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New users experience for forum


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So...

 

Just i had a question about Alfred, and not sure what's going on so I thought 'let's go to the forum' instead of sending a bug report. They are probably busy and I don't want to swamp them.

 

But the first user experience of this forum is really really bad.

 

While typing in my question, the recaptcha thing 'expires' 4 times. Every time you have to do it again. 

Then at some point I realise I can just skip it and do that at the last moment when I post.
Then it asks me to register, and you have to do the recaptcha again.
And when I make any error (too simple password, forget to check a box) I have to do it again.... and again...and again.

The recaptcha's even sometimes consists of 3 steps... (so I feel I've trained the google self driving car AI dataset myself today).

And then I when I finally have confirmation email confirmed, and I check the forum. Turns out because of all this recaptcha stuff, my question has been posted 3 times. So basically coming off like a spammer.



I think this whole flow is really user hostile. Most persons going through the trouble of posting something on an applications forum are there to help or are willing to ask some questions instead of deleting the app and moving on. This seems hardly the way to be an open and inviting community...

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@rhinoid First, welcome to the forum, and glad you're joining us :)

 

As you can imagine, Andrew and I did not create and write this forum platform ourselves; We're using a commercial platform called IPBoard. As with every single platform out there, there are pros and cons.

 

With regards to the captchas, I just went and created a test account so that I could identify the hiccup areas and report it to IPBoard's support, in the hope that we can improve the user experience, but I was registered in a blink. Having said that, I'll be investigating the alternatives to this Captcha option to see if I can find a more straightforward one.

 

I wish we didn't have to use any captchas at all, but unfortunately, we've had spates of significant spam registrations, which wastes a huge amount of time for us and for our wonderful forum moderators, as well as making it generally unpleasant for forum users. The moderators are people who give their time generously to help Alfred users, not to waste time on spam management. 

 

Don't worry, we can tell a spammer question from a legitimate one, so you're safe :) I'm sure you'll quickly discover that this is a friendly, and incredibly helpful community.

 

Cheers,
Vero

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Hi Vera,

 

I meant it as helpful critisism. I can imagine if you've been on this board forever, you might not even be aware there is an issue.

For people (like me) who isn't used to this board, any error I do, made me do the captcha dance 2-3 times (trafficlights,bicycle, etc). 
Also when you are slow, the captcha is not valid anymore...  and then after you're through you need to do the same stuff again on page 2 for the registration. 

So, no evil intent from my part, just a helpful perspective from a new user's eyes. But as I've read, that was clear ;^D

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@rhinoid If you’re behind a VPN, have a clean web history (i.e. Google wasn’t able to track you enough to know if you’re a person), or block certain scripts, CAPTHAs tend to get more aggressive. It might be worth investigating if something similar happens to you with other CAPTHA-protected registrations.

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21 hours ago, rhinoid said:

I can imagine if you've been on this board forever, you might not even be aware there is an issue.

 

For what it's worth, I register a new test user account after almost every platform software update to ensure nothing's broken, and it still runs smoothly for users, so I suspect @vitor might be onto something in suggesting what could be making the captcha experience a little rockier than usual for you. :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

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