Having lots of problems with this forum at the moment.
Files will not upload, cannot move forward or backward between screens.
Seems to be constipated.
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my mum always recommended “syrup of figs”
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Glad I am not the only one Ray
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It has already been reported to @JoeFedric-TL and he said he would get around to fixing it as on December 17 he stated “2018 will see more changes and improvements, including updating the forum and adding a new theme (hopefully!).”
The forum is not really functional at the moment and, as you guys have mentioned, the issues with performance are really concerning at the moment.
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I don’t understand why Topaz would not not want to put effort into keeping this forum running smoothly, it surely is in their own interests to do so?
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@Mond I think they want to have the forum functioning properly, however, it is more a question of prioritization for the very small number of people that make changes here.
Yes, I certainly understand that Topaz would want to prioritise outstanding fixes to their products, but unless this forum functions correctly the success of those fixes would not be fed back.
But anyway I think that we are going off piste here, as this was not the issue I was reporting, sorry if I did not make that clear. My issue was with the operation of the forum as a piece of functioning Internet software, it has been behaving abnormally for the last few days. But it has begun to respond normally again this evening so I reckon, given the UK/US time difference, the problems that manifested over the weekend might have been dealt with by the server provider. Business as usual.
Our forum membership is quite low, in the neighborhood of 2.2k total users. To compare, our Topaz Studio Facebook Group has over 4k members:
Naturally, the larger group requires more attention. Also, full disclosure – Facebook is “more public” than this forum, in the sense that more people are seeing what is going on there, on a daily basis. Engagement is higher, viewership and commenting is much more active, and overall, it requires more effort from us to maintain.
I still have several improvements planned for 2018, and they won’t be falling by the wayside. However, being such a small company, we have to prioritize our work very carefully, and make sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible. The forums have some minor issues at the moment, some more annoying than others, but they’ll all be fixed in time. Nothing that’s occurring on the forum at this very moment is high priority, because everything is running relatively smoothly, from a general standpoint. Sure, some links are having issues, and some images still aren’t populating, but that’s small potatoes compared to the persistent sync errors we’ve been dealing with, and may have finally just resolved for good. The less time we have to spend on investigating high priority, widespread issues, the more time we can devote to improving existing structures like the forum.
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It kind of takes the wind out of your sails to find that Facebook is more important to Topaz than its beta testing forum. It’ll be on Twitter next! #deflated
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Mond, the beta tester group is even smaller, with just 147 members. Further, not all of you participate, so it’s normally more like 30-50 of you at any given time testing the software.
I’m not talking about beta testers. I’m specifically commenting on the fact that minor problems on our forum software aren’t as high a priority as people posting much more public examples of problems they’re having. We’re a small company, and can’t be everywhere at once. I’m aware of the issues with the forum at this time, and we have plans to address them. I can’t do much else 
I think you have to decide where you want the software tested in that case. If you move it all over to Facebook then I’ll go with that, I don’t mind, but a little while ago you said we were not to discuss testing on Facebook. Is it OK to discuss problems with beta now?
Beta testing isn’t going anywhere. All I said is our social media presence is much larger than the activity on the forum, so it takes more of our time. The problems we have with the forum are minor at worst, and solutions will be deferred until we have a plan to address 100% of them. That’s still in progress.
At no time have I indicated anything about beta testing would be changing.
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Joe, I don’t understand why your social media presence should take more of your time than fixing existing software problems. Perhaps activity on the forum is not so active these days, because things are not being fixed by your paying customers. I am not trying to be anything but helpful here.
I don’t fix software problems. I’m support manager, web admin, and forum admin. I don’t actively contribute code to the software, that is not my job. That’s like complaining to the plumber that your car isn’t getting fixed fast enough.
Also, thanks for the assumptions, but I’m willing to be most of them are wrong, because you’re the only one complaining about the activity level on the forum.
Further, I’ve addressed most of the critical problems with the forums, after this post was made. Thanks, have a nice day.
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Sarcasm is not required, Joe. Nor is your attitude toward me. Thankyou.
I’d like this post closed as well, please. Things are getting out of hand.
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