'Upgrade'

My input after keeping away for a number of days, then briefly popping on a few times in last two.....I naively/incorrectly wrote to someone last week that I doubted we'd notice any difference with the change!

Credits:-

1) Broken links (that I knew of) have gone.

2) A member of staff is available for feedback, is responding, and has both the patience of a saint and is between a rock and a hard place.

Debits:-

1) Architecture. It was flagged well over a decade ago that the home page format doesn't work. It still doesn't. Webcam commentary and ospreys have proved popular, but need one entry to link off........not a free for all of filling most recent entries every Spring-Autumn.

2) UAT - unless and until it is used, I can only keep repeating, rollouts/upgrades will be a mess. Implementers testing their own work doesn't work....there is a reason why UAT was introduced and taken up across the globe.

There are 3) onwards but they pale into complete irrelevance compared to 1) and 2) and time should be spent entirely on those before, let's be honest, messing about with 3) onwards commences.

Any other organisation would have 'backed out' the change. A lot quicker and easier......assuming the prep was done correctly prior to the rollout.

  • Thanks. Definitely the number 2 for me. I definitely also clicked on each which suggested two different threads. I didn't read which thread each time as I was just expecting a page to load upon clicking. If it was just one thread, there's a new issue of multiple needs to click on notifications that weren't there prev. Pretty sure it was two threads for me though.

  • I think if there's different types of response, ie comment and like/vote you get a notification for each type, so possible for multiple for each thread

  • Pretty sure, but not certain, the two were in the same 'bracket' and almost as sure that they were replies. I got the notifications this morning. When was the 'official update thread' deleted?

  • It's still here, nearly at the bottom of the first page. Incidentally I logged the spam earlier 

  • Thanks. I can't see me having posted anything on there........or had any likes to what I didn't write (though more chance than for anything I do write).

    Edit....found one post on there.....that wasn't liked. Seems one of my two was indeed that thread. Can't explain the other one though.

  • Flagged it!!

     

     2013 photos & vids here

    eff37 on Flickr

  • First, hoping all are well.

    I also will give praise to the fact that someone has, and still is, available from the RSPB.

    I'm unable to look at when I last posted, because all threads I've been involved with are now like general notifications. I've refrained from posting, mainly due to the instability of this software, creating such a wide and varied list of issues.

    I'm looking to return once things have reasonably been resolved, until then, I'll keep popping back, checking and in hope there is a resolution, I'm sure there will be, just when.

  • Look after yerself. Some suggestions/preferences on modifications to the new upgrade being offered (on threads which I can't post/reply to) are at odds with my preferences. Whoda thunk people have different preferences? Personally I prefer thumb-nail(ish) sized images on the main threads and if I want to see the larger version it is just a click away. The thumbnails give a broad overview on the screeen. Reason? Big images embedded in the thread means a lot more scrolling. Sometimes it isn't (just) the images, but what people put in text input.

  • Look after yerself. Some suggestions/preferences on modifications to the new upgrade being offered (on threads which I can't post/reply to) are at odds with my preferences. Whoda thunk people have different preferences? Personally I prefer thumb-nail(ish) sized images on the main threads and if I want to see the larger version it is just a click away. The thumbnails give a broad overview on the screeen. Reason? Big images embedded in the thread means a lot more scrolling. Sometimes it isn't (just) the images, but what people put in text input.

    The thing is there are two aspects.

    Firstly this "upgrade" is just an upgrade to the product that was given to us 5 years ago, a product which it took a long time to get tweaked into the shape it was in before 17th February. So a lot of people really would just liken RSPB to get us back to that state and really they should have tweaked this "Upgrade" before going live as their testing would have shown them that the product no longer looked the same, which was at odds with their message that they were only "improving stability and Spam detection". 

    So secondly, as you can imagine, there were actually a lot of improvements that people wanted last time that never got done so obviously people are asking for those again, not least a restructuring of the architecture which might allow people to build their own Community Homepages or something that might help reduce the Osprey Threads taking over during the Summer - a time when quite a few people take a bit of a break. In fact you can add all of the nest cams to the take over as it can be bit much for many people.

    It will be interesting to see how long it takes and how far we get this time.