Full agreement No apparent ability to edit or delete previous posts. So slow (and yet so fast, but without evaluation of the action) that repeatedly hitting the "Save" button posts identical messages which cannot be retracted. Seems a treasure for any spammers that might get in. I can't see much future for this iteration. Sorry, folks. This forum software is a 'Fail' in my book.
I don't think this was a freebie by club members - see: http://www.bmwcca.org/node/2233 , or go to the club news and find the article. Since it says the club (&/or the companies involved in the transition & website design) have been working on this as a project for more than a year, I think it's reasonable to expect that what we're seeing is what's intended to be the primary result of that project. With that being the case, I assume that BMWCCA.ORG 2.5, as we're seeing it, is not supposed to be an unrefined work-in-progress, but a largely-completed package, only in need of fine-tuning as issues arise and time progresses. Had I the impression that what we have was a temporary, hastily-completed, club-volunteer effort, my initial feedback reply would have been less pointed. However, with the project taking over a year & involving hired 3rd-parties, it seems unlikely it was rushed, unless the companies involved had to meet internal deadlines, or deadlines set by the club. So, I think it's fair to get the feedback comments out there, particularly in the early going - if there's going to be any impetus to change things and address concerns, I would expect it to be sooner rather than later. As far as forum design, integration, and functionality, it will be interesting to get a word as to what, if anything, can, or will, be done. For all we know, the company that did the website design has completed the project and, having washed their hands of it, has no contractual obligation for anything further.. (ie: whatever we got here with the forums, we're stuck with it). "Perhaps there are a few website-savvy club members who can volunteer their time to fix things up." I suspect any website-savvy club members would have chosen different forum software, were it possible. Is this the only message forum software that will work with the site? Who chose this and why? "Presumably there is now better functionality for targeted search-based research of a particular topic..." I don't think it's particularly any different - only option is to search the entire website. Would that one could search specific forum topics. Answering similar questions multiple times is always par for the course on internet forums - even if people don't automatically jump to the search function, if there's an answer that can be searched out, others at least can refer the asker to the answer. At the moment, we're starting from scratch, and with forums that are a hassle to use. +2 on the loss of the club's first forums; it's a shame all that member-generated content was not valued enough to be permanently archived. I'm always disappointed when there appears to be that type of organizational disregard of the collective members' input.
A correction - kinda' OK; now I see there is an "Edit" link in reply posts (unlike thread starter posts which apparently can be neither edited nor deleted). That's the good news. The bad news is, this is what it brings up: "Fatal error: Cannot use [] for reading in /var/www/html/bmw/www.bmwcca.org/sites/all/modules/insurance_request/insurancerequest.module on line 476" Worse yet, I just found out that you can't use the usual 'Ctrl-V' to paste. You have to use the icon above the editing window to address this message in the window: "Because of your browser security settings, the editor is not able to access your clipboard data directly. You are required to paste it again in this window. Please paste inside the following box using the keyboard (Ctrl/Cmd+V) and hit OK" I have no idea how to 'return' that long line nor why my text is now indented. Hope this helps (not holding my breath). -- C.R. Krieger P.S.: And now I can edit and the formatting is totally different from what I "Save"d ...
