Just thought I would share with everyone the email I just sent to Lee Cooke,
Executive Director of the AOS. They went live with the new AOS website and
forum software, and the forum software is quite unusable.
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Good evening Mr. Cooke,

I see the new website and forum are now live. Unfortunately, you did a
complete strikeout on the choice and implementation of forum software. The
forum is essentially useless as it is currently implemented.

Here are the immediate problems:

* The window is *WAY* too small. It covers 640x480 and cannot be expanded.
The vast majority of computers are now running screens at 1024x768.

* The window does not respond to the scroll wheel found on most
Windows-based mice. I have to move the mouse over and use the scroll bars
instead. This is the first time I've ever encountered a website that did not
work with the scroll wheel. Someone isn't playing by the well-established
user-interface rules and conventions.

* I refuse to register with my real email address because of spam-harvesting
robots. I could find no privacy policy that would assuage my fears and
convince me that giving my real email address wouldn't be a mistake. Or a
simple explanation that the forum software never shows your email address in
a fashion that can be harvested by the spam robots.

* Where are the old posts? They contained a treasure trove of information.
There were conversations and discussions in progress, and those have been
unceremoniously terminated. Not good customer service.

The new site itself looks very professional and slick - not necessarily a
bad thing, but the AOS really didn't do a good job researching the available
forum software solutions. A public beta test would have revealed many of
these issues and allowed you to save face while fixing them.

I'll check back every few months to see if there are any improvements.

-Eric Hunt
San Francisco, CA
www.orchidphotos.org
www.orchids.org