Thoughts on the October 2024 upgrade

I will start by saying that I'm hoping it won't take too long for the current technical issues to be resolved. To be fair to the moderation team, they had warned us beforehand that after the upgrade, we might find ourselves having to reset our passwords in order to access our accounts. It's just unfortunate that the technical issue meant that none of us had been receiving a password reset e-mail. I can only speak for myself, but as I had suspected the moderation team would be inundated with e-mails from members, I had felt bad for adding to their workload, whilst also feeling like I was having to jump through hoops.

Putting the technical issues aside, and having eventually succeeded in being able to sign into my account, I was almost in a state of shock when I discovered that I was able to receive e-mail notifications again. Previously, I had opted to only receive e-mail notifications for private messages, and on-screen notifications or no notifications for everything else.

Prior to the upgrade, I had felt that the timestamp on forum discussions needed to be more visible. I had lost count of how many times I had seen newer members commenting on discussions that had been created several years beforehand by members who haven't been active on the forums for years, or have had their accounts closed. Now, I'm not talking about the kind of discussions where any advice given may be considered relevant and useful for other members.

When perusing the list of discussions on the main Home page, or the individual topic boards (i.e. Miscellaneous and Chat), I have noticed that if I hover over the discussion title, a preview window appears. This enables me to see at a glance who created it, get a basic gist of the content, and also see when it had been created.

Before the upgrade, I'm aware that some members had found it confusing when the replies to discussions consisted of replies to replies - what some members refer to as sub-threads, I think. Based on my observations so far, no changes (improvements) seem to have been made to how those sub-threads appear.

Prior to the upgrade I had found that when I signed out, it felt like it took forever for me to actually be signed out. Well, not any more.

I seem to recall the moderation team saying that accounts that hadn't been accessed for something like 12+ months were going to be deleted. I dread to think how long that's going to take them! As I think it was around 15 years ago when this online community was created, I feel sure there must be hundreds of inactive accounts. In addition to that, I'm sure there will probably be a lot of other work that will be taking place behind the scenes, so to speak.

For those of you who were members here before the recent upgrade, I'd be interested to know whether you have any thoughts about it. Have you noticed any changes that you consider to be an improvement? Is there anything that you don't like and consider to be even worse?

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  • I don't really care about the improvements, but I hope it makes it cheaper and easier for NAS to run and manage.

    I wish the replies sub-thread order worked better (like you said).

    But most of all, I miss some regular posters and friends. I really hope that they sort the account issues out. I hope that people re-registering with new accounts linked to the same email address doesn't make the old accounts unrecoverable (Maybe make a note of your dreaded NAS number in the browser URL of the profile page, so you can lay claim to it again.)

    If people don't come back or leave, then the upgrade will be a disaster in my eyes (I am not knocking the mods. I just wish someone had thought of testing this aspect before the upgrade. It's causing too much upset)

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  • I don't really care about the improvements, but I hope it makes it cheaper and easier for NAS to run and manage.

    I wish the replies sub-thread order worked better (like you said).

    But most of all, I miss some regular posters and friends. I really hope that they sort the account issues out. I hope that people re-registering with new accounts linked to the same email address doesn't make the old accounts unrecoverable (Maybe make a note of your dreaded NAS number in the browser URL of the profile page, so you can lay claim to it again.)

    If people don't come back or leave, then the upgrade will be a disaster in my eyes (I am not knocking the mods. I just wish someone had thought of testing this aspect before the upgrade. It's causing too much upset)

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