Functionality of this forum ?

yes since they changed the software it's become very user un-friendly. not intuitive and pretty hard to find links, navigate. out of thousands of free forum software packages this is probably in the top 1% of bad

Absolutely. The upvote or down vote sometimes takes a long time to appear, quite a while after all the posts on the page are displayed.

Turtle said:

Yes thanks for that. I have tried your activation tip and noticed a partial improvement so I'll continue to mess around with it.

I am glad to have been of some assistance!

Turtle said:

It's very frustrating though as I'm sure some people with very legitimate and distressing concerns could be put off by it and perhaps, the time delay and lack of responses to their queries.

I actually find using this website of forums somewhat off-putting myself as it is quite taxing operationally, and the absolute and infinite only knows how many people have been obstructed in terms of getting answers or being social. Hardly comforting really.  

Turtle said:

I'm not a tech geek by any stretch but just wondering if it can be fixed. 

I am a technoklutz myself to a great extent ~ who has learnt about using websites by way of my mistakes or others experience, but it might well indeed be possible to fix this place ~ keeping in mind that charitable donations and personnel are somewhat restricted at the moment (what with the Covid19 pandemic, social isolation protocols, wage reduction furloughs and increasing unemployment on the go and all that) so it might be several months at least before things get sorted out here ~ quite possibly.

Yes thanks for that. I have tried your activation tip and noticed a partial improvement so I'll continue to mess around with it. It's very frustrating though as I'm sure some people with very legitimate and distressing concerns could be put off by it and perhaps, the time delay and lack of responses to their queries. I'm not a tech geek by any stretch but just wondering if it can be fixed. 

I too am new to this forum and have also been finding the sytem rather clumsy. I belong to another forum (not ASD) which is much easier to navigate, although to be fair, I've been posting there for many years so am well used to it.  Maybe it's just a question of time, but I do get rather impatient when things don't immediately cooperate, and that's not good.

Turtle said:

Thanks for taking the time to explain your solutions. Very much appreciated.  Unfortunately, there is often no main reply tab visible but thankfully and eventually, it did make an appearance here so I could reply. Are you saying there is a specific way to activate this if not showing on screen ?

I was not stating as much but the next logical progression is that it would be the case, with the basic gist being that the system treats everybody as a visitor to this website of forums, rather than as a signed in member ~ until that is we activate something at the top of page; such as I have just discovered applies also with the forum search engine involving the 'magnifying-glass' icon to the bottom-right of the top panel:

These minor issues give this website it's unique character.

I also have the problem that the order of threads sometimes is jumbled...it doesn't always show most updated first on the forum home page.

Also, when trying to access other parts of the website, not on the forum, I keep being asked to register my details. 

I still can't read my private messages correctly on a mobile device. 

I'm sometimes finding that scrolling to the very bottom of the page and then back up to where you want to reply makes the buttons appear.

I'm pretty disgusted with the functionality of this forum - it's a technology that was completely sorted in the mid '90s - so how come this recent update is sooooooo useless?

In response to Deepthought.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your solutions. Very much appreciated.  Unfortunately, there is often no main reply tab visible but thankfully and eventually, it did make an appearance here so I could reply. Are you saying there is a specific way to activate this if not showing on screen ?

Regarding replying to individuals, I have tried your method and I think it may have been successful only on the first individual response though not on any others.

With your vote suggestion I didn't see any difference at all.

Turtle said:

1. Is there somewhere in the main menu of NAS that takes you directly to this Community/discussion/forum ?

Here is a link you can use and bookmark it if it gets you there:

https://community.autism.org.uk/?Redirected=true

Turtle said:

2. I've noticed that if wanting to reply to a discussion there are, most of the time either, no means to do so or, at best you can only reply generally to the OP.

3. Sometimes you can and cannot reply to the OP but there are no means to reply back to individuals because there is no ' reply ' tab showing for either or, or both. 

Basically I activate the reply tab to the original post right at the top:

and cancel it:

Which activates the next posts reply tab, and I carried on repeating that process until I reached the one I actually want to reply to.

Then I discovered that once I had activated and cancelled the reply tab to the original post ~ I could just keep scrolling down past and back up to each post in turn ~ and the reply tabs activated in turn.

The next discovery involved just activating the votes option:

And then I just scroll down past and back up to each post in descending order. Once this is done with one thread, the rest of the forum pages are normally activated also, for me as using a laptop.

Turtle said:

4. There doesn't seem to be a ' Home ' tab to get back to the main discussion/forum/community page after visiting your own profile page or that of others for example. 

The only means I have found is either the back-page option on my browser, my keyboards alt and webpage history or just opening a new tab with the bookmarked address I gave at the beginning of this post.

If any of those methodologies might be of some assistance.

As an example, I posted this over 2 hours ago yet I am still unable to respond to individuals who have replied to it. Just thinking how many people have simply given up on this and how many important discussions we have missed because of it. ?

Yeah - I've got all the same issues - but I'm also noticing the page loading slowing down massively.

I sometimes use an old WinXP netbook and it can take over minute to load a page from this site - just what the hell are they doing with all that down-loaded data?  The hdd LED is working double overtime when accessing this site.

This should be just a basic forum and all the other forums I use load instantly - even on the XP machine - so I'm disturbed with what on earth is being downloaded on every single page from here that takes so long.

Any thoughts?

I have those same issues. Also, why is there no dark mode option? Bright white is genuinely painful (thank god for browser plugins)