Forum upgrade taking place on Wednesday 8th July 2020

[Admin_MND]

Dear admin,

Why do we have to sign in every time. This was not an issue with the old forum.

regards
barry (still no capitals)

Hi Barry,

When you login to the forum next time if you click the 'remember me' button this will save your login details and mean you don't have to sign in each time.

Thanks,

Forum Admin

[Admin_MND]

thanks for responding. Go to top now works. I used to beable to adjust the font sizes manually but that option no longer exists.

Morning Miranda,

I would recommend using the zoom button which is available on our web browsers - this will allow you to zoom in our out of a page.

Also some accessibility tools will also have other options for enlarging a page.

Thanks,

Forum Admin

[Admin_MND]

Morning Ellie,

Please find below a full update below on your points you have shared above over the last (nearly) week.

1. Use of small arrow icons at top of page instead of NEXT & PREVIOUS icons makes for a much smaller target for both eyegaze users and the high proportions of users with manual dexterity issues. One needs to scroll down to the end of the page for the larger NEXT & PREVIOUS icons - all more laborious.

Answer - This question has been submitted to vBulletin as a support ticket

2. As the Forum is now on a separate platform to the MNDA website, there is now no link to the main MNDA website nor to the MND Helpline details.

Answer - the forum has always had it's own platform and URL - the links to our website and MND Connect have all been added

3. Private Messaging

Answer - Within our new version of vBulletin individual posts and replies are not counted the same way as previously, it now counts only topics. The amount of topics you can have ongoing at one time is 500 and a topic is just an ongoing conversation with someone. The reason for this change was to allow for the new Messenger feature and by counting topics and not individual messages each user can send a lot more messages without worrying.
vBulletin have also said you will receive an email notification when and if you ever approach the 500 quota.

4. Latest Activity

Answer - we can't see why this isn't showing all posts so a support ticket will be going into vBulletin

5. Email alert

Answer - we are still waiting for a full response on vBulletin regarding the email we have sent twice now to all users re the new forum being live.
We think this could also be causing your issue with receiving emails for new PM's. We will flag with vBulletin.

6. Inactivity logout

Answer- this has been increased to 2 hours

7. Bookmarking the old login page

Answer - if any users experience a 404 error when using any url related to the forum they will be redirected to the homepage

8. Subscribe button

Answer - This is working now.

9. Any chance of a Mark Forums Read button at the top of the page please?

Answer- this isn't a feature that is available at the moment

For the few tickets above that we are waiting on updates from vBulletin on, we will share updates in here once we have them.

Thanks,

Forum Admin

[Admin_MND]

Hi all,

Another handy tip and place to look for general forum help is the 'help' bar in the footer of the site, the direct link is https://forum.mndassociation.org/help . This is provided by vBulletin and offers some answers to basic questions.

Thanks,

Forum Admin

[Ellie]

Thanks for the update.

3. Private Messaging

Answer - .... a topic is just an ongoing conversation with someone, such as this email thread.

In the context of my PM query, the above quote makes no sense to me - please explain what "this email thread" relates to. I would say this is "an ongoing conversation with someone" (Admin) but is taking place on the "Forum upgrade taking place..." thread on the Forum and has nothing to do with the messaging facility??

The amount of topics you can have ongoing at one time is 500

So, to clarify - I can have 500 different conversations/topics going on and each conversation/topic might contain 5, 10 or 15 posts within that conversation, that's OK?

Re Deleting PMs:
Have you any comment on the lengthy multistep process required to delete PMs?

Thanks again,
Ellie.

[Admin_MND]

Thanks for the update.




In the context of my PM query, the above quote makes no sense to me - please explain what "this email thread" relates to. I would say this is "an ongoing conversation with someone" (Admin) but is taking place on the "Forum upgrade taking place..." thread on the Forum and has nothing to do with the messaging facility??




So, to clarify - I can have 500 different conversations/topics going on and each conversation/topic might contain 5, 10 or 15 posts within that conversation, that's OK?

Re Deleting PMs:
Have you any comment on the lengthy multistep process required to delete PMs?

Thanks again,
Ellie.

Sorry Ellie, completely my fault I meant to remove "such as this email thread" so it should have said:

Within our new version of vBulletin individual posts and replies are not counted the same way as previously, it now counts only topics. The amount of topics you can have ongoing at one time is 500 and a topic is just an ongoing conversation with someone. The reason for this change was to allow for the new Messenger feature and by counting topics and not individual messages each user can send a lot more messages without worrying.
vBulletin have also said you will receive an email notification when and if you ever approach the 500 quota.

And yes that is correct regarding your second point - you should be able to have up to 500 topics/conversations on the go at once.

Hope that helps and sorry again about the confusion.

Thanks,

Forum Admin

[Ellie]

And there is no limit to the number of posts an individual topic can have?

I presume the auto generated email alert for almost out of PM space won't happen unless & until the other auto generated email function is up & running?

[Admin_MND]

And there is no limit to the number of posts an individual topic can have?

I presume the auto generated email alert for almost out of PM space won't happen unless & until the other auto generated email function is up & running?

As far as we know, yes that is correct and there is no limit on the number of posts per topic. The message functionality very much seems to be based around topics rather than individual messages.

Yes that is correct, we have chased vBulletin and hope to have the issue fixed very soon and much before anyone reaches 500 topics.

Thank you,

Forum Admin

[miranda]

My “go to top” button has a mind of its own! It’s still sometimes not going to the top of the page I’m on. I too need a “First unread” button. And when I’ve read the posts in a thread where do they go?

[Ellie]

Miranda, in the absence of anything better, I use "Today's Posts" for the most up-to-date activity and that has a Last Unread (tiny) icon to the left of thread title.

Love Ellie.

[Admin_MND]

Hi all,

Just to give you a further update on the fixes we're working on.

1. Previous/Next Buttons - We've added wording to the buttons at the top of the page and have made the size of both the top buttons at the ones at the bottom of a thread larger in size so that should help.

2. Latest Activity/Activity Stream - This is still under review at the moment, but in the mean time we suggest using Latest Activity tab on the front page of the forum which should give you a list of latest posts, plus you can see what's been posted today from 'Today's Posts' page too.

3. Forum Emails - This continues to be an issue we're still working on, proving to be a little more complicated than originally thought, but will let you know when it's been resolved.

4. Browser issues - It appears that Internet Explorer and some older iPads models with iOS 9 and older are no longer being supported by the forum upgrade which may cause issues trying to log in, or not displaying correctly. Having tested multiple browsers and iPads, we've found Chrome, Firefox and Edge to be the best, but Safari also works as well on later iPads. We were using iOS 13. That doesn't mean to say that 10-12 aren't supported, we just haven't been able to test on those to be sure.

If there's anything we've missed, then do let us know. We want to make sure everyone continues to enjoy using the forum and it's benefits.

Forum Admin.

[Ellie]

Those changes have made the signatures disappear and last unread post doesn't seem to be working as before.

[Ellie]

2. Latest Activity/Activity Stream - This is still under review at the moment, but in the mean time we suggest using Latest Activity tab on the front page of the forum which should give you a list of latest posts

No, as I previously flagged, Latest Activity does not give "a list of latest posts". What it does show is the last post made on a given thread - if there were 6 posts on a particular thread, only the last post shows on that Latest Activity page. We have no way of knowing this when we click Go To Post other than scrolling through.

[Ellie]

Sorry Admin but whatever you did today has made navigating activity much clumsier and more difficult 😌

Clicking on an individual post does not bring you to that post but to the thread which, confusingly, is now in reverse order. As the posts are no longer numbered (can we have this back please?) it's more scrolling and / or page +/- to find the latest post.

Really, really confusing. Even when I post a reply, it sits at the end of the page, out of chronological order - just when the the new version was making sense too

And the member's avatar and number of posts they have made - can that be returned to previous layout? It was much clearer.

Thanks,
Ellie.

[Admin_MND]

Hi Ellie,

Signatures should still be working, we can see them, and we've tried logging into a non-Admin account to test and can see them there too.

Sorry to hear the changes seem to have made things more difficult, we hoped it would make it easier, as the changes had been requested.

Individual posts are numbered in the top right hand corner, for example this is post #46, and your last comment is post #45.
You should still be able to see the avatars and number of posts next to a user's post on the left hand side.

As for the chronological order, I'm not quite sure what you mean that it's out of order, it should be the same order as we had on the previous version of the forum.

Are you able to provide some more screenshots of what you are seeing, as that might help solve the problem?

Thanks,

Forum Admin.