Online Community - Comments, Improvements and Feedback

That paragraph is marked up as H3 (heading level 3), which is why it is formatted as larger, bold text. If that formatting is not being cleared as you describe, my guess is that the editor is interpreting your selection as being the text in the paragraph, but not the heading tags. A trick you could try is to edit the message, cut out the entire paragraph, and remove any blank line that is left as a result. Then paste the paragraph back using Edit - Paste as Text on the editor menu.

But as you say, it's not a major problem.

Once you have turned reply notifications on for a thread you receive a separate e-mail for each posting.

I have just logged on to my e-mail and there were six messages relating to this thread. Each message contains the reply and a 'View online' link.

I use an RSS feed to help filter those threads in which I am potentially interested and then use the notifications to follow a thread in which I am interested. Sometimes, I turn off the notifications for a thread because it no longer interests me.

There is an RSS feed (e.g. http://community.autism.org.uk/f/miscellaneous-and-chat/rss?Threadless=1) for recent posts for each section of the forum. If you do not wish to subscribe to the feeds, perhaps you could just use the links to view the activity.

Thanks for the explanation. I don't know how that didn't seem to work earlier. Now I've been able to add the two I want, by pressing Enter or clicking the italic word I've entered from the menu. Maybe the site has a limit on total number of tags so no new ones could be added? If it wasn't that, maybe I was just not trying the right thing!

Meanwhile on my latest post, there were some odd formatting issues related to including a poll.  Nothing major, but it seemed to remove the text that I'd copied from the body of the post into the poll, and I can't seem to get rid of the bolding in the first paragraph, even with 'clear formatting'. Quite a minor thing compared to the tag thing that brought me here.

I'm not sure that I understand the distinction between myself and the rest of the charity's staff? It's mainly the moderator team and me who post here, and the moderators need to focus on moderating. Meantime, we've had to divert development effort to one or two issues that appeared (e.g. the disappearing images referenced elsewhere), and also to GDPR work (like every organisation and charity in the country, I suspect). So, I'm sorry that work on other things has been held back (and I'm saying that on behalf of the NAS) - for example, making it easier to find the latest messages in a thread.

Regards

There's a picture-sharing thread that you might like. I'd recommend, as Cassandro suggested, reducing image size first, although pictures should get down-sized when you upload them anyway. Most cameras these days (even phones) take pictures that are much higher resolution (and therefore much bigger in file size) than is needed for a forum such as this. If you imagine the effect on everyone else's bandwidth usage of filling a thread such as the photo sharing one with massive images, you can see that the thread could quickly become impossibly large and slow to view for our site users. Uploading a large image will also take you longer than a smaller one would, obviously.

Google has advice on shrinking images.

You can create new tags by typing into that box. I've just been through and done some tidying up, correcting spelling errors in some tags, and merging ones that were obviously the same concept. They are listed in the box starting with the most used.

Tags are designed to be user-created in this way. Threads with similar tags will be more likely to be linked together in the Related box in the right column (or below the thread on mobile), so it makes sense to choose existing tags where possible. Since the aim is essentially to pick out the important topics that distinguish this thread (and similar ones) from others, tags such as "autism" will tend, in this particular Community, not to be as useful as, say, employment, hobbies or art.

Thanks. I don't really want email notifications. This is a place I come to sometimes, but don't want to be interrupted by notifications at other times. Do the e-mail notifications list every contribution to a thread, even if there have been several at once?

What I'd like to do is open each thread with new activity in a separate tab.  I can as you say open http://community.autism.org.uk/user/notifications its own tab, handy if I'm composing in another window.  But from that page only the head postings are links, not the notification entries that clicking takes you to the latest posts (that is, they don't show any URL, let alone the full URL including anchor).

I think you can upload pictures. Click 'Insert' (below or above the box you are typing in), then the second option is 'Insert image/video/file'.  I think only certain formats are acceptable, but JPG (most photos) should work. (You might want to scale them down a bit if you know how.)

Cassandro said:

A feature to highlight new posts since your last visit would be useful.

E-mail notifications do this.

Regarding the notifications covered by the lightning icon, I thought it was possible to right click (or middle click) to open in a new tab. I do not have any unread notifications to test this, however, I can right click (followed by 'Open Link in New Tab') and middle click to open the list in a new tab.

It would be lovely to upload pictures, decent ones of course, I have some lovely pictures of the natural world and knitting projects I would love to share, that will offend no one and make people feel happier.

Is it possible to add new tags?

When you start a new post, there is a box for tags, and a pop-up list that includes some big topics, but also odd entries like 'austim?' and 'ASDme', some capitalised, some not, duplicates like 'stress' and 'stressed', and not in alphabetical order as caretwo says above. I don't think it should add new tags automatically just from careless typing, but it's not obvious how to request new tags. I was thinking of:

• conversation
• small talk
• speech
• eye contact
• alexithymia

Thanks for any reply.

1) I noticed some of my contributions disappeared. I think this is because the author deleted the comment I was replying to (or maybe a moderator did).  If a whole thread is deleted, this loss makes sense, but is a bit unexpected otherwise.  (I can't immediately remember what thread it was.)

2) I don't really like the 'find and replace' dialogue that pops up for Ctrl+F. I prefer the find in the browser. I just need to remember to do Alt+E,F for this site. Some facility to turn it off would be good.

3) There's another response of mine about finding the most recent comment in a thread on this page here.

Would be nice to get some acknowledgements to these feature requests, even just to say they aren't possible at the moment.

I'd also been finding it difficult to find the new posts in an old thread. In a list of threads, if I hover over the title of the thread, the status bar shows a link to the main post which may be months old, so that's no use as you then have to scroll through and expand everything looking for what's new. On the other hand, there are times (like '2 hours ago') listed on the main community page and those show an anchor '#' that takes you to the latest post in the thread. Good. However, if there have been several posts you haven't read in different parts of the thread, you may miss some of these (this is the drawback of a threaded view). A feature to highlight new posts since your last visit would be useful.

Then there is the list of notifications that you get by going to the lightning icon and going to view all.  Here again you have links to the top post, and have to click outside the links in the body of the notification to see the newest post. But instead of an anchor, this is done in Javascript. (I appreciate not having too many scripts on a page, and generally only allow scripts for trusted sites.) One drawback of this is that I can't right-click and open the link in a new tab. It would be far better to have the notification be a link with an anchor as from the main page. These are pretty minor modifications to help usability, not a request for a major change.

I doubt the mods will ever see this, as it's hidden in a sub-thread that's 5 months old.

Holly - Mod

8 Months ago

...Greetings, NAS! How is it coming with the replies to THIS Thread, or to your starting a New Thread like this one, then?

How long has it been since YOU (- not "WebPM" - ) has replied to *this* Thread?

I noticed that you sometimes tell people to Post upon a "Feedback" Thread... Do you mean this one, or the ones which other people including myself had to start? Please SPECIFY, it would help all of us a lot, Thank You.

FYI - It is 2018, now. No-one has a typing speed of 'one letter per hour', and so kindly post your own real reason for such tardiness regarding your updating this Thread. (True enough, however, if you wait long enough, I shall be gone!)

This is a Polite Angry Letter... Were it written upon Paper.

Thank You for your Forum. But No Thank You for ignoring what anyone says upon it. Yet Thank You for your Forum again.

"WebPM" Posted this message upon this other Thread. (With regards to Missing Posts/Messages.) If anyone is reading this, then Please consider doing what WebPM says, Thank You Kindly. :

community.autism.org.uk/.../62751

...I myself cannot "PM" (Private Message), and I cannot always 'Snapshot a Screen'. This is why I write this, in asking others, and I Post it here. Fair Play to all who may read.
(... and a Happy New Year/Kung Hei Fat Choi ! :-D )

When adding a new thread it is possible to assign tags to the thread, however, the pop-up list of tags is not sorted alphabetically.

Is it possible, please, to set an alphabetical sort on the list?

Thank you both very much for Posting after all of that, is all I can say. And all I can say next is a preference towards NAS actually reading here...

Yes, those figures are Mbps tested tons of times with various speed checkers including diect from the router, the best we get these days is 1.7 Mbps download. A BT engineer came out last week and poked about but nothing has improved.

I think I've finally pursuaded my partner that we need to get an alternative internet provider!

Seconded, thirded and fourthed! It only happens on my phone (android) and iPad, on a PC it's ok. Presumably it's trying to be clever and use less resources but the result is responses you know are there, because you've previously seen them, become invisible unless you go right out and scroll through the entire thread from the beginning. 

Why can't we have a 'normal' forum where responses are linear with pages and page numbers for long threads. You then have a sense of where you are and can choose what to read or catch up with. Long threads on traditional forums can still make sense and be navigable which is not the case here and leads to subjects getting dispersed all over the place.

It's a mess and this thread is a shining example of said mess.

These disappearing and reappearing posts are driving me nuts.

Different posts appear depending on how we enter a  thread. From the oldest or most recent !   Then Pressing load new or load previous gives different final results.

Different posts in the middle are missing!