New forum Style

John, lots of people are acknowledging precisely that. Almost everyone that contributes to this thread has said at one time or another that it's a lot better now. I have too, on several occasions.


I could go on - there are lots more, so I'm surprised your question even has to be asked, to be honest.


The sticking point now is the fact that we are being told how we need to be safeguarded from imaginary problems, and we're back to the same "we know best, you lot are luddites" attitude that we got for the first 15 pages of this thread.

Quite a number of people have supported the view that we don't need to be protected against non-existent trolls, and not a single person has said they prefer to have edits as restrictive as they now are.

So the overwhelming sense is of (mostly Peter, if I'm honest) simply not listening, and telling us how it should be.

You know the point I am making. Raising issues is one thing but just insulting people is something else.

If there are issues that you feel have not been addressed then nobody has stopped anyone from having their say. Some forums might well have stifled some of the comments that have been made. In fact some are incredibly touchy about criticism.

If this is all about editing posts then the question would be is 20 minutes enough time to make any corrections. Do people routinely make corrections after that time has elapsed? I'm trying in vain to think of a situation where I made a correction other than immediately, usually after spotting a spelling error.

I think from what I have read that Pete is trying to protect the forum from any potential future attack. Photodo has a 10 minute limit. I'm not sure about other forums because it's never been something I've noticed.

I would just suggest that if it's a real issue to a lot of people then by all means let them say so and then Admin can weigh it up and decide what they want to do.

I think the new site is a great step forward,brought into the 21 century ,I raise my hat to the gentlemen who have made it possible!.......Kenp

John/Peter, I'm on here (and other fora) sometimes late at night when I can't sleep, I type away and post, sometimes noticing a mistake immediately, sometimes not until the next morning. 20 minutes is no good at all.

It's my post, I want to be able to edit it at any time regardless of how many people have posted in between.

to prevent the original post being taken out of context, use the quote function when replying to issues/points being made. Then people will be able to see the original and how it has been changed. e.g.

Now, no matter how you change your post, I have a 'copy' of your original comments.

Most other fora I use allow editing at any time, (as far as i am aware, not had issues with editing much much later).

The other issue is of broken links, lots of my images on here are from either my own website or other hosting services, what if I change hosts or they are having problems during competition judging? I will need to edit the posts with the correct image links.

I want the edit my posts as and when I see fit.

I'm sorry, I really don't.

What insults are you referring to?

I would guess that John is referring to my comments

Possibly, or maybe one or two of mine. It's hard to say unless references are given to specific things said that someone feels insulted by.

I don't think anyone here is actually intending to be insulting. I think there's a difference between comments where people's frustration is clearly evident, and personal insults.

There's lots of the former on this thread, for good reason IMO, but nothing personal that I can see.

I do find one thing faintly insulting, and it is this:

This forum consists of many people that are very technology-aware. It has a rich concentration of lots of people that are not in the least afraid of computers, electronics, the internet, and web applications, and are very experienced in all aspects of their use, including trouble-shooting when they don't work properly.

Hardly anyone like that is change-averse in principle.

Therefore to accuse us of making complaints about the new forum software primarily because it's not like the old one is quite extraordinary, and betrays what I see as an extraordinary lack of understanding.

For an organisation with as much experience of software development and running other forums as claimed, to lack understanding in this way does seem culpable to me, and in that context, insulting, as I say.

Changing the subject, is anyone else finding the search function almost impossible to use?

I tried to find one of the recent threads on "Back focus", so I used those keywords, and got many pages of apparently irrelevant material.

Whereas, typing "back focus siteentaxuser.co.uk/forum" into Google instantly returns a whole page of relevant threads.

There's no longer a 'show as threads/posts' option, and sorting in descending order of relevance (the default) doesn't seem to help.

Also, it breaks if you click on 'Last' to see how many pages of results are returned.

Yes chris, the search function is crap. i can't get it to search for a phrase like 'infinity focus", it just pulls up a load of posts with 'focus' in.

Google finds at least 9.

I've raised a report on this, linking back to these two comments.

Please allow pictures of at least 800x600 pixels to be posted to any forum page, and viewed in full without having to click anything.

I will consider leaving the forum if this is not done.

AFAICT, you can. E.g:
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/Kingfisher-and-Grebe-7753

You just can't use their gallery thing as they only allow tiny photo's for people with small monitors or magnifying glasses

Well, they have certainly insulted me and been very rude indeed to me by removing functionality and implementing a solution without regard to the community that existed before they decided to muck it up.

The following argument you then make I couldn't agree more with. I find their attitude patronising and insulting.

If the change had been made by consensus then I wouldn't have minded so much. But to impose their ideas onto an established community, well I've said it - insulting.

I cannot see why they should be commended for fixing what they broke. And which they still haven't brought at least to the standard we previously had.

Thanks Chris...I've made a comment on your report and you'll see we've now gone stages to make this work better. More to follow.

I wouldn't go quite as far as to say this.

It wouldn't be the first IT development that was run by well-intentioned people who fail, for a variety of reasons, and in a variety of ways, to establish requirements, design well, test thoroughly and implement in a way that is sensitive to an established user base.

Usually such projects are badly managed, and/or driven by unrealistic cost and time limits. I would be surprised if this is an exception.

There is that. Personally I commend the efforts of the developers that do the fixing, but not the inadequately managed circumstances that led to the fixes being necessary.

I've been in the software business for 20 years now, and I haven't yet worked on, or with, a team where the developers are not doing their very best in the circumstances.

I would cite the following as key determinants of the way this has all gone:

- Haphazard testing. Alarm bells should have rung when only four beta testers signed up.

- A 'Blame the Users' culture. Evidence of this is littered all over this thread, from as early on as when we were being blamed for not falling over ourselves in wanting to be testers.

- One exceptionally bad design decision, namely the requirement for the server to download all the images from their respective hosts, before emitting the page, in order to calculate the aspect ratio to be maintained when resizing - and then making the browser download them all again and resize them.

Apart from this, there's been a lot of firefighting needed, and as you say, it is not yet as full-featured as the old one was.

Apart from a few things, like the competition gallery format, the ability to see recent posts, and the fact that I can now have a funky avatar, I don't yet see many clear benefits.