Hello moderators!

Hi Gloria-

Welcome to our online family!  You'll notice that all of us mods have been here quite a while - 4 and 5 years - so we have enough history to fill you in whenever you need it.  There are a few topics that you may already be aware of - namely the request for a Product Review section, which we all believe would benefit dog.com as much as the forum membership.  Lani sent an email to Laurissa about it, which we can forward to you if you don't already have it.

I do have a somewhat immediate question, though - Do technical issues go to you Admins, or a tech/IT department?  Assuming "it depends", I'll bullet what I mean (and I've waited quite a while, so I can certainly wait until next week for the answers, lol!)  Here goes:

• Resetting passwords - as of right now, resetting a password requires entering the existing password in order to change it.  (We don't recall this being the case in the past.)  But if a person forgets their old password, we have no way of changing it.  Is that a permanent software change, and if so, who do we direct users to?
• "Give Us Feedback" form - where do those go?  I've tried to submit questions there and never got a response.  The messages don't come to us mods.
• Joining Threads - the forum software will misidentify threads because of what I assume are directory assignments.  Permanent problem?

Thanks in advance for any direction you can give on those topics.  We appreciate you making yourselves available to us.  We try to remain pretty self-sufficient, but there are times when tech or liability-type issues need guidance from dog.com representatives, so we look forward to having the connection restored. 

Best wishes and we hope you enjoy the forum.  It really is one of the best dog forums on the net.

Have a great weekend!!

Paige

Hi Paige,

      Thank you for gettign back to me so quickly! I highly appreciate it and I look forward to working with you and all the other moderators! I did not receive an email from Laurissa regarding a product review section and if you could forward the email to me and Kelly (whose contact information is in the post), it would be great!

        As for your question, please direct all technical issues to us Admins. This is just so we can not only understand what the issue is, but know which department to direct it to.That way, everyone can be aware of the issue.  As for the issues that you have bulleted, I will definitely look into all of them and try to get some answers back to you within 1-2 weeks. I also look forward to having the connection restored.

       Thank you and have a great weekend!

 Gloria

miranadobe

We appreciate you making yourselves available to us.  We try to remain pretty self-sufficient, but there are times when tech or liability-type issues need guidance from dog.com representatives, so we look forward to having the connection restored. 

Well said Paige!

Welcome Gloria

 Welcome Gloria, thank you for introducing yourself to us.  I have to be honest, and speak for myself (though the other mods may agree?), the problem with our contacts at dog.com has been very cyclical.  The problem is nothing ever really changes. I hope you can break that cycle and help us make this forum as awesome as it could be, it's already great!!  The thing is our members are giving us feedback and we aren't doing anything about it.  I think dog.com is missing a very, very powerful marketing tool here, I'm sure you agree!!

 I brought up these problems several times in the past, for example, our members would love to have an "Ignore" feature.  But this software would require the person to request them as a "friend" to then be able to put that member on "ignore".... as I'm sure we can both figure out that would probably be difficult in most situations, to say the least (this makes it hard to tell people "If you can't stand X just put them on ignore..." thereby taking care of some of the constant bickering between several members.).  All the technical issues have arrived as problems since we've changed to this "new" (as it's been years we've been on it) board.  The horse forum board was our old format, and we switched here and whoever did the job of making the board did a great job in making it very slick but it is VERY buggy software we are continually having issues. Here is an over view of some of the other technical issues that we've been talking about for a long time:

1. To "sticky" a post on this forum we have to create a new post and sticky it then.  It will expire after 3 months and disappear, so we have to continually put up the rules over and over... and over.

2. The search function is wonky.  You cannot find what you are looking for with any ease, the members have figured out it's easier to use google search to find what they are looking for!  That's really not making it easy for them and causing them to exit the forum for a bit... which of course is no use to dog.com

3.  The message alerts don't work.  If someone signs up to receive alerts when someone posts to a topic, they may or may not work... we haven't figured out why yet.

4.  Some member's profiles do not work.  For over a year (possibly 2?) so they cannot receive PM's unless they initiate them.  This makes, understandably, some of our members very upset.  It also undermines us from being able to say "TAKE IT TO PM!" if they are being too obnoxious on the forum proper.

5.  There is a privacy problem.  If someone goes into "Who's Online" and you are responding to a PM *ANYONE* on the forum can see the name of that PM.  So if it said "Lani is a dork" anyone who looked could see that.  So, those wise to the glitch make their PM's "Hey" or whatever.  But, not everyone knows.

 6.  There is no way to really monitor blogs, and right now it's more or less spam central in there.

7.  Due to lack of security in our new member log-in's we have to manually approve EVERY new member, because we have been getting spammed by casino and drug companies.  If we could make the security a little tighter it would relieve a lot of work for us, as Mod's as well as a better system for new members who want to join, right now they have to wait until we can get to it.

 I know this is a lot to hear and I'm sorry.  I would love to see some of these resolved, even if it means going back to the old board format... these issues have been going on for years.  So, how can we help you make some awesome changes for our membership??

Thanks for your help and welcome aboard!! :)
 

Sera_J

 6.  There is no way to really monitor blogs, and right now it's more or less spam central in there.

Agreed, although about a week or two ago I did figure out a cumbersome way to edit and/or delete blogs altogether.  I've managed to clean up some of the more recent ones since I learned the tricks on my own, but it's not easy and we never got a clear answer as to whom was supposed to be monitoring/editing them when we had no idea how to do it ourselves.  Typically, spammers were using blogs to create search engine hits for anything from Omaha steaks to window coverings and everything in between.... plus some managed to create formatting that would make the blogs and their personal profiles look like mini web pages for their products (especially "cheap drugs";).

Sera_J

7.  Due to lack of security in our new member log-in's we have to manually approve EVERY new member, because we have been getting spammed by casino and drug companies.  If we could make the security a little tighter it would relieve a lot of work for us, as Mod's as well as a better system for new members who want to join, right now they have to wait until we can get to it.

A quick band-aid to some of these spammers would be to require valid email addresses, instead of made-up/invalid ones (I'm nearly certain our old software required email verification before accounts were approved/active.)  When I mentioned this, it was suggested we mods should send an email to each new account applicant to test it ourselves.  None of us mods have dog.com email addresses, which would mean exposing our private personal email accounts to such potential spammers, which was clearly a poor idea.