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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?

  • I would just like to express my thanks to those of you who have expressed your thoughts, which I have found interesting to read. I had hoped to reply to you individually, but currently lack the spoons to do so. Perhaps this is something I may do at a later date. Slight smile

  • 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)

  • Hi Sparkly. I’m glad you were able to get back in to your original account in the end. I had to start again unfortunately as my original account is long gone, I think I first signed up in 2018/19. I haven’t properly used the new site yet but so far the logging in and navigating round the forum appears to be way quicker than the old was. Even the longest threads are a lot smoother and quicker. The font is a bit small for me, I have solar retinopathy in both eyes and it makes reading smaller fonts a bit difficult but it’s not too bad. It’s usable which is nice! The buggyness is unfortunate but hopefully the IT team will have that fixed sooner rather than later.

    One thing I do miss from the old site is the screen filter, where it used to dim the pages? I don't see that on here anymore so I'm hoping they'll add it again or just implement a new one. I found it useful as brightness can not only upset me from an autistic point but also for my eye health as well. I wonder if some things like the screen filter will be added at a later point? 

    I didn't know old accounts will be removed after a certain time. I'm glad of that as it will make things less clunky but it's sad to think that people who made such an impact previously will just vanish like breath on glass. A lot of the people I met when I first joined such as Plastic, Luna, Aidie and then others like Steven, I regularly look at their posts and remember good times we all shared. It's sad I won't be able to do that in the end but from a programmers perspective I get why they will do this. I expect over the coming months new updates will occur where they fix bugs, add new features and remove the old stuff. A lot of change but it will hopefully improve the community overall.

    I’ll fill in my profile page next week hopefully when the site is less likely to flag me as SPAM. Fingers crossed they work these bugs out soon.

  • To me as I said it is definitely a good thing.

    On the main pages that lists the posts it is very readable and I wear bifocals.

    However, the standard font is small and without glasses I cannot read it without glasses and a bit of straining. I wonder what font is. I discovered this after I posted and trying to read the thread. Perhaps it can taken up one or two sizes?

    I also read that Comics sans font or Arial is the best for autistics to read around 12 I read I think. Research is out there.

    Thank you though

    Now I took the size to large and it all became bolded but I didn't want to bold it.

  • Hello

    I ended up deleting my account and started again. Also still seeing more inactive accounts (which supposed to be deleted);

    Improvements is to have an account delete button (Instead of email the community manager); also removed friends and not able to contact them (like Facebook etc); that's why I declined no PM/followers.

    Once Facebook did an update and went wrong.

    Plus side nice seeing new members (noticed some are under 18 years old; new rules over 18 can join)

  • It is so strange. I have not been on this website in some days. I was a member and my posts and  account still stand but I had to register again to post.

    These are my first thoughts on the changes and I have not had a good look around. This is just what I have observed.

    I am someone who historically finds change very difficult. When this has happened on platforms like Facebook I will usually not like it and grumble to myself.

    However, what I have seen I am loving so far. It looks so clean and much better to my eyes and cannot find fault in anything seen. I have not read your post yet as I don't want to be influenced. I am writing it and I have seen it. This is a rarity for me to see change and like it just like without trying to get used to it as well.