A welcome addition!
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October 10, 2014 at 9:32 am
I’m glad to see this useful addition to the forums and take it as a sign of renewed interest in this long-neglected site.
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October 10, 2014 at 5:51 pm
Hear, hear. Also good to see Captain Black wiped out relatively quickly – probably the best way to discourage them.
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October 11, 2014 at 2:48 pm
I know that a lot of us regular contributors have been trying to make improvements in these forums. I too have been working behind the scenes trying to describe some of the problems I see and to help inspire positive changes. I’m sharing some of my efforts here because I don’t think that what I’ve been trying to do for the forums should be a secret. I also want to give credit to the Foundation for taking positive actions to better these forums, even though they are on a tight budget and don’t have dedicated staff to continue working on this full time. They have recently made great strides enhancing these forums and are to be congratulated.
My correspondences follow:
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From: info gbs [mailto:info@gbs-cidp.org]
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2014 6:26 AM
To: Jim
Subject: Re: New submission: Contact UsSorry Jim,
we are currently getting ready for the International Symposium and we are so busy there is no way to help with the forums at the moment can you wait till the first week of November, there is no way either wise. I’m not even able to help with that. Have a great day!
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From: Jim
Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2014 10:49 PM
To: info gbs
Subject: RE: New submission: Contact UsHi,
The forums are still not viewable in IE8 and cause IE8 to crash!
IE8 is the latest version Microsoft will allow for use in XP. XP still commands a 26% worldwide market share in desktop OS’es, more than Mac, IOS, Linux, and Win 8 combined! As of Sep 2014, desktop systems accounted for 84% of browsing versus 17% for mobile/tablet. Please see the details here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2014&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
I think most folks trying to connect with the GBS/CIDP website and its forums use desktops and older versions of OS’es. If this is true (as I believe it is) you guys would be doing yourselves a large disservice by NOT supporting older browser versions such as IE8.
Thanks for your consideration.
Jim-LA
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From: info gbs [mailto:info@gbs-cidp.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2014 6:42 AM
To: Jim
Subject: Re: New submission: Contact UsWe’ll see what we can do.
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From: Jim
Sent: Tuesday, October 7, 2014 9:42 PM
To: info gbs
Subject: RE: New submission: Contact UsHi again,
There are changes on the website that make the forums unreachable on IE (my preferred browser). I can reach it on Chrome and there is a new floating banner on the left of the screen that tracks the user as we scroll down/up a page. It appears the floating banner is only on the forum page and it interferes with navigation to others pages on Chrome (latest version). I think this banner is incompatible with older browsers (IE8+) and may cause many people to leave the site.
Please review. Thank you,
Jim-LA
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From: Jim Tate
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 12:28 PM
To: info gbs
Subject: RE: New submission: Contact UsHi and thanks for responding.
1st – Your website http://www.gbs-cidp.org/ has a security certificate problem that is probably keeping some people from visiting your website. Here is the error I get when I try to visit with IE:
There is a problem with this website’s security certificate.
The security certificate presented by this website was issued for a different website’s address.
Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.2nd – I have been a active forum member under the user name Jim-LA for a few years. I just went to your site to view the forums and found that you changed the forum link to redirect to a user sign up screen. I also found out that I now have to sign in to view the forums. I don’t think this new level of security is very user friendly and will probably not endear the site to users!
Here are a few links that should give you an idea of what’s happening regarding the use of your forum:
https://forum.gbs-cidp.org/topic/inactive-forum/
https://forum.gbs-cidp.org/topic/my-this-forum-has-slowed-down-since-i-was-active/I just searched for some examples of recent forum spam and found you have cleaned them up, hooray! I hope you banned the IP addresses of the spammers so they cannot create new user names and spam us again in the future. Do you update the robots.txt file with disallows? But this doesn’t work as well as as configuring the .htaccess file to block bad bots.
Thanks for your efforts to clean up the spam in the forums! This should help breath some life back into the forums. I recommend you consider advertising the forums on your FB page and feature them in the ‘communicator’ from time to time too. I think there will always be many people who would prefer to use the forums than FB and supporting this would open the door for more donations and contributions over time.
Thank you,
Jim
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From: info gbs [mailto:info@gbs-cidp.org]
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 7:09 AM
To: Jim
Subject: Re: New submission: Contact UsHi
what forum were you in and what was your name so we can see what is going on.
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From: Jim
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 3:21 PM
To: info gbs
Subject: New submission: Contact Us
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