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Hate the new forum interface.


kohanmike

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More counsel of patience. Every time I come back, things are coming alive (It's Alive!...)

It is not clear how Google is going to handle the slightly (in some cases) different URLs, but "We shall see..."

 

[ATTACH]1175868[/ATTACH]

 

301 redirects have been implemented incases where URL structure has changed so we shouldn't see any links broken, that said we still are tracking 404s in Google WebMasterTools, and implementing 301s where applicable.

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Moderator: Please let them know at least two problems that I am experiencing: (1) When I write my reply, I am writing over "Write your reply..." in the box. (2) I cannot use my usual Google Chrome browser at all as the screen jumps, blinks, and flickers. Not sure if I should notify Google to make their browser compatible with Photo.Net (haha).

 

Actually Google Chrome is used by about 45%, followed by 25% Safari, then 11% Firefox and 6% IE and then there are a number of smaller browsers. You are the only one I have seen report this bug, can you "re-install" Chrome, wondering if you have an outdated version.

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GPalm, how about addressing all of our issues instead of posting technical jargon and statistics. Anything to be said to all of the rest of us with complaints about how badly this interface has been implemented? I certainly haven't seen anything "coming alive" in the last few days, my patience is non-existant.
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GPalm, how about addressing all of our issues instead of posting technical jargon and statistics. Anything to be said to all of the rest of us with complaints about how badly this interface has been implemented? I certainly haven't seen anything "coming alive" in the last few days, my patience is non-existant.

 

We have posted what we are working on and those threads are at top of help. If bug reporting is repetitive and or comes with "stick it where the sun dont shine" kind of comments then those users will no longer be welcome here. Abusive language will not be tolerated as it reflects much worse than any user experience dealing with a bug that can be fixed.

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"Moderator: Please let them know at least two problems that I am experiencing: (1) When I write my reply, I am writing over "Write your reply..." in the box."

"Actually Google Chrome is used by about 45%, followed by 25% Safari, then 11% Firefox and 6% IE and then there are a number of smaller browsers. You are the only one I have seen report this bug, can you "re-install" Chrome, wondering if you have an outdated version."

 

 

FWIW, like Mary, I`m experiencing the very same "write your reply issue... ", I`m in (updated) Safari.

BTW, even though I clicked "reply quoting this message", the quote doesn`t appear.

Edited by jose_angel
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"Moderator: Please let them know at least two problems that I am experiencing: (1) When I write my reply, I am writing over "Write your reply..." in the box."

"Actually Google Chrome is used by about 45%, followed by 25% Safari, then 11% Firefox and 6% IE and then there are a number of smaller browsers. You are the only one I have seen report this bug, can you "re-install" Chrome, wondering if you have an outdated version."

 

 

FWIW, like Mary, I`m experiencing the very same "write your reply issue... ", I`m in (updated) Safari.

BTW, even though I clicked "reply quoting this message", the quote doesn`t appear.

 

Hit "enter" aka "return" on your keyword and you can type your reply under "write your reply"

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I wonder why Google Chrome and Firefox react differently when using the editor (on a desktop). One Chrome, the field stays "dead" whereas on Firefox the box brightens and the icons darken and the "write your reply" disappears. Not going to get into much detail how things work (or more to the point, don't work on an ipad). Even depends on whether I hold it vertically or horizontally. Links don't work because they don't appear to be links. Items are inaccessible because they are covered with portions of other menus that are floating around haphazardly.
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Hit "enter" aka "return" on your keyword and you can type your reply under "write your reply"

 

Well yes, but then as you type more and the text scrolls up in the box (which is weirdly tiny, by the way) you end up with the "Write your reply" text overlaid again. It's not the end of the world as a thing to work around, but I really wonder who can't work out how to enter text in a text box and why this problem couldn't be most simply solved by just removing those three words.

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I wonder why Google Chrome and Firefox react differently when using the editor (on a desktop). One Chrome, the field stays "dead" whereas on Firefox the box brightens and the icons darken and the "write your reply" disappears. Not going to get into much detail how things work (or more to the point, don't work on an ipad). Even depends on whether I hold it vertically or horizontally. Links don't work because they don't appear to be links. Items are inaccessible because they are covered with portions of other menus that are floating around haphazardly.

 

Oh, is that why everything stays illegibly grey on Chrome? Yes, it's a little annoying; I hope they get to it eventually.<br />

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The mobile view is generally quite broken, including the overlaid features and the non-working links that Dieter suggested. However, requesting the desktop view on my phone seems to work at least somewhat better. Dieter - can you do that on your iPad? (Sorry, Samsung employee, iOS isn't my thing. :-) )

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Laurie, unfortunately that's not an answer to Steve's question. What you get when you go through your process, and thanks for the info, is about a dozen thumbnails of the avatars of SOME of the photographers you follow. You then have to click on LOAD MORE in order to see about a dozen more. It's a time consuming process to get them all loaded. The reason the old LIST was nice was that they'd all be on screen at the same time, so if you wanted to search for someone, you could easily do it. This is now a time-consuming mess where I needlessly have to put up with seeing everyone's avatar in big picture form. I come here to see fellow photographer's photos, not their avatars all over the place.
We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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The forum software is not built by photo.net as we didn't see the need to re-invent the wheel when it was already created. We started down that path some time ago and quickly found that programmers were recreating something that had already been created. The 3rd party options out there and were much more feature rich than we could have ever created in house. We picked Xenforo for a number of reasons, but you can see a comparison here of all the players in this space. It is not uncommon for sites to use 3rd party forum software and white label it - the time and cost to create and support proprietary forum software is quite simply unnecessary unless you wish to get into the forum software business, which we did not want to do. They already have a 2.0 out - but we're only in testing mode with it so far, but an update of the forum side is in our future - if there is one thing you can count in software development is change, all sites need to maintain, update, and develop to stay competitive - we waited much too long to update. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
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I assume that's what I see, the URLs are the same as on the desktop, ipad or iphone. Wasn't even aware there is a "mobile version of PN 2.1 - how do I get to it?

 

The site seems to have different layout when it detects it's running on a mobile browser (this is fairly common behaviour). You should be able to tap the URL bar on your browser and drag down to get a menu with a "request desktop site" option. The same is available in Chrome on Android under the menu system. I believe this fiddles with the browser identifier to persuade remote sites to serve the desktop version. Of course, you then get a mobile browser's attempt to render the desktop site; this isn't perfect, but I found it better than what the site was trying to serve me knowing that I was running on a mobile device.

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The forum software is not built by photo.net as we didn't see the need to re-invent the wheel when it was already created. We started down that path some time ago and quickly found that programmers were recreating something that had already been created.

 

Thanks, Glenn. I think we were aware that the site uses a third-party platform (although unlike some others here I'd not paid attention to which). I understand that writing a site from scratch is time-consuming. Frankly I'd have done it myself anyway (at least on top of Apache) just so I understood everything, but that's because I'm an egomaniac and control freak; I'm glad you guys didn't do this. Unfortunately the off-the-shelf solution means that the team will have needed to spend nearly as long as they would have spent writing the software in an effort to understand the software enough to be able to fix things. (Xenforo is listed as "proprietary" rather than GPL, but I hope you still have access to the source so you can see what's going on when there are bugs.) I hope most of the issues are in the PHP side that's directly under the control of the site maintainers. This should mean that everything will be fixed eventually - I'm just a little worried that possibly the development team didn't have as long prior to roll out as they might have liked (in order to fully understand the system). I'm only basing that on there being quite so many issues and - despite everyone's efforts - the fixes taking a while to appear.<br />

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Again, we are where we are. I wonder whether the pressure on the development team meant the site was rolled out before they were as familiar as they needed to be with the underlying system, in addition to it happening without (much of) a consultation process with the forum users; in which case, they have my sympathy, and the situation is unfortunate. I wish them the best of luck getting up to speed, even if it would have been nice if the "getting up to speed" had happened before the new site went live. (Sorry if I sound insulting to those who already feel they know the system; I'm basing this only on the end-user experience.)

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Indeed. So I have been using the mobile version without actually knowing it. When I get the time, I will see if the desktop version behaves better on the ipad than the mobile one.

 

Please report back, Dieter. If the experience on iOS and Android is better with the desktop view, we might want to petition the maintainers to stop trying to output a mobile view (until it's fixed, at least).

 

In other news, having been logged out for reasons I don't really understand (I think I'd just posted...) the good news is that I can see my real name again.

 

And once more, apologies if my most recent post sounded insulting to the development team. I was expressing concern about the apparent process and trying to be sympathetic to the issues that the development team now have; I realised it sounded like I was accusing them of not knowing what they're doing, which isn't really what I was shooting for. (There's a line between "I'd not have done it like this" and "you're incompetent", and I wasn't trying to fall on the insulting side of it.)

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