Are you experiencing problems with the site?

[ForresterModern]

I finallly got around to fiddling with my altered signature since the "glitch" ten days or so ago. Interestingly, before the glitch my signature, consisting of my "FM" initials followed by all my clan and social group affiliations in various color letterings, was fully present and visible. Afterward the signature came out in the computer script for the colors but not the actual colors themselves. Others suggested simply re-entering the original signature for a fix, so I cut my old signature out and reset the signature blank, then re-editted it by pasting my original signature script back into the signature. The program would not accept it because, with the script for the different color letterings, the total number of letters in the signature exceeded 500, seeminlgy some new arbitrary limit that was not present before the glitch. When I started cutting down the total number of script letters in my signature by removing colors from several of the social groups I subsequently was able to get that number down below the limit and my signature, now minus the colored letters for some of the social groups, reappeared as it was before the "glitch". So something must have happened during the glitch that changed the maximum number of letters of script in your signature from whatever it was before down to a maximum of 500 script letters. So we figured out what caused the weird signature issue, but that doesn't jibe with Steve's claim that nothing was being changed in the forum programming when the glitch happened. Even weirder. Oh well.

jeff

[Hamish]

Steve,

Just to add to your problems, and I know we have discussed this previously, but I still cannot open my PM from Rocky, and the threads I could not access (plus several more) are still not available to me.

I've reached a stage in my chemoradiotherapy where I am tiring very easily and so, whilst I regret not having access to all threads and posts, etc as I have over the years, I am not able to worry too much about it for the time being. Just thought you'd like to know!

All the best, and

Take care,
Ham.

[BoldHighlander]

Okay, not only am I not receiving any email notices of replies to subscribed threads, but I discovered just by chance that I had a PM from a fellow member....I didn't receive the usual email notification regarding this either

My home email is thru msn/hotmail & I've never had issues with XMarks notification emails before.

[Cynthia]

This is a two-parter regarding Visitor's Messages.

First... the Visitor's Messages that are on our profiles (not the personal messages): I never get any notification that I have one. No pop-ups, no notifications in text in our User CP box on the right side, no emails. It would be handy if we could be notified that we have one.

Second... I had an error when I tried to reply to someone using the Visitor's Message feature. I clicked "View Conversation" like I usually do, typed my reply to someone, and when I clicked to post it to our conversation, I got an error message at the top of that section (not a pop-up, but it just became part of the page above the message I'd typed). It said that it couldn't post due to the following reasons... and then didn't list any. There was an "Okay" button, which I clicked, and all that did was remove the error message. Before I tried to post it again, I opened a new window and viewed the person's profile and saw that it actually had posted.

So I had a weird error message that wasn't real (my conversation had not shown up on my conversation page, but it HAD posted to the individual's profile), and I don't get notifications of Visitor's Messages.

Hope this helps.

[Cynthia]

Oops, one more I meant to mention.... still about Visitor's Messages:

I sometimes see "This message is moderated" (in a lighter gray text) right above someone's message to me on my profile. For example, the most recent one on my profile for the longest time had that message written above the actual message, but today it finally went away. I do notice that my reply to that individual now has that. I've noticed it for a while and kept wanting to ask what that was about? It obviously posts, and I don't have to do anything to allow it -- I don't think a moderator is having to do anything to allow it either. Is that an error as well?

[Steve Ashton]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have a list of all your problems and comments about the site. I will be re-hiring our code guy in the near future to fix them and answer all your questions.

But I will need to do this in one large batch and not piece-meal. It is simply not feasible to keep Chris on permanent retainer. Not to mention too expensive.

Please keep posting to this thread with any problems you encounter and I will let all of you know when they will be worked on.

I will re-hire Chris as soon as he has some free time and as soon as I can afford it.

[Riverkilt]

Well, since you asked.

I reconize that I'm rural and dial up, so my expectation is that things will be slow.

Seems since the last upgrade/change the site takes much longer to load...like about five minutes for me - really. Imagine the tartan has to load, but also notice all the vendor ads load first, and the smilies load first, then finally the copy appears.

I don't expect it to change, so I just go do something else for a while and come back when I think it may have loaded to the point of being able to read the posts.

Good news is, once the background ads and smilies have loaded its pretty speedy - unless I open in another window - then its the same slow as initial fire up because that's what its doing again.

I'm probably the only guy on the forum still using dial up.

And, to clarify, when I say "slow" I mean much slower than most other Internet sites I visit for various reasons.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Hi Steve-- Just to add to your woes:

I usually preview my messages prior to posting. Sometimes, when I hit the "submit reply" button the message fails to post-- this happens with about 1-in-5 messages.

[Steve Ashton]

Riverkilt,

Ron, I'm sorry about your problem with the time it takes to load pages while using dial-up.

The fact is that this forum is huge. All the graphics and all the photos stored in all the forums, threads, and galleries must reload each and every time you move around the forum. Large, hi pixel content photos, are the worst of all when it comes to re-loading pages.

With all the forum sections, threads, posts photos and graphics on this site the only way to get them to load faster is to prune and delete stuff.

Our hope is that as people get used to the new map that we can delete all the regional, state, provincial, and country sub-forums. This should speed things up. Notice that I said "should'. We won't know for sure how much time it will save till we try it.

The reason things load in a particular order is because the forum is built in layers. The first layer to load is the Tartan background, Then everything else is placed on top of that in further layers. I didn't plan to have the advertiser banners layer load before the forum layer it is just how the software does it.

[Steve Ashton]

MOR,

I have never experienced the problem you are experiencing.
I do know that there is a short, 5 second delay, between hitting the submit button to prevent people from double posting. There is also a delay between submitting two posts. for the same reason.

I don't know if this is the cause of your problem but I have added it to the list for our next troubleshooting session.