16 replies to this topic

[D-Type]

I am finding that some old threads, such as this one have all the posts shuffled into some sort of random order.  Is it there a way that I can view them in chronological order?  Or is this another unexpected undesirable effect consequence of the recent upgrade [?] of the software?

Nobody responsible for the forums appears to have answered previous queries from myself and others.  If somebody is prepared to provide an answer can you please do so by personal message as I don't visit "Feedback" regularly

[Buttoneer]

It seems to be in member order.  How odd.

[Zmeej]

Hmmm. Smells like something that could be done to some threads in the Racing Comments forum,
in which folks seem to be talking to themselves, or at least for their own benefit and hardly
anyone else's.

[275 GTB-4]

so its a database field priority order stuff up by the symptoms....ohh joy!

[D-Type]

One week and no response from any of the IT people responsible for setting up the forum! 

 

I didn't really expect one.

[D-Type]

Another week and still absolutely no response.

 

One does wonder whether anybody responsible actually reads the feddback

[Allan Lupton]

It seems to be a case of getting what you pay for!

 

I must ask Theo Pape's family if he's still working for this outfit.

He told us he worked as the user interface developer (i.e. the web designer/front-end developer) at Autosport, and he seemed helpful during the brief time we heard from him (September and October last year).

[Allan Lupton]

It seems to be a case of getting what you pay for!

 

I must ask Theo Pape's family if he's still working for this outfit.

It seems he is not.

I wonder if that means there's nobody doing software development/maintenance now - it certainly looks like that.

[Option1]

Possibly Theo was seen as being too helpful.  After all, can't have one's employees talking to the public an' all, old chap.  The bounder even offered to help!  Just not the done thing.

 

Neil

[Grayson]

I've been looking at the thread you mention as well as a couple of others. The forum doesn't give members the option of viewing a thread in a customisable order (ie. you can only see the posts in the order that the database thinks they come in) and it doesn't look like there's a way to change that.

 

If you know that some of these threads WERE in the correct order at some point after last summer's forum upgrade but are in the wrong order now, then we can try to work out what happened and what changed (and see whether there's a way to fix it). If they were already wrong immediately after the upgrade and nothing has changed since, then it sounds like there was a problem with the original migration. As it's far too late to roll things back without losing the last year's worth of posts, I don't think that our developers would be able to fix that.

[milestone 11]

I've been looking at the thread you mention as well as a couple of others. The forum doesn't give members the option of viewing a thread in a customisable order (ie. you can only see the posts in the order that the database thinks they come in) and it doesn't look like there's a way to change that.
 
If you know that some of these threads WERE in the correct order at some point after last summer's forum upgrade but are in the wrong order now, then we can try to work out what happened and what changed (and see whether there's a way to fix it). If they were already wrong immediately after the upgrade and nothing has changed since, then it sounds like there was a problem with the original migration. As it's far too late to roll things back without losing the last year's worth of posts, I don't think that our developers would be able to fix that.

Incredible!

[Allan Lupton]

I've been looking at the thread you mention as well as a couple of others. The forum doesn't give members the option of viewing a thread in a customisable order (ie. you can only see the posts in the order that the database thinks they come in) and it doesn't look like there's a way to change that.

 

If you know that some of these threads WERE in the correct order at some point after last summer's forum upgrade but are in the wrong order now, then we can try to work out what happened and what changed (and see whether there's a way to fix it). If they were already wrong immediately after the upgrade and nothing has changed since, then it sounds like there was a problem with the original migration. As it's far too late to roll things back without losing the last year's worth of posts, I don't think that our developers would be able to fix that.

That is a quite extraordinary post.

Nobody is asking for thead order to be optional, and the first clause of the second para should never need to be written.

What do we have to say or do to convince you that, until the downgrade last year (and for many months thereafter), all threads were displayed in chronological order, as is the way with every forum I know and have known?

Edited by Allan Lupton, 25 April 2014 - 14:34.

[BRG]

That is a quite extraordinary post.

Nobody is asking for thead order to be optional, and the first clause of the second para should never need to be written.

What do we have to say or do to convince you that, until the downgrade last year (and for many months thereafter), all threads were displayed in chronological order, as is the way with every forum I know and have known?

Try reading Grayson's post again, but this time properly.  He is asking whether anyone knows whether the jumbling up occurred at the time of the change or later on.  It's quite a simple question.

 

It's a pity that some here are so dead set on slagging off the forum that they can't be rational about it any more.  

[Grayson]

That is a quite extraordinary post.

Nobody is asking for thead order to be optional, and the first clause of the second para should never need to be written.

 

Apologies if I didn't express myself properly. I realise that no one is asking for the thread order to be optional. The reason I mention that is to make it very clear that there's no setting or option that anyone reading those threads has selected which puts the posts in the wrong order (unlike when you're viewing a forum and can choose to view the threads in order of, for example, post count rather than date), which means that there's no option to select which would put them back in the right order again.

 

 

 

What do we have to say or do to convince you that, until the downgrade last year (and for many months thereafter), all threads were displayed in chronological order, as is the way with every forum I know and have known?

 

 

As BRG suggests, I realise that these threads were originally in the right order and I absolutely agree with you that there's no reason that this should ever have changed.

 

If they were in the right order until the day before all of the posts were migrated from the old servers to the new servers, and have been in the wrong order since the day after (with no changes to the order since then), then it's as good as certain that the problem was with the migration process. It sounds from your comments in brackets as though you think that the jumbled order started more recently than the the upgrade. Is this right, or have I misread your post? And do you remember whether you have looked at the same threads which are now in the wrong order, or is possible that they have been wrong for all of this time and that no one noticed until more recently?

Edited by Grayson, 25 April 2014 - 15:30.
Changed the second half of the final paragraph.

[Allan Lupton]

If I got your meaning wrong, Mr Grayson, I apologise, but the second sentence was so wide of the point that I missed the fact that you clearly wrote "after" the "upgrade".

I think we can say that any normal user would have flagged the strange order as soon as he/she noticed it and in that case the change was first noticed by Duncan who started this thread on 8 April. If I have still got things wrong it may be because I don't understand some of the terms being used. e.g. are you telling us the change cannot be undone, even though you do not know how it came to happen, which is what two of your statements seem to mean.

 

I dread to think of the consequences, should the The cutaway drawing and its artists  thread become corrupted in this way - the change in the number of posts/page was bad enough as the index system relied on the page number not changing.

 

I resent being told by BRG that "some here are so dead set on slagging off the forum that they can't be rational about it any more" when I made a simple error.

What I must say is that it still seems there is a large number of matters that have been reported in the 20 pages of the New AUTOSPORT forums  thread, but which we have not heard have been fixed. If reminding the owners of the system of that is "slagging off" so be it.

[D-Type]

I've been looking at the thread you mention as well as a couple of others. The forum doesn't give members the option of viewing a thread in a customisable order (ie. you can only see the posts in the order that the database thinks they come in) and it doesn't look like there's a way to change that.

 

If you know that some of these threads WERE in the correct order at some point after last summer's forum upgrade but are in the wrong order now, then we can try to work out what happened and what changed (and see whether there's a way to fix it). If they were already wrong immediately after the upgrade and nothing has changed since, then it sounds like there was a problem with the original migration. As it's far too late to roll things back without losing the last year's worth of posts, I don't think that our developers would be able to fix that.

 

Thank you for responding - even if it took 19 days.  As this is the first time I have seen this particular problem and have viewed other similar long threads since the downgrade I think that possibly only some threads have been corrupted in this way.  As I cannot recall accessing this particular thread previously since the 'upgrade' I can't say when the change happened.

 

If the migration process has corrupted threads as is suggested then that process was Not Fit for Purpose and then surely your software suppliers and IT specialists have a legal duty to put right the damage their software has done.  It may not be easy, but it would be possible to write bespoke software that compares threads in the old and new databases and flags up those that have changed, or become corrupted if you want to describe it that way.  Presumably there are not that many or someone else would have noticed it sooner and reported it.  So it would be feasible to manually correct them and safer than an automated change.

 

BRG, why do you consider it to be irrational to express frustration when there has frequently been no response to previous reports of deficiencies in the revised software?  Not even an acknowledgement.  Even when these have been quite simple questions? 

[BRG]

I resent being told by BRG that "some here are so dead set on slagging off the forum that they can't be rational about it any more" when I made a simple error.

Perhaps you now feel how Grayson may have felt at the reaction to his attempt to help.

Edited by BRG, 25 April 2014 - 19:26.