The A to Z will become a members only feature of the website.

K Barrett

"J Fortuna" wrote in message
news:Y35Md.3837$uc.2352@trnddc09...
Yikes, I just visited the AOS site to see what you all are talking about.
Being a Web application developer myself, I am pretty disappointed with
what
they have done. They obviously went with some website designer who was
more
concerned with superficial look than with functionality. Among other
things
the site is now so reorganized that those of us who used to use the
resources on the site before will have to look for stuff that we had come
to
appreciate and used to know where to find. Something so simple as a Site
Index would go a long way toward making this site more user friendly. For
example, where is the A-Z Orchid info, that was such a great resource,
please don't tell me they took it down! Also think of all the broken links
from other websites that link to the AOS site's resources, what a
nightmare.

Joanna

"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