I thought I’d better start a thread about the mysterious disappearing of avatars and profile pages and apologise for any annoyance caused!
It’s something a few of you have reported to us in the past week or so. As it first starting happening a few days before Christmas, the developers didn’t have chance to look at it before the break, but they will be looking into now as one of the first things on their to do list for 2015. Hopefully normal service should be resumed soon.
In the meantime, I know some of you have been able to get your avatars and profile pages back by re-uploading images and re-entering your details into your profile page. This does seem to do the trick, however, once you have logged out and then back in again everything disappears. So I think it’s fair to say, I wouldn’t spend too much time doing this in case of more annoyance!
There is another problem with the personal profiles, Steph.
IF we try and stay logged in, the system logs us out periodically.
When this happens, our profile vanishes along with the avatar.
Trying to reload the avatar, the system will not accept a save command unless the “gender” is entered.
But, when this is done, no-one else can see the profile.
SO WHY DO IT!
There is a follow-on to this:
If we can only see our own profile, we cannot do a quick check on a person making a controversial post to see if they actually signed up 30 minute ago just to make that post - and will probably never be heard from again.
You only have to read the thread on “anon” posts to see that members can get quite annoyed when that facility is even presumed to be being abused. Someone who signed up 6/9/12/18 monhts ago is more likely to be expressing a personal opinion, rather than being a troll.
Personal profiles really are not working as expected at the moment, you should be able to see each other’s profiles and the developers are currently looking into to why they have disappeared. Being of semi-techie mind (but not enough to fix things) I imagine the problem may be to do with, as you say Geoff the system randomly logging users out.
Rest assured we know the importance of people’s profile pages and hope to get them working again as soon as possible.
We are still having problems with avatars and profile pages at the moment although now they do seem to appear intermittently. We will let you know when a permanent fix has been found. Until then, apologies again.