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Jacques Cinq-Mars
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« on: August 28, 2002, 01:07:22 PM » |
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The Forum having been activated a bit over a month ago, I thought it would be as good a time as any to summarize (and comment on), in a single post, what I take to be the most important issues (some technical, others not) that have been brought up by various Forum members who, by the way, should be thanked for having provided us with feedback. The issues in question are, for the most part, pulled out of the “Suggestions and Assistance” Topic (“Forum information” Board) and others have been brought to our attention through personal email communications Here they are, and not necessarily in chronological order:
- Difficulties login in.- This has been brought up by a number of people. From a technical point-of-view, there should be no problem, as long as all the appropriate steps are taken. I noticed that some seem to be login in and out, whenever they want to access the Forum. This is not necessary. All you have to do, once you are in, is don’t bother login out. The default mode for this is “forever” and you should leave it as is (i.e., do not select a particular session length). If you are login in again (after having logged ? out) and want to find out where you stand (re: the default mode), just go (after login in) to the bottom of the main Forum page where you should find, on the right hand, four little white boxes. Fill in the first two (user name & password), leave “forever” alone, and click on Login.
- Choosing the appropriate topic. – The topics we have chosen should be regarded as nothing more than general and somewhat intuitive categories and should be used accordingly, by taking into consideration the main focus of whatever it is you want to discuss. If, in the course of an ongoing exchange, there occurs a drifting away from the original focus (something that happens more often than not) to such an extent that what is being discussed is entirely different, then, you (or the moderators) should come up with a new, pertinent Topic name and move it to the appropriate Board.
- Difficulties editing “profile”. – After verification, this function has been found not to be wanting.
- Smileys. – I have said earlier what I thought of those things. They have been desactivated and will remain so. However, if you really feel that you need them to get across the full meaning of what you want to say, you are certainly welcome to make up and use you own in your reply.
- Email capability – This has been extensively discussed. What it boils down to (assuming that the present system can support or be readily linked to) is that such a capability is a matter of bandwith use and additional programming. In both cases, this can be translated as additional costs! At present time, there is not much we can do for people who cannot live without emails. Unfortunate, but …
- Search function. – Questions regarding this have been brought up a few times, and our initial response was that, as far as we were concerned, “it worked”. Well, it does work, but it is a bit complicated due to what you might call the “not-too-user-friendly” characteristics of the program we have been using. We are looking into whether or not the procedure can be simplified and made more intuitive. In the meantime, if you want to do a word search – and I’ll use, here, as an example, the problem encountered and mentioned by Rachel Brekhus a while ago -- just make sure that you use the following procedure: first, enter the word “axes” in the “Search for:” window, leave the “Match all words” and the “Search for:” windows alone, and set the third window down (whose default is Search-All-Members only”) to “any poster”; second, ensure that you write in (1) “Maximum age since last post” and in (2) “Display how many results?” (found at the bottom of the page) numbers that are likely to exceed by quite a bit the default settings. This should do it.
I hope that this will be of help
Jacques Cinq-Mars
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