My thoughts on your site

The developers know where you live, you know......

We'll pass your comments on to our technical team, who are currently working on a major Forum upgrade.

However, it's worth pointing out right now that we haven't built a new website - this was a necessary evolution of an existing, older design. Not ideal (as we are well aware!). We are, however, working on making it much better - as well as focussing our editorial efforts on keeping the content as comprehesive and responsive as possible.

Clare Newsome:

We'll pass your comments on to our technical team, who are currently working on a major Forum upgrade.

However, it's worth pointing out right now that we haven't built a new website - this was a necessary evolution of an existing, older design. Not ideal (as we are well aware!). We are, however, working on making it much better - as well as focussing our editorial efforts on keeping the content as comprehesive and responsive as possible.

How polite is that reply.You must be chilled on holiday.

Can you move probedb's Avatar a little higher so he can look down his nose more -in fact so high that he cannot see the content which is after all what most of us are on here for .

probedb:

I know you're obviously on Microsoft hardware from the .aspx extensions but even the free PHP based forum phpBB 3 is 10x better than this?

Plus when I login to the site it doesn't log me into the forum? I have to login again.

This message reply box works bizarrely in FF3, it defaults to putting a single space at the beginning of a new paragraph for some reason.

Finally, from a web development perspective, you shouldn't be using a Transitional doctype, the site doesn't even validate with a Transitional doctype which is one of the easiest things to do. I understand you're probably using some sort of CMS but in this day and age, building a new website like this is something I'd be embarassed to do as a web developer....well I actually couldn't build a website like this any more.

Hi There,

I am part of the dev team on this site, (and many others), so I can try and answer some of your questions...

We are a .net development department, so we are unable to use php bb etc etc, (there are better forums than php bb btw, that is the most known as it is free!) Running two dev teams and system admin teams isn't practical for us at the moment. The software we use is Community Server at the time it appeared to be the best out there that we could use. We are just starting off the road of upgrading to the latest version which should solve a lot of problems, however with any off the shelf software it could always be better. 

One thing we are trying to sort is the logging in issue, the whole system is being rebuilt at the moment, (it isn't just this site that uses it - hence why you can log onto multiple sites with one login.)

As for the doctype, there are a million arguments out there regarding transitional versus strict, none of which I am going into now. There are only 2 errors on the home page, one of which is from the stats package and the other is from a .net tool. (That's a hell of a lot better than Googles 64 errors on it's homepage :) 

It would be great to live in the ideal coding world where everything works and is strictly compliant and works perfectly on every browser, (even those that weren't released when we built the site.) But we don't, we have tight deadlines, "out of the box" software that has errors in it and we have to build off older versions.

Sorry if it isn't good enough but I think you will find very few sites that are perfect... 

A developer who can argue cogently.....my word. Will you come and work for me?

I thought you wanted to come and work for us, JD...

JohnDuncan:

A developer who can argue cogently.....my word. Will you come and work for me?

I'd imagine austinh7 gets all the patronising he can cope with here, thanks. 

JohnDuncan:

A developer who can argue cogently.....my word. Will you come and work for me?

Oi, hands off - Austin is vital to our plans for world domination.... 

Clare Newsome:

JohnDuncan:

A developer who can argue cogently.....my word. Will you come and work for me?

Oi, hands off - Austin is vital to our plans for world domination.... 

Andrew Everard:

I thought you wanted to come and work for us, JD...

Simon Lucas:

JohnDuncan:

A developer who can argue cogently.....my word. Will you come and work for me?

I'd imagine austinh7 gets all the patronising he can cope with here, thanks. 

 

JohnDuncan:

I think you'll find that was not so much "patronising" as "taking the p-ss".

It's a fine line, isn't it? Like the one between 'stupid' and 'clever' than Nigel Tufnel talks about. 

I've tried to provide context on this site to suggest which though......

probedb:

I know you're obviously on Microsoft hardware from the .aspx extensions but even the free PHP based forum phpBB 3 is 10x better than this?

Plus when I login to the site it doesn't log me into the forum? I have to login again.

This message reply box works bizarrely in FF3, it defaults to putting a single space at the beginning of a new paragraph for some reason.

Finally, from a web development perspective, you shouldn't be using a Transitional doctype, the site doesn't even validate with a Transitional doctype which is one of the easiest things to do. I understand you're probably using some sort of CMS but in this day and age, building a new website like this is something I'd be embarassed to do as a web developer....well I actually couldn't build a website like this any more.

It's a shame that some people lead such sad lives that they feel the need to abuse the build of a forum. Oh well.........

Messiah:

It's a shame that some people lead such sad lives that they feel the need to abuse the build of a forum. Oh well.........

Some of us have got it, some have only got IT