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Thoughts on the October 2024 upgrade

Sporadic Sparkly

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?

Parents

  • When I wrote my original post, it hadn't been my intention to spend too much time dwelling on the (currently ongoing) technical issues, mainly because I had hoped they would have all been sorted out by now. However, it's now been a week since the 'upgraded' platform opened its doors and welcomed us in, so to speak. I use the word 'welcomed' loosely, as I think many of us would agree that the technical issues have made this platform feel far from welcoming.

    I do not claim to be an IT expert, but if I was an employee of the 'IT partners' that had been contracted to undertake the upgrade, one of the first things I would have done would have been to create a handful of online community accounts, which could then be used to check that everything was functioning as it should be after the upgrade.

    Now, if I was a NAS employee and the IT partners had reported back that there were technical issues likely to affect the mental health and wellbeing of site users, I think I personally would have been inclined not to let the online community area of the site 'go live' until the issues had been sorted. Based on my observations, the way things have played out so far has resulted in a lot of angst for community users. As for the moderation team, I imagine they have been feeling super-stressed too.

    With the benefit of hindsight, I cannot help but feel that the upgrade was rushed. Had it been properly tested, and if time had been factored in to rectify any unexpected technical problems, all the confusion, frustration, and anger being experienced by users (and possibly the moderation team too) could have been avoided.


Reply

  • When I wrote my original post, it hadn't been my intention to spend too much time dwelling on the (currently ongoing) technical issues, mainly because I had hoped they would have all been sorted out by now. However, it's now been a week since the 'upgraded' platform opened its doors and welcomed us in, so to speak. I use the word 'welcomed' loosely, as I think many of us would agree that the technical issues have made this platform feel far from welcoming.

    I do not claim to be an IT expert, but if I was an employee of the 'IT partners' that had been contracted to undertake the upgrade, one of the first things I would have done would have been to create a handful of online community accounts, which could then be used to check that everything was functioning as it should be after the upgrade.

    Now, if I was a NAS employee and the IT partners had reported back that there were technical issues likely to affect the mental health and wellbeing of site users, I think I personally would have been inclined not to let the online community area of the site 'go live' until the issues had been sorted. Based on my observations, the way things have played out so far has resulted in a lot of angst for community users. As for the moderation team, I imagine they have been feeling super-stressed too.

    With the benefit of hindsight, I cannot help but feel that the upgrade was rushed. Had it been properly tested, and if time had been factored in to rectify any unexpected technical problems, all the confusion, frustration, and anger being experienced by users (and possibly the moderation team too) could have been avoided.


Children
  • in reply to Sporadic Sparkly

    I'll be banging my own drum in this regard (ie the points that you raise above) very shortly.  I am starting to detect real harm and damage within our community Sparkly.  This is NOT cool.  Thank you for re-assuring me that my impending post is "not too much!"  Us autistic folk, know how hard that self-judgement can be.  You have helped me - so thank you - but please do not feel obliged to reaction to my post, merely based on this response to yours.  If you think I am not "on-the-mark" just let my post float away - OR - "tear-me-a-new-one."!

    FKH - Life is complex Sparkly !!  With warm, long established, trusted, safe, comfortable assurances -  Number.