FYI

Thanks Jenny,

I could see my comment, but it took perhaps two minutes before it appeared on the conversations board. It is strange, but no bid deal.

I just made a comment and it showed up on my conversations page.

This has been going on for the last week or so with me.

I wonder, is 'tweaking' synonymous with 'rolling the dice'. It seems to me like any one 'tweak' has about one chance in six of producing the desired result without negative side effects.

I have exactly the same problem. Don't worry, you are not alone.

Yes, it seems to have come with Tal's latest comment, but now it is gone. Perhaps CPod did some tweaking.

Hm the page is not OK for me. It ends abruptly with the header--just the header--of Xiaophil's (wait, I just realized we're all seeing different things in our Conversation pages to begin with; we're not all in the same Groups ...) new post in the 中文吧 Group.

Actually, I just fixed it myself.

My post in 'A Phone Call to the Moving Company' was causing the problem.

Apparently, the Paste From Word button is not filtering out all the crap that it should. As soon as I edited that stuff out, the Conversations Page was fine.

Edit:

No, Its not fine. My post is still causing the rest of the page to go bold. And my edit time has elapsed.

CPod please note. One post should not affect the rest of the Conversations page.

Well, after saying the Conversations Page was perfect today, it has just gone haywire.

I have only 3 threads on my Conversations Page, and the one you refer to is not one of them.

Regardless of reason, when the result of your decisions is this many non-minor problems, the choice was not good. I would be interested to hear reasons (I've asked for them several times because like you I think everything is being done for a reason, and CPod's reasons are so often not at all obvious) if CPod were forthcoming with them, showed their interest in being communicative with us users. But they have not been. And now that just makes things simple for me.

I don't care about any reasons any more. I just want all the hyperlinks we took the trouble to put up that are now dead and invisible to be revived.

But couldn't they at least tell us the reason.

Well, I wouldn't use the word "request." I guess I'm just trying to theorize as to why the hyperlink function was taken away from the toolbar. It doesn't apparently make sense to do so, and there must be a reason. Everything has a reason. It could be because they just made a bad choice, but I am giving the benefit of the doubt and suggesting the reason might not be so obvious.

Or how much money they lose from frankly dire technical implementations. I can't believe, for instance, that this Dashboard has been around for the past 3 months, and the newest lesson isn't even at the top. I don't understand how UAT is not involved in the development life-cycle, or if it is, it is absolutely inadequate.

We unwittingly requested this mess you mean? I for one didn't mind at all that we don't have the toolbar for Reply textboxes. If I reaaaaally wanted to share an image or hyperlink in a Reply I did the HTML (too much of a pain to do it all the time). The thing about the Reply textboxes is, since they were introduced we were busy complaining about the threading.

Well if we did ask for it (did we, really?) and CPod are just doing their best to try to accommodate us, I speak only for myself of course but apologize for the fuss made and ask that things please be restored to the way they were before.

I wonder if this step was made for uniformity reasons? What I mean is, perhaps they found it technically difficult to add a toolbar to the reply textboxes, and so decided to apply this solution to all instances where poddies input some kind of text or what not. Personally, I much preferred the hyperlink button on the toolbar. That worked very well.

Technical problems aside, don't you think its a backward step? Especially, not being able to associate text with the link. And my other points above?

It's definitely not working properly. See my spamming in the technical problems group...

OK, it looks like I am the only one who thinks this is NOT an improvement.

Please allow us to choose the text associated with the link.

All it does now is copy the first line of our comment - a joke really.

Let me give you the 4 downsides to this system:

1. We have no choice over what text is associated with the link.

2. We cannot select to have the link open in another window.

3. When we edit our comment, the link vanishes, leaving only text.

4. We don't see how our comment will look until it is posted.

The only upside - a few seconds saved.

This was not broken - why try to 'fix' it.

And then there are the questions about the double-spacing, and the 'Paste from Word' button.

Also, our username no longer appears under 'Join the Discussion' at the bottom of the page - not an issue at all, but was it intended?

Can we edit the text of the link?

Update: I just tried to see if I could edit the text of the link. It looks like this can't be done. If I am right, this is very inconvenient.

The new link function has already been published. It works like this: you type a link into the comment or reply form and click "reply." The link address you have typed (no need for special html or anything) will be automatically converted into a hyperlink. Please let me know if this is not working properly for you.

And now, there is also no 'Paste From Word' button. What next?

Imagine how much money they are saving by getting us to do the testing for them, unpaid. And despite the lack of testing, they can't stick to a schedule.

I wonder if they have a dedicated software engineer in charge.

Does Chinesepod really not have a Test environment? Is there no life cycle process in place? Because it really feels like testing is just skipped before being put live.

Tomorrow morning at the latest? Hm.

Not only has this not been done, but all links entered within the last few days have been disabled.

Are those links going to be reinstated, or do we have to post them again?

Just testing whether we can insert links at all now:

Test

Nup. Not there. So now we have NO way of inserting links.

And another thing: What has happened to the double-spacing after hitting enter? I DID actually want it removed, but on new comments only. People have typed old comments assuming that they were getting double-spacing, so now their formatting is stuffed.

That's good to hear.

I've just tried to post a link using HTML, and it won't work.

Tech. team has told me that the update will be published to the live site tomorrow morning at the latest.

Catherine, the common cause of disruption seems to be using Microsoft Word to edit text, and yes, I did use the Microsoft clipboard to paste them.

I went back into my 中文吧 post and tried to re-edit it and it didn't work. My conversations page was still out of whack. Then I tried taking the html out all together. I merely pasted this link within the text. It still didn't work. I finally saved it as a draft to spare the rest of the poddies the discomfort of having to look at the mess my post was causing. Can the tech people please find a way to salvage my post?

As I've just discovered from Catherine's link above.

But shouldn't changes be designed to simplify the process?

Catherine from what I've seen I have a feeling we're getting punished today for putting hyperlinks in our comments and posts.

I'm no expert, but I think if you can make a link, you just add the target="_blank" within the same bracket, following the URL:

href="http://abc.org" target="_blank">your link

I had to omit the beginning

Two questions about that.

1. Previously we had the option of opening the link in the same window, or a new window. I like to have it open in a new window. How will that option be incorporated?

2. It doesn't sound like a complicated function to introduce (although my previous question may complicate matters). Could you give us a rough time frame.

I have an update regarding this. What we're introducing is a function that automatically converts text to hyperlinks (while you're typing). The tech. team mistakenly took away the hyperlink icon early, so in the meantime you can use html tags to include a link in your comment:

how to insert a hyperlink using html

Sorry for the inconvenience. Will update you when the change has been published to the site.

"What happened to the hyperlink function on the toolbar?"

Catherine said yesterday they were working on this, and that it would be fixed 'soon'.

Who knows what soon means in Chinese Pod parlance.

Perhaps it will be done by Christmas.

Hi bodawei

Actually, just saying “旁观者清‘ would be OK.

I usually ignore all chengyu, I don't want to be a wanker. Ok, I am actually too inept to use all bar almost none. But this is so beautiful it is worth risking making a fool of myself. Thanks Changye, I love it. I've saved it to my learn and use file.

Thanks yes I reported this problem to the tech. team yesterday when I found out about it. I'm not currently having the problem on my end. It's clearly still buggy for others though. Will talk to the tech team about it.

当局者迷，旁观者清。

Catherine, it's the Conversations page we've been having so many problems with. Yesterday, a user's comment (not to place any blame on that person of course) had a bit of text copy-and-pasted from the dialogue tab, with the rollovers; it seemed like that copy-and-pasted bit was setting off something that made the format of the entire page beneath that one comment go all off, all over everywhere. In other words, things above the comment in question were as normal. I'm sure someone among the staff was seeing all that.

I thought yesterday's problems were from formatting in our comments. As I said in the thread below, when I used blue color text all comments beneath mine in the Conversations page turned blue. Same thing happened with bolding. I don't know about today.

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/9455#comment-183689

Also My Study Groups and Newest Users are stacked at the bottom.

It is happening to me too. The conversations cuts off halfway down and then there is some html garbly goop. It seems it is impossible to see conversations beyond that point. It seems to start at the 'Study Strategy' post.