Site Makeover Glitches

well my list of 50 complaints is now down to a few, only after playing around for a few hours tonight. although logged in it told me I wasn't authorized to edit my stuff until it finally occurred to me to press log-in again and that let me in. In fact i had to press log-in for every new page i brought up but it seems that once you have done that it recognises you as legit. the new format for editing and uploading is unclear. presumably, pressing 'save' uploads a piece? haven't tried it yet .... have spent the last hour deleting stuff that shouldn't have been on the site in the first place and trying out the wysiwyg window. hmm, as someone else says, it depends on what format you work on. I converted some stuff to rtf and that seemed to work reasonably well but not as well as my original doc. I also seem to have to log in every time I come back to the site whereas before I was permanantly logged in. In aol/IE the navigation 'frame' on the left seems to get in the way. yesterday, after the page title, there was a gap until the end of this frame when the body of the page was displayed. From the uploaded work I have looked at tonight, it seems that this is half-cured but then the work steps left as the frame ends which spoils the look of the piece. Is it necessary to have this frame on every page? I think it detracts from the poem or story. Surely the navigation sideshow should be omitted from the 'work' page or a better format found to make it less obtrusive? Page loading takes forever, and I use broadband. perhaps this is down to site traffic or else aol is trying to show me i need to spend an extra £15 per month to get 'double speed broadband' but the forum - on a seperate server? - is also slow. when editing the story titles (over 13 characters) are mashed with the edit/delete buttons. I'm sure most of this is in hand which is why I've posted it rather than use abc email. nothing to do with abc's email reliability (hahaha)

Thanks for this folks. Changes on all of these and other things will begin tomorrow (thursday). It's best to email mark at: markbrown@abctales.com with your points as we are assembling them in one document for presentation to Tav on Thursday morning. Cheers, Tony

I jumped in where angels fear to tread and posted a rather long story which sat on the spike overnight; when it was passed and readable I found that all the punctuation apart from full stops and commas, plus speech quotations and paragraphs, were replaced with odd characters; fortunately the new format allows you to tinker about and fix this kind of thing, but it took half an hour and I still missed one or two, and I notice the other new postings similarly affected. If you're posting stories you might consider it worth waiting until this is fixed. Also the "times read" counter works but only displays accurately when you call up the story, not on the initial screen which displays the last 100 - just spotted that tonight after the cutoff time. Buy, hey, isn't it good to read new stuff again?? [%sig%]

Help! Are there going to be instructions for thickos? The site has got cleverer, but I HAVEN'T

Neil - that glitch is fixed. Fay - yes, instructions are on the way!

Hi Tony! Following might help: Poems have to be very short lines to stay in one piece., and appears to be hit and miss whether lines up left or middle, no matter what is chosen. Transfers from "Words" as double spacings and must be rectified after. "Citation marks" , and possessive commas as in "everybody's" come out as squares. Might help if the original matched the site type font, is it Courier? Only managed to post one of three poems, because the result was lacking in something layout wise, or producing strange symbols. Poems look much better in New Times Roman 12 pt Good luck!

Doesn't like apostrophes very much does it. Is it still possible, like before, to get your own piece off the spike without being an editor? I've been dying to get that off my chest off for ages. Hee hee.

I don't wanna be a pain in the a.rse Mark, but why the hell are we still using only half the screen width? It can't be difficult to sort that out, and then maybe the problems with split lines in the poetry would end too.

phew :0) I'm trying to upload and edit stuff, but it just says: "internet explorerer cannot update the internet site http blah blah blah operation aborted" then a click button saying "ok" The box comes up and everything, but there's a little box at the top left corner with coloured shapes in (sorry, not a techie) and nothing happens? Is this my computer? It has been VERY stroppy lately