Boy oh boy, I've never had so many problems getting going on a message board in all my life. Wow this has kinda crazy.
Let's start with the normal registration. Everything looks like every other board, setup the basics and we'll email you and you'll have to click the link in the email to activate. Okay, that's typical, no problem.
Email comes in and click the confirmation and....... 404 Not found. Okay, maybe it's not friendly with Chrome, try IE. 404 File not found. Come back to the board and login, nope, can't post, can't PM, can't do much of anything. Okay check the FAQ. FAQ says any other problems with registration email the webmaster and gave the email address to do so. Sure, okay, let's email the webmaster. That makes sense. Emailed webmaster and BOUNCE! email address doesn't exist.
Scour the site for any means of contacting someone to let them know that the confirmation message isn't working..... Nope, no other emails to be found and no way to message anyone with any pull, so kinda let's take a step back and look at the problem again. The confirmation email looks like it came from a customer service email address. They're typically do not reply to those messages, but what the heck, can't hurt. It didn't bounce, but also did not get a response.
Hmmm.... What else can I do. Let's see. The people over at Mr. Excel are usually pretty helpful and I've used the site on and off for nearly a decade, maybe one of the VBA guys over there is also registered here and can get a message to someone that might be able to do something about it or at least the person they contact can contact a different person who can do something about it. Who knows, worth a shot, the board looks too busy to not be able to get registered. Go back and forth with a couple guys over there for a day, but none of them were registered and they were just trying to help me out to get going on this site and it's not even their site.
I give up.......
2 days later and out of the blue..... I get another email confirmation message from VBForums. This time from a different email address a different canned registration response along with a link that actually worked. GREAT! Thanks! I already figured out my own problem, which can be a good learning experience sometimes, but I'll get on the board, maybe there are other portions of my small project that I may need help with and it is more VBScript related than Excel related even though VBS and VBA are similar, there are some differences. Let's go ahead and check the site out.
Now prior to this, I was thinking that the board must hide messages from those who are not registered, but now that I have a valid activation I should be able to see the messages......
Let's go straight to the VBScript section, because that is what I'm currently working with. The site says there are 4100 (roughly) threads. Okay great! Click to go in and...... I can only see one single message. Go back out to the SubForum list. Okay, I can see the last post to the right. Click the last post. Sure enough I can see the last post. Go back into the forum itself, 1 post.... The pinned post saying that ASP.NET has it's own forum.
Okay, so I still can't see messages even though I'm now activated. Can I post a message? Well, we'll see a minute. If this thing posts, will I be able to see it? Oddly enough, the forum feedback actually showed me more than just a single post, but the VBScript forum did not as well as most any other I clicked on just had 1 to very few messages even though it says they have thousands of messages.
I'm sorry if this comes off as me just wanting to complain about the board. That's not the case at all. I've probably been on half a dozen programming boards of some sort over the years including ones that cover VBA, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and the link and have never had these kinds of problems to get going as a user. The point of this point is to point out to the people in control that if I've had these kinds of issues and I've been doing this for 2 decades, what is it going to be like for those college kids just starting out or your freshly out of school kid who wants to put his knowledge to work for the first time and needs a little assistance. I'm sure kids these days would throw their hands in the air and just give up, as I did prior to the 2nd confirmation email that came in 2 days after the first one. In the end, you could say, I'm a fix it guy, so thought I would post my experience so maybe those in charger could fix it for others in the future.
If anyone knows anything about why I can't see most of the messages I would appreciate that bit of knowledge as well.
Thanks,
RJ
Let's start with the normal registration. Everything looks like every other board, setup the basics and we'll email you and you'll have to click the link in the email to activate. Okay, that's typical, no problem.
Email comes in and click the confirmation and....... 404 Not found. Okay, maybe it's not friendly with Chrome, try IE. 404 File not found. Come back to the board and login, nope, can't post, can't PM, can't do much of anything. Okay check the FAQ. FAQ says any other problems with registration email the webmaster and gave the email address to do so. Sure, okay, let's email the webmaster. That makes sense. Emailed webmaster and BOUNCE! email address doesn't exist.
Scour the site for any means of contacting someone to let them know that the confirmation message isn't working..... Nope, no other emails to be found and no way to message anyone with any pull, so kinda let's take a step back and look at the problem again. The confirmation email looks like it came from a customer service email address. They're typically do not reply to those messages, but what the heck, can't hurt. It didn't bounce, but also did not get a response.
Hmmm.... What else can I do. Let's see. The people over at Mr. Excel are usually pretty helpful and I've used the site on and off for nearly a decade, maybe one of the VBA guys over there is also registered here and can get a message to someone that might be able to do something about it or at least the person they contact can contact a different person who can do something about it. Who knows, worth a shot, the board looks too busy to not be able to get registered. Go back and forth with a couple guys over there for a day, but none of them were registered and they were just trying to help me out to get going on this site and it's not even their site.
I give up.......
2 days later and out of the blue..... I get another email confirmation message from VBForums. This time from a different email address a different canned registration response along with a link that actually worked. GREAT! Thanks! I already figured out my own problem, which can be a good learning experience sometimes, but I'll get on the board, maybe there are other portions of my small project that I may need help with and it is more VBScript related than Excel related even though VBS and VBA are similar, there are some differences. Let's go ahead and check the site out.
Now prior to this, I was thinking that the board must hide messages from those who are not registered, but now that I have a valid activation I should be able to see the messages......
Let's go straight to the VBScript section, because that is what I'm currently working with. The site says there are 4100 (roughly) threads. Okay great! Click to go in and...... I can only see one single message. Go back out to the SubForum list. Okay, I can see the last post to the right. Click the last post. Sure enough I can see the last post. Go back into the forum itself, 1 post.... The pinned post saying that ASP.NET has it's own forum.
Okay, so I still can't see messages even though I'm now activated. Can I post a message? Well, we'll see a minute. If this thing posts, will I be able to see it? Oddly enough, the forum feedback actually showed me more than just a single post, but the VBScript forum did not as well as most any other I clicked on just had 1 to very few messages even though it says they have thousands of messages.
I'm sorry if this comes off as me just wanting to complain about the board. That's not the case at all. I've probably been on half a dozen programming boards of some sort over the years including ones that cover VBA, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and the link and have never had these kinds of problems to get going as a user. The point of this point is to point out to the people in control that if I've had these kinds of issues and I've been doing this for 2 decades, what is it going to be like for those college kids just starting out or your freshly out of school kid who wants to put his knowledge to work for the first time and needs a little assistance. I'm sure kids these days would throw their hands in the air and just give up, as I did prior to the 2nd confirmation email that came in 2 days after the first one. In the end, you could say, I'm a fix it guy, so thought I would post my experience so maybe those in charger could fix it for others in the future.
If anyone knows anything about why I can't see most of the messages I would appreciate that bit of knowledge as well.
Thanks,
RJ