[dst87]

Rhys Jones wrote:

Noted – have added to our list.

By the sounds of it not many people know about the ‘recent topics’ page, which is probably the easiest way to keep up with conversations across the board. Would it make more sense for the forum home page to have this versus the overall category view?

I think education is the missing factor here. I think forums may be quite new to many folks here, so perhaps a pinned topic introducing people to the forum, where to find certain things (annotated with screenshots), how to format their messages / add links / add images would be useful?

I’d gladly volunteer to do this myself over the weekend if there’s demand for it.

[dst87]

kinnimod wrote:

The alternative is laboriously looking at and trawling through disparate forum topics which just takes too much time and unattractive.

I recommend navigating to the Recent Forum Topics page. This will list all new and recently replied to topics, listed from newest to oldest. It makes it much easier to find the topics you’re interested in, and skip the ones you aren’t interested in.

kinnimod wrote:

You used to have about 500 posts a day on the daily chat – why try to fix something which wasn’t broken (at least for your readers)?

It’ll take time for people to get used to the new format, but I’ll add my voice as someone who found the daily chat threads incredibly frustrating. It was impossible to keep up, as new comments were added to previous pages so you’d have to go back through 8-10 pages to see if any new replies came in, or try to remember which page an interesting conversation happened on (and that occasionally changes as topics were pushed on to subsequent pages).

Add to that the fact that every. single. day. someone would hit the wrong button and add their reply out of sequence, then (due to lack of edit) added a follow-up post explaining what happened and who their message was directed at.

A forum solves so many of those problems. This forum is a little barebones at the moment, but sets the foundation for a much more useful place to chat. There are some features I’d love to see added to make it better:

• Remove reply button; use only quote (already in the works, I believe)
• Add thread subscription and (optional) email notifications for new replies to subscribed threads
• Email notifications when someone mentions you

Remember that the forum has been used only since last week. Rob and Rhys have already made changes based on feedback, but these these things take time.

kinnimod wrote:

It’s not a moan. For me it’s a fundamental objection to the principle of the change. I might well be a minority of one but I won’t be deterred from giving my honest feedback!

Feedback is helpful, but it’s more useful to explain the specific issues you’re having so that workarounds can be suggested and fixes implemented. Saying “I don’t like it” isn’t constructive. (I know you did include specific feedback in your original post so that’s not targeted at you, but an important thing for others to bear in mind when writing their feedback.)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87.

[dst87]

Barraclough wrote:

The forums and new chat line are settling in and it will take time. I do think we need to give it a chance, especially as it’s only been found for one day, and provide feedback with suggestions on how to improve it, as requested by Rob and Rhys. The old chat line had a lot of repetition, grumbles from the regular posters who disliked certain topics, and it was difficult to search. I’ve found in life that changes can take about three weeks to get used to so let’s hang on in there!

I agree – best to give it time! I think it may turn out to be a mistake to continue the daily chat thread at all, but we’ll see. It’s new, and takes time to settle in. But… forums make the most sense when a thread is confined to one topic. Having a daily chat thread makes it harder, and I reckon most conversation topics in the daily thread would be better as topics.

Perhaps we need an Off Topic Lounge forum category so individual topics of conversation can be grouped together and not have to happen in one mega chat thread. There’s no reason most topics of conversations should be confined to a particular day. 🤷‍♂️

[dst87]

JimBurgessHill wrote:

Any tips on how to avoid paying a staggering £380 (two of us) for pre-assigned seats!

Everything I’ve read (mostly here) suggests that there are no bad Club Suite seats so… just don’t bother?

[dst87]

STEPHENADARGLAS wrote:

This is an opinion not based on fact however it would be good to ask just for peace of mind if nothing else. In the past asking has worked for me in Las Vegas however it’s down to how many rooms are empty in the hotel at the time. They all have to reach targets.

That’s a fair point, thanks! Doesn’t hurt to drop them a message and see what they can do. 🙂

[dst87]

Lady London wrote:

Reply not positioning,and Quote button does not seem to work. Feels like same WordPress problem applying in the Forum.

Quote button does work, but (at least for me) if you’re replying to something further up the page you’ll need to scroll down to the reply text box where you’ll see the message quoted.

If you only want to reply to one part of it, you can edit the test between the [ quote ] and [ /quote ] tags to remove the bits that aren’t relevant.

It would be a nice feature enhancement to automatically scroll down to the reply box when clicking “quote” on a message.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87. Reason: formatting error

[dst87]

Rhys Jones wrote:

Email addresses aren’t case sensitive (neither are URLs for that matter).

It would be nice UX / usability feature to accept mixed-case email addressed and normalise them to lowercase during sign-up and sign-in.

I don’t think users should have to know that email addresses are case insensitive to sign-up for an account, and for those who don’t know it could easily result in them abandoning the sign-up attempt.

[dst87]

Wonderful! Someone has managed to include some sort of character that changes the writing direction of the remainder of the thread. 😆

Maybe this will fix it: ‪

Or this: ⁦

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87. Reason: fun?

[dst87]

Super Secret Stuff wrote:

Also, IHG have an unlabeled version of Open Table, never used it but I think it qualifies

I have used this. Points post relatively quickly after meal, and do count for status.

[dst87]

Glad to see nested replied removed. As Rui said, it just brought back the same issue finding recent replies to a particular post as we had in the comments on the main site. Quoting makes more sense in the context of a forum.

[dst87]

I hope they can implement email notifications when someone replies to a thread you’re subscribed to.

Very basic feature of basically every forum I’ve ever used.

[dst87]

I haven’t received any shop small notifications, but have had one credit.

The other place didn’t credit automatically. Apparently they’ve switched to using a payment aggregator. CS said they’ll credit it if the place is on the map, but they really need to find another way to track these (or remove them from the list if ineligible) as it would take someone with fairly specific knowledge to identify what type of payment system a retailer is using.

[dst87]

iheartarbitrage wrote:

Some really basic stuff missing.

Edit message

You can edit your messages – there should be an edit button in the top right of the message card.

Here’s a screenshot showing the location of said buttons.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87. Reason: Add screenshot

[dst87]

Youllnever wrote:

Actually it does work – you’ll just need to force clear the cache for the website. If you’re on iOS, go to Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data > swipe left on the headforpoints.com row and tap “Delete”.

Argh, I did that earlier and it didn’t work. Now, naturally, it’s working fine. 😒

Thanks! 👀 Nothing to see here.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87.

[dst87]

The Urbanite wrote:

You can top up Monzo at a Paypoint with a credit card – the fee is low enough to make it worthwhile.

I thought Monzo topups at Paypoint were only for cash deposits?

[dst87]

Rhys: I opened the forum on mobile this morning for the first time, and it appears the changes you made haven’t been applied to the mobile stylesheet, which still has the same white background etc.

[dst87]

Rhys Jones wrote:

Fixed now!

Looks great, thanks Rhys!

[dst87]

dst87 wrote:

iheartarbitrage wrote:

Quotes are not clear as to what part of the text is being quoted

Me and a few others mentioned this in the Welcome thread. Hopefully a fairly simple fix once they have a chance.

Edit: Ah yes, I see that’s working now! 🎉

Actually, it looks like this is still problematic for nested quotes like in this message, or this screenshot from the welcome thread:

[dst87]

iheartarbitrage wrote:

Quotes are not clear as to what part of the text is being quoted

Me and a few others mentioned this in the Welcome thread. Hopefully a fairly simple fix once they have a chance.

Edit: Ah yes, I see that’s working now! 🎉

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by dst87.

[dst87]

Youllnever wrote:

Sad to say I received an email from haveibeenpwned yesterday saying that Gravatar had a breach on October 3, 2020 which leaked my email address, name, and username.

These things happen, unfortunately. If you’re using, strong (randomly generated), unique passwords for each site you sign in to, simply changing the password for Gravatar is all you need to do.

If you’ve reused that password elsewhere then you should change the password everywhere that one was used.

(I love HaveIBeenPwned – it’s great to get up to date information about breaches!)

[dst87]

Amy C wrote:

Can’t see how to add an avatar 😩

You cannot add an avatar on the forum itself. It seems to use Gravatar, much like the main HfP comments threads.

As long as you’ve registered your forum email address with Gravatar your avatar will show up.

[dst87]

Another suggestion: offer (optional) email notifications for subscribed threads, and allow folks to subscribe by default to any thread they post in.

[dst87]

dst87 wrote:

How’s your multi character emoji support, I wonder. 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦🤷‍♂️🏳️‍🌈

Good! 🎉

[dst87]

I guess MarkDown formatting does not work, then. 😕

How’s your multi character emoji support, I wonder. 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦🤷‍♂️🏳️‍🌈

[dst87]

I’d also love to suggest a preview feature so we can see the formatted message with BBCode before sending.

For example, I’m curious if this forum software supports Markdown in addition to BBCode, but I can’t test that without trying it.

* This is a list
* List
* list

If I want to italicise something, _just do this!_. For bold, **consider this**.

Finally, assuming the Markdown I try above _doesn’t_ work, it’d be great to support keyboard shortcuts for simple formatting. For example, ⌘B should insert <strong></strong> with the cursor positioned between the tags. ⌘I would do the same for <em></em> etc.