The woes of a new user

Level1Techs Bug report
1

So I just created an account on the forums and website, and I wanted to give the TS guys an idea of the problems and UX issues I faced in account creation.

First I tried to use a Social ID with Facebook.

Never mind then.

Tried making an account using Steam Social ID. Not very helpful. The username I get suggested is something nonsensical (seemed like some kind of URI for my Steam account) and the email is not filled in.

Okay, time to make an account without any of this Social ID crap. Username... OK, Email... OK, that captcha... Whose brilliant idea was it to have a CASE SENSITIVE captcha WITH SYMBOLS?

Finally create an account... except I get a nondescript error (can't remember off the top of my head). Okay, assuming it worked anyway, try to log in, nothing. Okay, go through the signup process again, fail the captcha about thirteen times, and eventually manage to create an account. Then, the page I get redirected to says both that my account already exists AND that it was just created.

I go to my email, click the link, see the threatening warning about me only being able to press the button once (who cares anyway, I should only have to use it once). Set a password, upload a profile picture, great.

Go to the forums, my profile picture is not here. Okay, guess the two sites are not linked. Not a problem, go to Discourse, upload a profile picture...

okay f&ck you lets move on.

Finally I find the meta section and write this post. And here we are now.

Criticisms:

  • The captcha. Yes, it is that hard to tell the difference between an uppercase C and a lowercase c. And why do you need symbols?
  • The entire process seems to be bug-riddled.
  • Discourse and the main site are linked in a super-janky way.
  • Why do you need mainsite-discourse linking anyway? Discourse's signup is great for a reason.

/rant over

7 Likes
2

I had similar problems signing up a couple of months ago. The username I entered originally was FlameSilver, then it didn't work, tried again and it said it already existed, got a confirmation e-mail logged in and my username had been down cased to flamesilver (might not seem like a big deal but it annoys me :/). Other than that though the Tek forums are great, responsive and an awesome community of people. I also even made my first real contribution a couple days ago where I wrote a post about Blender as a video editor :D

3

Yeah, I feel your frustration. I remember signing up for this site six months ago. When I logged in all I saw was a black screen with a faded tek syndicate logo. I emailed them and received no response. Then I watched an episode of the tek and Logan was talking about how he can't stand YouTube commenters and how the people are cool at teksyndicate.com (most of them). So I was like "cool, now answer your fucking emails about your site not letting me in."(in my head)

So I started watching linus, eli, and nerdgasm. I finally gave it another shot about a week ago and it worked. But now I'm discovering a site with weird bugs and a sort of duality. For example: when filling out my profile it asks "What are your favorite books?" and then it asks in a different text box "What do you like to read?" Those are two different questions! Granted, they are similar but it's not the same question. Also, even if you can somehow disagree why are you asking twice?

Anywho, it's hard to complain about relatively free stuff but I find it very weird that this entity/organization/whatever can throw stones and make negative comments about how other people suck at what they do (congress, regulations, etc) while not having their own shit on-point. I'm not defending the people/organizations tek syndicate exposes/bad mouths.

So just to clarify, I enjoy Tek Syndicate and I'm not perfect either so I won't throw any stones.

1 Like
4

My first post, and it has to be a downer. I experienced all of the above, and still can't do what I signed up for... to comment on a video in a way that they may notice. :( There are no comment where it says "Comments:" under the videos, and nowhere to post one. So either nobody comments on here, so they took the button away and forgot to take the heading with it, or it's down, or it just hates my browser.

But the capcha, is stupid. Never mind C and c, (though, in different fonts and warped around, that isn't easy) but what about I, l, |, /, \ or 1? I don't know what I'm looking at, how could I possibly guess in 1 what you want me to type? XD

I got a blank page, but as I waved my pointer around it, one part highlighted in inverse yellow "tekSyndicate", so I clicked that to find I was still logged out and nothing had changed.

I only get eMail on my phone, and setting your password on the OSK and scrolling into the black which covers half of the input boxes to find the black on black button on a black background (all because it's off the side of the page, which has adjusted to the size of my phones screen, while the content has not) ... Yea, that wasn't easy either. lol

I can't find images that any of the profile stuff will accept without "error 500", and the "Tell us about yourself" want's me to say what type of things I don't like, I like. I don't read books or listen to music! I'm a geek for heavens sake. Books require paper, and paper is evil! (no, I do quite like the odd eBook when I'm on vacation, but I don't like to advertise it) As for music, I just like to read the tracker bytes in a hex editor and imagine how it sounds. Usually it sounds bad, and that makes me feel better. hehe

At least the only ASL question is Location. I love it when forums have no ASL rules and ask you to fill out your birthday and gender in your profile. ;)

I'm just hoping the people and content is as good as the YouTube channels to make up for the bad initial experience. Imagine if it's just full of winging b*stards like us!? That would be awful! ^_^

5

I have encountered some cool people, I've also encountered a decent number of annoying people. I'm going to give this site a few more weeks. I am annoyed that they will take the time to merge my thread with another without much of a reason yet fixing my account name by adding a letter and capitalizing two others is too much of a bother.

6

I thought it was possible to change your own account name, whenever you wanted too. Its under preferences under your user account.

EDIT: wait nvm I am wrong. The username you have is just shown to you with out an edit button next to it.

7

For general moderation and forum tidying, a number of people are able to do things like move and merge topics. For things like changing names only a few people are able to do that. Did you ask about it? (On my phone so I haven't checked your posts)

I'm gonna move this topic to the new bug section. Were well aware of a number of bugs and changes that need to be made, and they will get fixed! Hopefully sooner than later but for the mean time, the more feedback the better it will eventually be :)

8

For something like this send a pm to a mod or tag them in a post.

@MisteryAngel can you help change this user name?

9

Yes I already sent a pm. I figured there was an administration hierarchy but I stand by what I said. The lower level admin(s) should have made a note to present to the higher level(s) or the higher ups should have responded to my contact attempt directly. I don't give two doodoo logs about "we're sorry blah blah blah pc yadda yadda" please just fix it.

I'm not a front end web developer guru (yet) but I know it's not rocket sugery.

10

First off, the mods and leaders on this site are all volunteers or voted into these positions by their fellow community members. Likely all of them have full-time jobs and lives outside of the site. In my experience, they do their best to keep up with requests and things. However, there have been an influx of user requests and buggy items popping up since the forums changed over to discourse, which is expected when implementing such a broad change.

The following is a list of community leaders.
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/badges/4/leader

If you sent a PM to some of the members of this group, they can either address the problem or get a mod involved. Note: It might be good to have a list of moderators somewhere on the site (I may have missed it) though.

I believe that any of the following folks should be able to help you out:
@Commissar, @GigaBusterEXE, @MisteryAngel, @Ferman, @Destroyed007
(please correct me if I am wrong folks. I don't know what permissions are required for user name changes.)

1 Like
11

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/about

List of all mods and admins. Leaders aren't listed though

12

Ah ok thanks. I actually didnt know that page existed or how to access it until just now :D

13

@markspolakovs the 500 errors are a recurrent problem. @wendell is working on it. he'll probably also need to look into the capcha.

because discourse was patched into an already large forum, and they plan to use another CMS for their newsfeed that your singular account would tie into.

i believe it's a google thing? i've never actually seen a capcha here, as my account predates the capcha requirement.

14

Ehm were did you send a pm?
If you want your username to be changed you can send me or another moderator a pm.

15

To tell you the truth I don't remember exactly what I did it was over a week ago. I'm thinking It was a direct email through a "contact us" link of some kind. Either way, I know I went through a properly labeled means of contact.

16

I just read what I posted earlier. You know how sarcasm doesn't translate well into text? Neither does my direct communication style. I realize now that my last comment looks pretty dickish. I apologize.

Earlier I felt like "wow these people sure are doing alot of talking and not a lot of fixing my name". I still feel that way, but that little shake of spice at the end was unnecessary.

1 Like
17

I've discovered that the reason I can't comment on the videos here is because that feature requires me to keep Discus.com open in another tab. (for security, I clear out any sessions and cookies and such when tabs are closed) Just remembering to go and sign in to Discus, which I don't use for anything else, doesn't seem like it should be necessary. However, I do accept that my own paranoia is partly to blame for that.

Is it also worth mentioning that there is no scroll bar right now? What happened to that? It's a good thing cursor keys still work because my scroll wheel doesn't, and before now, I didn't even care. lol

18

The scroll bar is replaced by
Alt text

Scrolling does work, must be something on your end.

19

Thanks.

No, there is a tiny scroll bar on the right which returned soon after making that post. I don't remember if the pager was there or not, but the scroll bar wasn't present... Then it was. Has not repeated it, so I just put it down as a one-off.

20

It wasn't until you mentioned the tiny scroll bar that I noticed it. Since the invention of the scroll wheel I haven't touched the side bar. The post numbering feature is pretty awesome though!