Some good, some not so good news (DOWNTIME 16th April)

Hi everyone, 

Just wanted to let people know that we've made some improvements to the community that will hopefully improve the experience for everyone. 

Most importantly we believe we have found a way to keep people reading and replying in the community logged in. This should mean that no matter how long you spend typing a reply you won't get the 'logged out' screen. 

Once you leave the community, you should then be logged out. 

Let us know if this works for you and we'd recommend still copying any long reply just to be on the safe side. 

In other changes we hope you'll now see links displayed better in emails and recognised better as links in replies. 

We've also added any option to include images when posting a reply and added a 'Latest content' option to the left hand side bar.

This is a little off at the moment - it's only showing titles rather than message details but with a few tweaks should help find new content.

We'll be updating help pages and other content to reflect these changes but hopefully now we're getting closer to sorting out the basics we'll be able to move forward with some more exciting developments.

And now the less good news...

The community will be down for the week starting Monday the 16th April.

There are changes taking place on the main website that means that it will not be possible to register or log in during this week. That's something that needs to happen to address the system the main site works on and it's unavoidable.

We hope the work will be completed as quickly as possible but to be on the safe side we are assuming things will be down for the full week. Static content (info sheets, etc) will still be available on the main website.

So, why is the community going to be down and not visible? 

I think it's really important that any community is active and can be engaged with - which is what we hope to build here over time. What I don't want to happen is that people post a message or reply to someone else and then can't log in, can't reply, can't post their own views.

All they'd be able to do is just look at a forum that sits totally inactive for a week, wanting to reply.

For this reason we think it's better to replace the community with a simple message that the service is down and links to our other services and information. That way people coming here can still find help for a week, not be confused about why they can't add a comment or discussion.

So, really sorry the community is going to be down. I hope you can see why we've made this decision but let me know if you have any questions or would like to share your views on the decision

  • Just wanted to give this a *bump*

    A reminder that from tomorrow the community is likely to be down due to technical work until at least Friday