Suggestion to improve the forum

Thanks for your reply.

The Riddler - This is under active discussion, but you're right that we have to choose measures carefully. The spammers are specifically trying to behave as much like genuine users as possible, so of course anything we do may affect real users as well. And yes, if they can detect what we're doing, they will respond with posts such as you suggest, to get around our measures, which is why you won't see me saying what we are doing!

But we know that more is needed.

Please make sure that you mark spam topics as Abuse using the More link, which will flag them to the moderators. Do the same for individual messages. The more people who do this, the more help it is. Obviously though please make sure that the messages actually are spam, so that the moderators are not inundated with reports that they have to go through!

someone just did 2 spam topics

I think you’re thinking about stopping SPAM, which is good. 20 feels excessive though, for genuine users, but also isn’t fool proof. You could just write Hi! In the first 20 topics then post what you want. 

I agree though that links need to be quarantined until they have been approved by MODS or something similar.

Yes.  Also, the oldest and newest function gets confusing when you sort by newest. It does for me anyway. 

Can we make it so that you can't post links until you've posted in / created more than 20 topics?

I think there needs to be an End and Top button for long posts that have had a lot of responses. I looked at a thread recently that had had 100+ replies and I wanted to see the most recent. It took a while to scroll through on the iPad. So something you could click on to take you to the most recent replies and back to the top if you want to re-read the original post and maybe add q quote from it would be useful.

I am experiencing the same.

it costs money (development team time) and risk ( each change is a risk )  NAS is a charity and thus do not have the resources of youtube and its parent Amazon.   

Just saying thats all  I think this forumn is excellent it now faster than it was.

Its free, managed, governed,  and policed for us.

Maybe we could ask them for sponsorship/donation if all get togther and ask 

Is there any news on the notifications button. ..?

I find the reply buttons are displayed intermittently too.

I do not want to install browser extensions.

Some websites offer the option to enable the dark mode themselves without any browser extensions.

For example, YouTube.

I wonder why does this website should be different?

Hi California

How you get dark mode depends on what browser and device you are using.

Extensions (mostly for desktops and laptops):

Gadzooks gave the link for Darkreader, which gives a dark mode for many sites. It's a browser extension. Some people use those a lot, whereas others have never tried them. As the article below explains, the advantage of extensions is the ability to make your browser work the way you want, with the sites and services that you use. Although you have to think about security with extensions, recommendations here, from trusted users, may give some confidence.

Once you have installed an extension such as Darkreader, you may need to activate it for a particular site. That particular extension is available for various browsers.

There's some information about extensions in general here: https://www.howtogeek.com/169080/beginner-geek-everything-you-need-to-know-about-browser-extensions/

Accessibility settings for mobile devices:

Extensions are generally for desktop (and laptop) browsers. On mobile devices, try using the general accessibility settings for the device. There are some starting suggestions here, but most useful pages concentrate on individual devices (Android or iPhone for example), so it's worth Googling for help:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8909631/android-ios-web-reading-text-size-brightness-easier-how-to

Specifically for dark mode, this page explains that different browsers behave in different ways:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/18/the-best-android-browsers-with-dark-mode/

I confirmed that dark mode on the Samsung browser works on this site. By contrast, Dark mode on Chrome is more of a theme that affects the browser menus and so on, but not the site itself. To get a true dark mode, you need to use the Chrome flags settings:

https://www.techradar.com/uk/how-to/get-chrome-dark-mode

Hope this helps. We may use feedback on these points to expand our accessibility page, although browsers change quite quickly and it can be difficult to keep up to date.

I would like the option to enable the dark mode.

Thank you WebPM. I hereby grant you the 'listening to user feedback' award 

Hi calmerchameleon

Thanks for the kind words, and for flagging that about achievements.

In general, feedback from users of this forum was that they were not so interested in flagging of most active posters and so on, so we have tended not to use those features of the underlying system. As well as launching our new site last week, we updated the version of the forum software that we are using here. Looks as though that one crept through in the update, so sorry about that. We'll put it right in due course.

I'm off to see whether I have any achievements either - probably not!

Sorry, we're having some issues with the calm mode. The plan is for it to stay as you set it, not only on every page on the community, but also if you go to our main site - i.e. one setting on both sites. We've just got something to put in place to make that happen.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

On my profile, I now have a lovely line line telling me "calmerchameleon has no achievements"

Fortunately, I can see the funny side of this but as someone totally struggling in life again all of a sudden (as I'm sure many others on here are), seeing "you have no achievements" is a complete facepalm thing to have.

I don't mean to complain/moan as I'm really grateful that this forum actually exists.

I think Facebook is absolutely awful as a forum and I'm very pleased there are actual forums like this that exist.

So, thank you to NAS for providing a forum. I hope some of the niggles can be ironed out and I hope the 'faithful' here stick with it even if it does feel awkward/difficult (or worse) for the timebeing.

I'd love to know who passed this off as a good idea!

It is the same here.

The colour mode resets when I open a new page.