracking issue. There is no need to track the last person to post to the thread. Simply highlight the post made by the dev. eof.
Revert dev tracker changes. thanks.
Well, I still have the issue that it doesn't remember me afer I log in. I'm using IE 6.0.28 and I do have cookies enabled.
Oh well, maybe someday it will work right, until then I'll just keep re-logging in every hour or so. 