General compliants

1. When I go to the site initially the site recognizes my IP address, but when I switch to the forums, I have to sign in again. This has been a recurring problem since the new site was launched. Am I doing something wrong?

2. The need to resize pictures in the fleamarket contributes to 1/3 of the postings have no pictures and the fact that our traffic in this area is very slow.

This is the only website where I pay an annual fee and the only website where I have these problems.

Comments?

Beemer01 said:

1. When I go to the site initially the site recognizes my IP address, but when I switch to the forums, I have to sign in again. This has been a recurring problem since the new site was launched. Am I doing something wrong?

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Universally this has been solved by a cleaning of "cookies", "cache" from your browser/computer. This is achieved a number of ways, probably best is to "Google" how with your particular set-up. The FM and the Forum are to separate places in the internet therefore the 2 logins. Most members have got through this since the past spring's changeover. A good way to check all this is with a different computer- such as work or at a friends.

2. The need to resize pictures in the fleamarket contributes to 1/3 of the postings have no pictures and the fact that our traffic in this area is very slow.

This is the only website where I pay an annual fee and the only website where I have these problems.

Comments?

Click to expand...

I can't make any suggestions as far as this goes, again the flea market is separate. This is the first I have seen of this, perhaps someone that works the FM regularly can chime in. A call to the office may help on this.
Gary

I've had the same problem since the forum (not the site) was updated. I can log into the main site but then have to log into the forum separately. I thought that I had seen a while back that is was a "security measure". Kind of like that high tech one that Verizon Wireless now uses where you enter your username on the first page and your password on the second page! At least the MOA forum asks for both the second time.

See if things improve when you do not log out at the end of a session but just close the browser page.

The main reason for two logins is that the MOA homepage and the forum are running two separate sets of software from separate databases. Just nature of the beast right now. There is a plan to merge things and eliminate this down the line, but don't expect anything immediately. As for having to relogin over and over, it seems clear to me that this is a problem with the individual setup and/or connection. The vast majority, nearly all, login once and never have to login again. It works for me this way on multiple platforms and computers...even my smartphone. There is nothing sinister going on that is singling out any specific people to force continued logins.

Omega Man said:

Universally this has been solved by a cleaning of "cookies", "cache" from your browser/computer. This is achieved a number of ways, probably best is to "Google" how with your particular set-up. The FM and the Forum are to separate places in the internet therefore the 2 logins. Most members have got through this since the past spring's changeover. A good way to check all this is with a different computer- such as work or at a friends.


I can't make any suggestions as far as this goes, again the flea market is separate. This is the first I have seen of this, perhaps someone that works the FM regularly can chime in. A call to the office may help on this.
Gary

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Most new cameras create huge file sizes and when you post to a forum, classified or fleamarket, you need to reduce the size of the picture.

20774 said:

The main reason for two logins is that the MOA homepage and the forum are running two separate sets of software from separate databases. Just nature of the beast right now. There is a plan to merge things and eliminate this down the line, but don't expect anything immediately. As for having to relogin over and over, it seems clear to me that this is a problem with the individual setup and/or connection. The vast majority, nearly all, login once and never have to login again. It works for me this way on multiple platforms and computers...even my smartphone. There is nothing sinister going on that is singling out any specific people to force continued logins.

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100% correct. This is an issue of two different software providers for the member account management and the forum. It is probably the highest priority to be solved, but it is a lack of functionality in our member management software. We are evaluating an upgrade now that will likely solve this problem, but no ETA to date. The upgrade has several other pieces that have to be vetted before we can say go.

I promise, it is something I desperately want to correct. I'm hopeful by summer, you will see a marked improvement and single site login capability.

20774 said:

The main reason for two logins is that the MOA homepage and the forum are running two separate sets of software from separate databases. Just nature of the beast right now. There is a plan to merge things and eliminate this down the line, but don't expect anything immediately. As for having to relogin over and over, it seems clear to me that this is a problem with the individual setup and/or connection. The vast majority, nearly all, login once and never have to login again. It works for me this way on multiple platforms and computers...even my smartphone. There is nothing sinister going on that is singling out any specific people to force continued logins.

Click to expand...

Actually it doesn't bother me to log in twice. Most often, I don't need to log in on the main MOA site and just use the link to forum and log into that. If I do log in at the main site it's still no big deal to log into the forum separately. But I read the forum on a PC or laptop. I imagine it'd be different if using a tablet or phone.

I'm going to give some props and sympathy to the MOA team here, along with a bit of explanation. This work is something I do for a living, and I understand the frustration as I spend a lot of my time working on problems like these.

The MOA doesn't have a staff of web programmers. The MOA "main" site and forums are two separate, third-party software products.

Getting the two products to not just communicate, but mutually agree on user names and passwords, is no small task. Each was designed to keep its own list of authorized users. For security reasons, any proposition that either should accept some login credentials from somewhere else is a significant change.

"But the MOA is not storing my bank records, health history, or whatever," you say. Still, it is the duty of both publishers to tread cautiously when providing openings for "other" types of login -- because they don't know what some other web site will contain, and they don't want their software to end up being responsible for some disastrous privacy breach.

The issue is not insoluble; indeed, it sounds like a solution is in the works. But understand, the solution is not trivial, and is dependent on the vendors of these two other products supporting some mutually-acceptable set of credentials, and a means of communicating between them. As it is vendor-dependent, it's not entirely within the MOA's power to determine when a solution will be implemented.

The flea market is a "plugin module" from yet another vendor, that works with the software running the main site. As such, again, issues internal to that module, such as what options it provides for handling large images, are dependent on the module's publisher.

Of course the MOA could move to different products for all these functions, but I assure you the hassles and lost archives of a major system transition far exceed the issues currently under discussion.

These are the trade-offs that enable a (budgetarily) relatively small organization to operate a reasonably sophisticated web presence at a minimal cost. These products are comparatively inexpensive; some may even have been "free," at least from a purchase/licensing perspective. The trade-off is that they may not do exactly what we want, exactly when we want it.

Well explained!
Gary