This forum is very important to many people with MS. In fact many of us consider it a life-line.
You, MS Society, are a well-off charity… hardly a lttle poor charity working from a room above a shop… So please would you tell us why you are unable to get professional web designers to give us a forum that actually works???
YES I am angry.
I am a member of the MS Society. I often send you donations. I always sell all of the raffle tickets. I did a collection for you on my 60th birthday. YES I expect better!
Apologies to my fellow users on here… but I am so angry about this.
Hi Pat, your feelings have been taken on board- and we sympathise. Deeply. Administrating these forums has’t been a barrel of LOLs in the past few weeks. It would be really helpful if you could tell me what your specific problem is, so then that can be passed onto the developers.
Obviously, we’re very grateful for all your fundraising efforts and hope that these issues with the forum will not deter your support in the future. Without people like yourself, our army of volunteers (including moderators on this forum) and other fundraisers, the MS Society would not exist.
I can assure you we’re doing the best we can to fix these bugs- and we thank you for pointing them out, constructive criticism is most helpful - but please bear with us and hopefully everything will run smoothly in due course.
Very difficult to get on site sometimes. It just wont open and I get message ‘Safari cannot open this page’.
After I’ve written a post I get a message that I have to copy the post and refresh the page… which I do and then have to paste the post. It’s irritating but also I’m quite computer savvy but I think some people would just give up. I fear we will lose newbies and regulars will give up (last time we had an upgrade… a few years back… we had major problems and we lost some regulars who never came back).
For once my ipad spellcheck is working on here… if I put the curser at very end of word it gives me the correct word to tap on… but then the correct spelling links itself to the word before it… likethis… so I have to use arrow buttons to place curser inbetween the words to create a space.
If I try to write things in capitals a box comes up with ‘link type’ and ‘protocol’ which means nothing to me.
Often when I click on LIKE I get an error message.
Smilie faces don’t appear where your curser is so you have to delete them and try again (or give up).
And this I think is an important one… we can’t put links on a post. This is very important as we often use links to articles about MS and to blogs (like Don’s blog). This is a big loss and I hope it can be fixed soon.
There is another thread on here right now with problems other people are having, and I know there is a thread going on EL as well.
I’m sure you understand how important this forum is for many of us. For me it is often the only contact I have with other people all day. In fact I have not seen another human being to talk to since Friday morning and it is this forum that keeps me sane! I know I’m not the only one who relies on this forum and feels upset and frustrated when I can’t get on here.
Thanks.
Pat xx (and now I’m going to have to select, copy, refresh & paste again…).
I will ditto all of the above, I had an email from the webteam today wich I am sure they wont mind me posting here
Hi Don,
Thank you for your email.
We are sorry that you have been experiencing problems with the website since the upgrade. The forum particular seems to have hit quite a few hiccups. We are working with the developers to iron out these problems and direct links not working is certainly one of them, thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Regarding the slowness of the website – we were also experiencing server problems last week as this too was going through an upgrade to improve the website’s performance. Again, this will taking a bit of time to settle, but we are aware of the issues and thank you for your continued patience, we’ll get there in the end!
Many thanks,
Steph
Stephanie Laurance
Digital Producer | MS Society
Switchboard: 020 8438 0700 www.mssociety.org.uk | Find us on Facebook | Follow us on Twitter
Multiple Sclerosis Society. Registered charity nos. 1139257/SC041990. Registered as a limited company in England and Wales (07451571).
Mae Multiple Sclerosis Society yn elusen gofrestredig 1139257 / SC041990 a chwmni cyfyngedig dan warrant yn Lloegr a Chymru (07451571).
Thanks for getting back to me and letting us know what’s broke. We’ve given a list of bugs to the developers and they are working through them.
Obviously we’d prefer for these issues to be fixed quicker- and understand your frustrations. We are well aware of how important this forum is- and the support and company it provides.
While we’re aware that we may sound like a stuck record- thanks for your patience and please do bear with us.
Thanks Stewart… it makes a huge difference hearing from you and knowing the developers are working on the bugs. Actually things already seem to be better… quicker and letting us on the site.
We know the forum doesn’t work with Safari very well since the upgrade. It might be an idea to try Chrome. This isn’t perfect, but may be a short term solution.
The copy & paste problem, we’re aware of- and are onto that.
The spelling & emoticon (smiley) issue? It’s very possible that this is an iPad issue.
The website is currently not ready to use on any tablet or mobile device. This is something we plan to sort in the new year.
Links not being active, this a bug - and we’re working on it.