Not happy

Zoxsasi

Dear Tasbeha.org

Many thanks for the service you are providing. This website was a place where I could come, post a question on anything troubling me, or weighing on my mind, and I was sure to get a response.

I think this website is being maintained by a Parish in New York? Excellent khedma guys.

I'm really impressed with the effort you put in.

Please don't take this in a bad way, but the previous BB format was much better than this. This is very difficult to quote someone and give your answer. It makes following a thread and responding to many people in a thread very hard. 

Is it at all possible to go back to the previous set up?

Thanks

minatasgeel

Great to hear you that you are enjoying tasbeha.org.

We don't really do much to deserve any thanks. :-)

Let's just say we are in North America. The site was established by youth in New Jersey and the service extended to the tri-estate area.

and, the answer to your last question is, No.

ReturnOrthodoxy

In the interest of honesty, as a moderator, I've also wanted it to be changed back, but the answer was also "No." And with no real explanation either but I guess thats just the way it is LOL. 

Zoxsasi

Hi Return to Orthodoxy.

This is very odd that we cannot roll back to a previous version of Tasbeha.org Bulletin Board.

I think the admins are very spiritual, but perhaps you need to look at employing technical people who have some knowledge in how to rollback to different versions. No offence.. you are all good admins, but you need good system administrators. Its pretty obvious that the system admins of tasbeha.org are not technical, or have made big mistakes. They should have 1st tested out the look and feel of this new design 1st and could see that you cannot quote other people easily. 

Why not put up a small announcement and ask for copts who are techy to support you??

minatasgeel

How about we just let this go and not discuss it?!

You know what's a life lesson that I live with, despite how cruel it is: "we don't always get what we want"

AntoniousNIkolas

Note: Please forgive (or delete) the two blank posts above.  I tried to add this comment to the discussion here three times, but was unable to do so until I switched from Internet Explorer to another browser.  Although I had entered a couple of paragraphs worth of text, every time I tried to "save comment" I was greeted with a red line and the message "must have body content".  All I could post was a series of smileys, which I have since deleted and replaced with the dots above.  How ironic, when I was trying to post in a thread about the difficulty of navigating the new format!

At any rate, I would like to echo Zoxa's remarks.  The new format is very awkward and and difficult to navigate compared to the previous incarnation.  It has prevented me from participating in discussions here for many months.  As Zoxa has said, replying to posts - especially quoting another poster line by line - is now an arduous process.  In short, it has become a chore.  I just happened to pop in today because an old tasbeha.org discussion happened to pop up in the results of something I was googling.  I got sentimental and decided to check in.  I found a discussion I wanted to participate in, but found it very difficult to quote the guy I wanted to address.  He had made several points that I felt merited a reply, but it was considerably more difficult to do so than in the BB version.

I realize that we "can't always get what we want" but can we ask please why the decision was made to abandon the previous user-friendly format in favor of this one that is more awkward and unwieldy?

minatasgeel

The main reason the old forum system was replaced is because of many bots and spam we were getting. Which we are still getting a few here but it has decreases dramatically. 

AntoniousNIkolas

Thanks for being kind enough to offer the explanation.  It's a shame, because communicating on the old boards was much easier.  I wanted to jump into the discussion in the Mission Thread, and I did because I feel it is an important topic, but as you can see the posts there are messy, and it wouldn't let me make longs posts as the old BB did, so I had to make several posts back to back.  I can't promise I'll participate here often, or even check in often, but I'll try as time permits since posting here is work! lol

Remnkemi

Nick

Other forums with the BB system also spend a lot of time and effort to maintain. The difference is we don't have the man power and resources to "moderate" this forum like other sites. Many other sites have 10-20 moderators who are constantly deleting and moving threads. The handful of moderators here, myself included, do not have the time or the energy to moderate like other sites. So either we keep the old system with the numerous privacy issues, or we use another less than ideal system that doesn't have nearly the same amount of privacy issues. 

The last thing we want to see happen is great minds like yourself, whom God sends a word of benefit through, deprives us from such blessing. Please reconsider contributing more.

Besides, "in the world, you will have tribulation". This includes internet bots, viruses, and just plain old stupidity to deal with every day. "But be of good cheer." Christ has overcome internet bots and security holes....(not now) in the eternal life. 

AntoniousNIkolas

Thanks, Rem.  Very kind of you.  I hope you'll forgive my posts in the Mission thread which look very choppy and strange, and that the content will be a useful contribution to the discussion.

minasoliman

What I do is whenever I'm copying and pasting from something I use one of the other websites (like a website that asks me to comment or to contact them using the form they have, or a Notepad-like program in the computer, or oc.net can be used as well for this) as a way to paste what I copied and recopy them to paste them here, since this is somewhat like Word editing where it will paste the exact way it shows up in the websites.  

For quotes, I change the color and use the indent feature in this site as well.

And if my posts might take more than 3 or 4 posts from this site, I just end up typing my response on something else and linking it.  Rem uploads pdf's of his posts when they're long, and I use google docs.

Remnkemi

The easiest thing to do  is to copy the post you want to reply to into Word (or some other program that can work with Unicode), change the color of the original post (as minasoliman stated) or use italics and underlining, then save as pdf. When you come back here, you can simply attach the pdf. Some people don't like to open responses as files because it is an extra step. But I think it is helpful to put comments into a pdf so you maintain the layout, fonts and anything else. This is very useful when one has to write in Arabic or Coptic. 

One last thing, Nick. I know you're going to have a hard time with this new format because I know you like to reply to posts line by line. (As I often do myself). But somehow I feel responding to a whole post is a little more natural than line by line rebuttal. It took me a while to get used to the concept. I still quote original posts but I focus more to articulate a full coherent argument. It makes it easier for others to follow instead of going back and forth from an original post to your response back to the original post to a new response and so on. Even our fathers who fought heresies in their writings used a more flowing style. St Cyril's letters to Nestorius didn't really take every word Nestorius wrote and respond line by line and argued line by line. St Cyril framed his argument, taking the Nestorian letter as a whole, and refuting the heresies in a more rhetorically flowing mechanism. I can't see St Cyril responding line by line to Nestorius. This is merely my opinion concerning rhetorical style and natural discussions, keeping in mind that I still often reply line by line. It is sometimes necessary to respond line by line, but I don't think it is a natural mechanism.

While BBcode visually demarcates when one is quoting, it is still hard to follow the context when one has to re-read the original post to understand what your response means. BBcode quotes mechanism and line by line back and forth discussion has involuntarily created something that is not really a discussion. 

minasoliman

"But somehow I feel responding to a whole post is a little more natural than line by line rebuttal."

 

I agree! That is something I try to do in my posts.  I will quote line-by-line only if there's something specific in each line I want to address, but most of the time, I just reply based on the summary of the major points made by a previous poster.

AntoniousNIkolas

I think I'm getting the hang of it now, guys.  Thanks.

Zoxsasi

Mina,

To remove SPAM or bots from a forum, there are many add-ons that can do this - no doubt its via SQLinject methods. Bots and SPAM can indeed ruin a forum, but making the forum un-usable is shooting yourself in the foot.

minatasgeel

Zoxsasi, God gave you 2 feet....we can use the other one :-)

minasoliman

Reminds me of a quote in the movie 300, "It's just an eye.  The gods so fit to grace me with a spare."  lol 

cyril

Hi everyone what's going on with the forum getting these strange advertising posts in the past week?

minatasgeel

they're all bots....that i try to delete whenever i see. 

minasoliman

I noticed that the mobile version of this site does not allow me to report these posts. I also am unable to bold, underline, color, etc my posts either on my phone. All of this can only be done on a computer. Just wanted to let you know just in case this was not the intention

Zoxsasi

cyril said:

Hi everyone what's going on with the forum getting these strange advertising posts in the past week?

What's really making my blood boil is that they reduced this forum to an unusable discussion platform with a tradeoff of reducing the bots/spams, and it still hasn't worked. 

The solution to protecting yourself from SPAMs and BOTs requires some add-ons and hardening on the front/backend of tasbeha.org platform. 

mcarmichael

minatasgeel said:

Zoxsasi, God gave you 2 feet....we can use the other one :-)

lol!

Zoxsasi

GOD FORGIVE YOU MINA!

The new forum software is awful. Really awful. I just created a thread, and it doesn't even allow me to paste what I want. I have to split up my text and post it in several consecutive posts because of the limitation it has.

Any engineer, any IT specialist would have had a trial 1st of this on a sandbox, and then, after user feedback, implemented it on the live platform. Its a disaster that you cannot role back.

mcarmichael said:

minatasgeel said:

Zoxsasi, God gave you 2 feet....we can use the other one :-)

lol!

Not funny. Its very unchristian to belittle people's concerns or their feedback. Its very immature. How old are you?

mcarmichael

> Not funny. Its very unchristian to belittle people's concerns or their feedback. Its very immature. How old are you?

That was a good line. It demonstrates a sharp whit. I don't know if there is more context here than I'm aware of, however that was the context of my comment.