Well, that letter should make Mr. Cooke feel good about himself...

Garland Hanson



"Eric Hunt" wrote in message
...
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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