View New Content

[Bonita]

Is there any way to add a “View New Content” button?  On the old, old site there was such a creature which made it very easy to find new material I had not read.  Perhaps there is such a thing here and I haven’t found it yet?  I personally think it makes life easier, especially when you don’t have  the time to open every single forum and search for new content.  Put it on my “wish list”.

[Moderator-1]

Hello Bonita,

Thank you for your suggestion to have a view new content button. Your idea will be addressed by the committee, but in the meantime I suggest you “Subscribe” to each of the foro categories. In doing so you will receive in your email inbox all of the new posts. Also, enable the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” so you can follow a conversation to which you have replied.

Thank you,
Moderator-1

[Bonita]

Thank you for your suggestions.  I have now subscribed to all of the forums except Online Urantia Book Study Groups.  This forum has no subscribe button. Is there a reason for this?  Am I missing something?

Also, I have clicked the notify me box on a few threads on the first day of the forum and have not received an email notice of a new post when there was one.  Is it necessary to hit the submit button in order to activate the notify me option?  I thought the submit button was only for entering a post.  Or am I all mixed up?

[Moderator-1]

Hello Bonita,

To activate the notify me button you must create a reply. Then click notify me. Then click submit. You will be notified of all future replies.

I will inform the committee about the button to Subscribe to “Online Urantia Book Study Groups”. In the meantime, each forum (OPAD and The Urantia Book Study Group) has a Subscribe option. I suggest you subscribe to those as well.

Thank you,
Moderator-1

[Kathleen]

Hi Bonita,

About not having a ‘Subscribe’ button on the Online Study groups: the reason for that is that the forum was created to be the parent of sub-forums. It serves more like a heading than a forum. There’s no provision for posting when you click on it. You need to choose a sub forum and then you’ll see the subscribe button.

I know there’s only one forum available for that category at the moment but there is a another one being built called ‘The Urantia Book Study Group’ which will be similar to the one we had on the old site in the ‘Urantian Groups’ zone. It will have further sub forums for each part of the book and will have all of the papers listed in the parts with links to the book. It’s taking a while to get it set up and we ran out of time before launch (these kinds of things are now being done by volunteers). Therefore we’ve made it a ‘hidden’ forum for the time being. Hopefully we’ll have it up and running soon.

Regards
Kathleen

From Sydney, Australia

[Bonita]

Hi Kathleen,

Thank you so much for entertaining my questions with such prompt and thorough responses.

In regards to the Study Group endeavor, I’m wondering if the fact that you are working on it has anything to do with the fact that the links on the search engine do not take you to the specific paragraph clicked on, but rather to the beginning of the Paper.  For instance, in the last incarnation of the search engine if I searched for “garden prayer”, two hits would show up.  If I wanted to read the 74:7.21 quote in context and clicked the link, it would take me directly to that specific paragraph.  Currently, clicking the link takes me to the beginning of Paper 74, which necessitates me going back in order to recall the section and paragraph.  Is this a temporary situation or a permanent one?

[Kathleen]

Hi Bonita,

No the work we’re doing on the Study Group forum won’t affect the search engine. In fact work has been dormant on it during the launch phase as there have been other pressing things to deal with. And all we need to do is create links to each paper (that’s why it’s taking so much time) which don’t interfere with the search engine.

You’re the second person who’s pointed out this problem. I’ve been testing it and don’t have the same problem. It’s working like the old one for me, so I sent it to the rest of the committee to test and they all came back with it working properly except for one of them. It seems to be user related – it may have something to do with the browsers. What browser are you using? And are you using a PC or a Mac? I’ll bring it to the Webmaster’s attention and see if she can come with a solution.

Another thing I’ve just realised (that you may already have figured out) is that when you click ‘subscribe’ to a forum, it seems like you only get an alert for the first thread of a new topic. I figured it would include answers to that topic also but I now see a whole bunch of replies that I didn’t get an alert for. I see I need to ‘subscribe’ to every topic if I want to see everything. I’ll ask the webmaster about whether there are any other ways we can view new content.

Regards,
Kathleen

From Sydney, Australia

[Bonita]

Kathleen, you’re right about the browser.  I just tried it on Google Chrome and it worked fine, however it does not work on Safari (and yes, I’m all up to date).   I prefer to work on Safari so I’ll just have to deal with it unless you come up with a fix.

And thanks for mentioning the issue with the subscribe button.  I had noticed that but figured I was loosing my mind . . . good to know that I might not be.

 

[Kathleen]

Ah, now that’s interesting because the one committee member who had the problem users safari too (up to date). I’ll see if the other guy who raised it is also a safari user. Thanks.

Kathleen

From Sydney, Australia

[Nigel Nunn]

Hi Admin team,

Thanks for getting this latest attempt at our world-wide and friendly forum in place.  Now that the dust has settled, three questions:

(1)  As asked some time ago by Bonita, is it now possible to add the essential forum feature of “show new posts“?  Many UAI members, as well as casual browsers, will be missing almost everything without this standard forum feature.

(2)  Regarding web browsers, on my Windows 7 PC the forum runs nice and fast when using Google Chrome, but when using Internet Explorer 11, it is frustratingly slow.  Any other reports of slow response?  Maybe some setting in Explorer we can toggle?  How are things for Mac users and Safari?

(3)  Can a “preview” option be enabled, to allow checking of appearance and <html> behaviour before posting?

All in all, so far so good!

with thanks,

Nigel

 

[Kathleen]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for your questions.

Re Q1. Nothing has changed since the forum began. To view new posts people still need to “subscribe” to each forum to see new threads and to” subscribe” to an individual thread to receive ongoing replies. There have been a lot of other things on the website not forum related that are taking up a lot of our attention – things like setting up for translations of the site, the ability to register and pay for events online, the ability to make donations online, and e-newsletters. I’ll put this one back on the agenda for the webmaster to investigate to see if there is more flexibility on this issue.

Re Q2. The speed of the site has been an ongoing concern for people who are logged in (but not for the general public). I’m not aware of the variations between browsers though. I do know that during some of our training sessions one of our admin people was using Explorer and often saw things differently to the rest of us. When she switched to Chrome she had no problems. Sometimes when new plug ins or software are added to allow additional features to the site, the system can slow down until we figure out what’s slowing it. The first time we found the Chat feature caused it and we were able to rectify it. Lately,since we’ve been adding new things to allow the ability to do the things I mentioned in Q1 it’s been slowing again (and I use Chrome) and the webmaster is now investigating. We’ll stay on it…

Q3. No can do. We checked into that earlier and it seems to be a limitation on the Forum. If we installed a social network similar to the one on the previous website we’d have more fancy features, but because we decided to keep it simple and only installed a Forum we don’t have that particular luxury. It’s more like email – once you hit send it’s gone…

Glad to know you’re enjoying using the forum. Hopefully we’ll get some more traffic once we do some more promoting and improve our search engine optimisation. The July launch was considered phase 1. Since then we’ve been working on phase 2. Once these other features are well established we’ll have more time to do some in depth analysis on how the site is performing. Any feedback and help is most welcome.

Regards,
Kathleen

 

From Sydney, Australia

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