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SurferTim:
Maybe you need to "varnish" your web browser cache? :slight_smile:

I was locked out of the forum not long ago with a "banned from using this forum" message, and deleting the browser cache and cookies corrected that.

Oh I know how to fix the search problem. It's just that I don't have the permissions to do so. :slight_smile:

Oh I know how to fix the search problem. It's just that I don't have the permissions to do so.

If that is all, then I give you permission. It IS your web browser and computer, isn't it?

SurferTim:
If that is all, then I give you permission. It IS your web browser and computer, isn't it?

No, I'm talking about permission on the server, to fix the document expired problem at the source.

I don't understand. My forum search works fine, except when I use the "back" button after selecting one of the search results. I get a "Confirm Form Resubmission", at which point I click "reload". That is right next to my back button.

Is that what you want fixed on your other thread?

SurferTim:
I don't understand. My forum search works fine, except when I use the "back" button after selecting one of the search results. I get a "Confirm Form Resubmission", at which point I click "reload". That is right next to my back button.

Is that what you want fixed on your other thread?

That's the problem Tim. No other forum I go to has that issue, and it shouldn't be happening here. I have an SMF forum myself and it doesn't happen there. I just did a search there and went back and forth between the search results and the links and it work just fine.

It's a very aggravating problem if a person wants to look at many search results. It's going to cause people to stop using the search here and just post their question even if it's been answered. That's just human nature. If there's one thing this forum doesn't need is more questions that have already been answered. This is one of the busiest forums I've been to and that means it's a top priority for the search results to be easy to use.

Now I understand. I adapt quickly, so I am used to the reload button. That would be a good fix.

SurferTim:
Now I understand. I adapt quickly, so I am used to the reload button. That would be a good fix.

Thanks. I can't understand why the Admins won't even acknowledge the problem. It just ridiculous to have to go back through two dialog boxes to get back to your search results every time. If there's 10 pages of results to go through until you find the specific information you need, it's going to be very frustrating. I don't need to ask a lot of questions if there's a good library of questions that have already been answered, I can do the research myself. But, with the document expired issue it's way too time consuming.

If they don't think it will frustrate users needing information, they need to think again. The best solution is to just fix it. I have very knowledgeable contacts at the SMF support forum and I'd be glad to work with them to help get a resolution.

But the first step is to realize the problem exists.

In a search I always right click and select open in new tab on the search results I think are interesting. That avoids having to reload the page when I need to go back and the pages are loaded while I'm still reading the results. That saves me some time.
You could consider this as a workaround.
Best regards
Jantje

In a search I always right click and select open in new tab on the search results I think are interesting.

I do the same, not just in this forum but everywhere. Except I click the mouse wheel, same result.


Rob

Why not just fix it?

Kind peoples at admin, please fix it for moddeller, he'll go crazy with a bunch of others if you don't, I'm sure :stuck_out_tongue:

Me, just like Jan and Rob, I do everything right click new tab where ever I am, so I haven't had the pain of it all.
Sure, I end up with a few tabs, 30 or 40, sometimes by two windows in two different viewports, because I can in linux or OSX (chuckle), but heck, it's easier and quicker, no re-loading pages. I've tried to letting people know this for years, when I see how cumbersome they clunk their way back and forward on the same tab.

But for the love of sanity, can you let moddeller know or even let him do it.


Paul

rockwallaby:
Sure, I end up with a few tabs, 30 or 40, sometimes by two windows in two different viewports, because I can in linux or OSX (chuckle), but heck, it's easier and quicker, no re-loading pages.

No, it's not quicker.

You know, it's really funny. It's really odd. It's really quiet. This place practically screams "We can solve problems! Tell us your problem and we'll find a solution!" Five or ten people sometimes jump on solving the problem at hand. They can't resist solving problems here, and that's really good. It's really impressive, until this problem came up.

Why, when it comes to this problem, is there silence from the problem solvers, the Administration? What's different about it? Why are they so averse at working on a solution to the problem, not avoiding it or working around it? Maybe they are embarrassed and don't want to admit the problem exists? I can only speculate on the reason if they don't chime in. They haven't even acknowledged it. They haven't even said "We don't know how to fix it." Anyone want to guess why? Is it the color of my avatar? Maybe they don't like members with locomotive avatars that report problems.

I just think it's very strange, especially when I posted this topic in the proper place out of goodwill, notifying them of the problem, and what happens? Crickets chirping from the Admins. It's really not a good policy to ignore problem reports and offers of goodwill from members who want the forum to run like it should. I know, they are they types that "shoot the messenger". That's gotta be it.

I dunno, I just think it's weird.

P.S. The forum is running a version of SMF that is on the fast track to being unsupported, as I've also said. But that's another thread ...

It's not that strange, I don't think I've ever seen a single issue of this nature addressed, or even acknowledged, by the powers that be.

In fact the only time I've seen them post on this forum was around the time of the Due release.

I know of people (myself included) who have directly PMd and emailed the team with no response.

There may be good reason, maybe they get 1000 emails a day and just can't answer them all. Either way you better get used to it :slight_smile:

There is a bug-reporting mechanism, I don't know anything about it though.


Rob

Graynomad:
It's not that strange, I don't think I've ever seen a single issue of this nature addressed, or even acknowledged, by the powers that be.

In fact the only time I've seen them post on this forum was around the time of the Due release.

I know of people (myself included) who have directly PMd and emailed the team with no response.

There may be good reason, maybe they get 1000 emails a day and just can't answer them all. Either way you better get used to it :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply Graynomad, I appreciate it.

If what you say is true, they need more people who are empowered to fix things on the forum. I know the structure of SMF very, very well. They could add more Admins, or even Global moderators with more permissions. If there isn't a moderator assigned to this board, they could do that. The Moderator would acknowledge the problem and elevate it t the appropriate official, and report back.

A forum this big needs a lot of moderators. In fact, I just looked at the boards and none of them show that any moderators have been assigned to them. Shoot, a forum this big, which covers so may time zones? It should have 5 to 7 moderators per board , not because that many are needed at once, but because the board is so active worldwide 24/7 - the members who are mods should reside in several world wide time zones. It deserves that many. Each board would have these mods and that way all the members know specifically who to report problems to.

I just sorted the memberlist and Admin should have come up at the top, but it looks like they have renamed the membergroups, i.e. Edison, Faraday ... who knows who is really an administrator? Who is in charge. Very odd way to do things!

It ain't rocket science. There will be no problem getting volunteers to do these jobs. They will have more volunteers than they can shake a stick at.

There is a bug-reporting mechanism, I don't know anything about it though.

OK, I'll try and PM an Admin to verify that they don't care about these types of reports, and I'll post what happens here.

modeller:

There is a bug-reporting mechanism, I don't know anything about it though.

OK, I'll try and PM an Admin to verify that they don't care about these types of reports, and I'll post what happens here.

Good luck.
May the force be with you
Jantje

Jantje:
Good luck.
May the force be with you
Jantje

PM sent to the recipients shown below. At first I tried to send it to all six Admins, but I got this message:

You may not send personal messages to more than 3 recipient(s) at once.

That's ridiculous, for a site this large, to be only able to send a PM to just three people! THREE?

Good Grief. :~


Forum Error Messages Involving Searches

The courtesy of an official response in-thread is requested regarding the documented problem in the thread linked below.

Thank you very much for your attention,

Modeller

"Document Expired" Messages When Going Back to Search Results

cc:
Massimo Banzi
David Cuartielles
mellis
Davide
cmaglie
madbob

Graynomad:
It's not that strange, I don't think I've ever seen a single issue of this nature addressed, or even acknowledged, by the powers that be.


Rob

Looks like you were right Rob. Not a single Admin responded to my PM, or commented on my post about the document expired error. I guess they just don't give a damn about members reporting problems. But it's funny, if you look down the lists of posts on this board you can see they lock threads and move them, so they must be reading the board. Hmmm ...

But that isn't going to stop me from commenting on problems I see with this forum. :slight_smile:

And now for my short treatise on SMF's moderating system, for those that are interested.

There are 8 Global moderators on this forum, and no board moderators (if there were, they'd be listed on each board)

Four of the Globals are very active -

Name - Position - Date Registered - Posts

AWOL Global Moderator 2009-02-25 17733
Coding Badly Global Moderator 2009-04-15 9497
CrossRoads Global Moderator 2010-08-21 15175
Nick Gammon Global Moderator 2010-12-31 12905

Four of them are not active at all. Taking into account the length of time they've been registered, it seems they have lost interest in moderating -

michael shiloh Global Moderator 2009-03-24 37
Federico Vanzati Global Moderator 2009-03-26 1077
Yot Global Moderator 2009-10-05 287
UweFederer Global Moderator 2011-03-27 4

So for all practical purposes, there are only four Global Moderators, and no board moderators, for a forum of this size -

1136364 Posts in 139356 Topics by 128500 Members.

SMF has a heirarchy set up that, when used, makes the life of everybody a lot easier.

We have these top ranks -

Administrators
Global Moderators
Board Moderators

It should be used like a police force. You have the Chief(s) of police (Admins), the captains (Globals), and the cops on the beat (board Mods). In this case the forum owner would be the Mayor. The police chief(s) (Admins) should never be doing the work of moderating. All they do is manage the police force and hire and fire other mods and twiddle with the forum settings. They also work with the Mayor (forum owner).

The Global Mods manage the board moderators and determine what actions to take when serious violations of forum policy happen. They can, if given the permissions, edit members profiles and do some other things to enforce the rules, ban members, and so on. In a pinch they can do the menial work of moving and splitting threads, but that's not their primary job function.

The board Mods are the cops on the beat. They do most of the work of moderating. They make sure that the posts for each board are on-topic and manage each board. They split threads, move threads, respoond to Report to Moderator actions, get involved in threads when they veer off-topic, and so on.

If you have a very small forum, it's OK to use Global Mods to police the entire forum, because it's not efficient to assign members to each board if your membership is very small. In fact if it's very small the Admin will do the same thing. That's just the way it goes.

But for a large forum (and this one is huge) you need to set up the moderating system the proper way. You should have board moderators on each board to handle all the little things that happen inside each micro-community (each major board). Another thing to consider is the global activity of the forum. If it's truly a world-wide audience, you need moderators awake spanning all the global time zones.

IMHO, this forum is way too big, WAY to big, to be policed primarily by a few Global Moderators, and as I said Administrators are not supposed to be moderators. My guess is that it just evolved that way from years ago. But looking at it now, it needs to have it's moderating hierarchy gutted and set up the way SMF is meant to be set up. It's just way too busy to be run like this.

Cheers,

Modeller

It seems to me there are in fact a few "board moterators", specifically in the "international" section. Uwe is one of the moderators of the Italian board.

(edit: typo)

tuxduino:
It seems to me there are in fact a few "board moterators", specifically in the "international" section. Uwe is on of the moderators of the Italian board.

Well, at least someone is paying attention.

Yes indeed (except for Scandinavia), I have that board collapsed because I don't need to read it, but that's good. Now the question is, why do they not do it for the busiest boards on the forum?

IMHO, this forum is way too big, WAY to big, to be policed primarily by a few Global Moderators, and as I said Administrators are not supposed to be moderators. My guess is that it just evolved that way from years ago. But looking at it now, it needs to have it's moderating hierarchy gutted and set up the way SMF is meant to be set up. It's just way too busy to be run like this.

Cheers,

Modeller

Well I don't agree with your opinion of what this forum needs. You present a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist in my opinion. I've been a member for over 4 years and seen the huge growth happen.

This forum started with almost no active moderation and had few problems to speak of, but as it grew the admin did ask for volunteers to help with typical moderation tasks and a few were selected.

This forum for it's huge size has not had a lot of problems with trolls and members posting abusive content considering the membership size and high posting traffic we have. What few show up are dealt with in a timely but fair manner. Once in a while some commercial ad bot spams the board pretty good but those are always handled in a timely manner.

So again I don't share that there is a problem here looking for a solution, our moderation is of the 'light handed' nature and I hope it remains that way. I don't wish to see this forum operate like a local government structure, too much politics and niches can form as a result of an over administrated forum.

Lefty