Feedback on the new look site

Hi,

 in regards to the features that are missing from the previous Forum, that is the display of the previous posts below the reply, having to select Action to make a reply or edit or quote and some other things you may or may not have noticed.

Those issues relate to the template or theme specific to the Forum. At the moment we are using the default template that comes with the Forum software and like most things regarding the look and feel of things on website these days it is a compromise between what looks good on the desktop and what works on a phone or mobile device. Being a relatively new version of the software the developers needed something to provide the basic functions and over time they may release better version or an alternative template to address these issues as they have eventually done with previous versions. There is very little money in writing this type of software so these developers and others that we rely on for website software are volunteers and doing this in their spare time so things move a lot slower.

I can only find one other 3rd party person writing templates for this software these days, there used to be quite a lot years ago(see comment about money above), and he has a choice of about 3 or 4 themes of which I can see some of the missing features have been addressed so I have made contact with the developer and trying to get a chance to try before we buy on a couple of these templates. And now that people are starting to get used to this theme got to be careful not to go backwards trying to go forwards.

The issues with the text editor, mainly the ugly way it deals with Quoting and the mysterious red line, that software is written by yet another developer as a stand alone editor that software projects like this Forum software can embed into their application rather than everyone writing their own editor. This CKEditor is also somewhat new and still has to mature but it is again once more removed from me in a support sense so I can't contact them and ask for changes. The alternative text Editor that comes with the Forum software is even newer and when I tried it uploading pictures wasn't easy or even possible at times and I know most people just come here for the pictures.

The Channel 40/Private Messaging feature is still not officially supported anymore at this level of software but I am reading of people who have managed to fix the errors enough to make it work so I am hoping someone will step up and provide a working version of so I don't have too.

As for the HCVCA committee, I am getting emails from Ross T about improvements and issues on the website that I try and get to as quick as I can, Frank M and Russell M call me when they want stuff added or mentioned  and John W. sends me the The Monitor to send out now. So yes the committee could make more use of the Forum and the website but in general it has improved.

Whether more  HCVCA Members make more use of the Forum is really up to them and nothing the committee nor I do will really change anyone behaviours like dragging them away from FB that spends billions designing something with short term reward for long term addiction. The best we can offer is take it or leave it.

Terry