[mishionary]

So i was posting something today here and then got pushed to a verify you are a human Captcha - have the forums changed this week?

I don't recall having to do this with Bethesda before - and if I am logged in how often do we need to verify ourselves?

[quinnnn]

It seems to be a bug with the forum software.
It happens randomly sometimes. You can just hit Back and retry your post, it shouldn't appear again.

[Rich O'Brien]

Gonna hijack this thread and say that the captcha for some sites are really horrible. I literally could not read the tangled mess on the screen. I think the longest I tried was around 9 times.

[Logan Greenwood]

Over the years I've been hit with this bug a few times.

As mentioned, usually going back and doing it again avoids the need to actually do it.

[Chloe Mayo]

Happened to me to once or twice but very rarely and I have never been locked out.

[Adam Kriner]

I just got it recently a couple times. Never seen it before this past month.

Annoying one was yesterday, wrote up a long reply in the FO4 forum, hit Post, got the captcha, did it...... and it threw my post away. Just stuck me back at the general forum level. (Didn't realize I could just go "back" to recover. Ah, well.)

[Kelvin Diaz]

I've had this a few times with PM. It's not just annoying, it's also broken, and once you get it, it seems impossible to get rid of until the session expires. Very irritating.

[Patrick Gordon]

Greetings!

I had been away for a while, but recently returned to these forums (mainly because I'm finally able to play Morrowind again). A lot was just as I remembered it... great Community of good folks talking about some of the best video games ever created. Good stuff!

But there was one significant change that I became aware of almost immediately, and has continued to be a big problem... and it seems completely unnecessary. I'm talking about the security CAPTCHA screens that I frequently have to go through when trying to post here. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if, after the CAPTCHA screen, you were returned to the post you had just spent who-knows-how-long writing... but it frequently doesn't. No, instead I am usually sent back to the www.gamesas.com homepage, and the text I had thought so carefully about is completely gone. Erased. Eradicated. Extinguished. Expired. GONE.

First and foremost, this is a terrible user experience. I have worked in web for over a decade now, and if I ever handed someone a finished piece of work that forced their users to go through CAPTCHAs as much as this site does, I'd have a bad reputation and would likely be out of work. You should never, ever, EVER cause a user to lose their stuff, no matter what it is. Doing it once in a user's experience is bad. Doing it multiple times in a single user experience? That is just plain evil!

Secondly, in a site like this one (an online forum where users share thoughts about video games), it might be appropriate to run them through a CAPTCHA screen once per visit: when they first log on. New users first registering definitely need to go through these things at least once to ensure that they really are human, and not a bot. But returning users, who have already signed up and gone through the entire registration process, should never be asked to do this more than once, and that "once" should be when they first log on. Requiring them to do it multiple times (sometimes even multiple times per post) is not only unnecessary, but burdensome.

Yes, I know about copying my text to something else (a notepad page, or even just the clipboard), and I've had to do that before on lower-profile sites. But this is Beth's official forum... you'd think they'd have the money to pay for professional web development, and not just something cobbled together by a script kiddie. There is no need for uber-security here; there are no transactions taking place, and the site is so well-moderated that spammers have no chance here. The repeated CAPTCHA screens are literally doing nothing to protect anyone from, well... anything! They are just a big PITA making the user experience here much less enjoyable than it once was.

So, please, please... can't someone take a look at this and correct the problem? It shouldn't take anyone who knows what they're doing very long at all, and it would make a big difference to folks like me (besides not being a very good typist, I am also suffering from a neurological disease that makes keeping my thoughts together very difficult. These CAPTCHA screens have caused me to lose more thoughts than I can even remember!) A little change, like making people go through these things once and only once, would go a long way.

Thank you!

[Sara Lee]

It's a bug. You should only need to do it during registration. It comes and goes for some people. I've had it too.

But it's moot at this point. These forums are shutting down soon and we'll have a new home.

I'll assume the new forums will not have this issue.

[Sandeep Khatkar]

All bugs are just a matter of code. If it is a bug, it can and should be fixed. I disagree that it's a moot point; the new site is not up, this is the only one we have to use for now, and so it is relevant. And I wouldn't assume anything. Do we know that the people developing the new site are not the ones maintaining this one? And even if they are different folks, how do we know they won't just copy the code for this from this site? Believe me, it happens a lot in this industry!

I do appreciate what you're saying. But honestly, if Beth's view on this is, "to heck with it, it doesn't matter if our users are having a bad experience now, because our new site will be better". That is not professional, and quite frankly I do expect more from a company like Bethesda. The people using the site today matter more than the people who may use the new site in the future. The future does matter, but nothing is as important as what your users are experiencing right now. This is why having a site (or parts of a site) "under construction" is such a bad idea. I really wish more developers understood that. It was hammered into us when I was getting my Computer Science degree, but unfortunately the industry is hiring more self-taught charlatans these days than people who are actually trained in this stuff. (Yes, I am a little bitter about that. But who wouldn't be?)

Is there a date we can at least look forward to for the new site, or is it still just "soon"? The announcement was back in July; it's October now, and still no new forums.

[Nathan Risch]

I am in complete agreement with you that the forums are in dire need of fixing, however given the silence on the matter, I think it's clear it's not going to happen. However to answer your question on the new forum, the new forum looks to be cloud-hosted and is using completely different forum software than this one (this forum runs IPB, new forum looks to use Jive) so the current maintainers won't be doing much of the implementation or maintenance (since it's a cloud service)

You have every right to be miffed, but your words won't reach the people who can do something about it here, unfortunately.

[Matt Terry]

As am I.

Yup. Just seems to be how these things go.

[Lawrence Armijo]

Thanks, I appreciate the extra info. I am curious about one thing though. I understand that the new site is using new software and will be cloud-hosted, but why do you say that means the current maintainers/implementers won't be involved? The last web shop I worked for was at an advertising firm, and we did both our own hosting (from our servers) and cloud-based hosting (using mostly Rackspace's cloud services). We even migrated a few of our earlier sites from our servers to the cloud while I was there. In all cases, there were no other developers; it was just us, and we used many different languages, frameworks and developer tools in addition to using several different hosting strategies. I suppose to an outside observer it may have appeared to be done by different people, but it wasn't.

So, I'm just curious. Do you have some info about the development team? That would actually be a little more significant than the technologies they are using.

And thank you for the kind words. I really do appreciate the empathy! Do you know who where I could lodge a complaint? I guess I thought issues with the forum site itself should be brought up in the forums, but I suppose it was wrong to think that. Any suggestions? I'd at least like to let them know that this kind of thing really does matter to [some of] their users!

Thanks again!

[Miranda Taylor]

There's a big difference between a cloud-hosted solution and cloud hosting for your own solution. A cloud-hosted solution is basically SaaS, you don't control the software, you pay to use it. You get some admin functionality, but you don't do installing updates yourself and stuff like that.

There's never been a significant development team for the forums here. It's always been COTS solutions, even the themes are purchased, not made in-house. There are admins (or at least there used to be, even some good ones over the years), but the forums have always been COTS

Probably the only thing you could do is maybe try reaching out on twitter and other social networks, just don't be surprised if you continue to be ignored.

[yessenia hermosillo]

Threads merged.

With the new forums coming soon (no, we don't know when yet) it is unlikely that any fixes are being planned for this forum.

[David John Hunter]

I understand the differences between different types of cloud-hosted solutions. To be fair, you didn't specify in your post; you just said the new site was going to be "cloud-hosted". I've used several of Rackspace's cloud hosting services, all of which gave us full control over the software we ran and how we ran it. I have also used more SaaS-like tools offered by Host Gator and GoDaddy, where I had some, but considerably less control of the software. So I get that there are quite a few cloud-hosted solutions out there, but just saying that something is "cloud-hosted" doesn't imply that one doesn't have full control of the software. More information is needed to be able to determine that. I'm sorry there was a misunderstanding there.

OK, I understand that, too. Heck, at the ad firm I last worked at, we often started with COTS and/or open source products, and then customized them. No point in re-making the wheel! But even when you don't do anything but install and configure software, there's still at the very least a sys admin somewhere who's job is to keep the servers running, install updates, and configure add-on tools like CAPTCHA modules. Are you saying that Bethesda's forums don't have even someone doing those things? That seems unlikely.

Again, I'm sorry if there was some kind of misunderstanding. I have hands-on experience with this kind of stuff, and I know it's not that hard to fix this issue. I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes or anything, I'm just trying to address what I feel is an issue. Your responses to my last post seemed to imply that Bethesda is helpless to fix this software, that they'll have even less control over it at Beth dot net, and that it's hopeless to try, anyway. Maybe that's all true, maybe it isn't. But in any case, I do understand how these systems work, and I'm just not convinced by the reasons you've given that your conclusions are sound. If you can elaborate a little more about who is keeping the Beth forums software up and running, and/or the specifics of the particular cloud-based solution Beth dot net is using, then please do. Perhaps then I could understand your rationale a little better.

[Zualett]

Hi vegtabill! We don't see you in this forum very often. Here's some threads on the problems we've been having with the forum since June. Everything we know about forum problems and everything we know about what's coming up with the new forum can be found in these threads.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1533362-bethesdanet-update-%E2%80%93-username-registration-soon/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1530442-bethesdanet-new-forum-thread/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1530894-bethesdanet-new-forum-thread-2/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1528524-bethesdanet-is-now-live-new-forums-coming-soon/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1530194-reply-to-post-issues/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1526636-forums-broken-again/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1530172-strange-board-loading/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1518986-just-a-heads-up-about-members-rank-and-posts/

[Casey]

Wealth without measure, Pseron! No, I don't come around these parts much, but this seemed a much more appropriate place for the CAPTCHA issue than the Morrowind forums.

Thanks for compiling that list. That looks time-consuming, and I appreciate your effort immensely! I'll get to reading...

Good to see you, sir!

[sas]

To be precise, I actually said "cloud service". I didn't use the word hosted specifically because Bethesda isn't hosting it nor are they using a cloud host. They are using a cloud service no different from Dropbox and the like.

It's pretty rare for COTS to allow customization. Open source, yeah, COTS is much more limited though and Beth forums have been proprietary COTS for some time (possibly forever, not sure). They haven't done any customization from what I can tell beyond the basics (disabiling features, adding custom themes that were purchased). For the longest time the minimalism of the forums have been a major plus in my opinion, but the lack of support has been a big downside.

There is and in the past they have been active on here, they are not active on here anymore.

I didn't mean to imply that Beth is helpless to fix it, but rather that your words are falling on deaf ears. Everything you've said has been said countless times before without the admins giving us so much as a single word back. The silence on the issue speaks volumes.

Are at least some of the problems easy to fix? Most likely, but no effort has been made to fix them and the problems have been going on for almost 2 years now. The admins (as in the actual sysadmins, GStaff doesn't do sysadminy things) haven't actively posted on the community-facing portions of this forum in a long time, nor have any announcements of maintenance been made where we've been told things will be fixed.

[Louise Dennis]

To be precise, you said, "... the new forum looks to be cloud-hosted and is using completely different forum software than this one...", and then you tacked this on the the end: "(since it's a cloud service)". I'm sorry, but that is not very clear. I think it is perfectly understandable not to make any assumptions about control of software based on that.

That is patently false. Do you work in the industry? If so, where have you been? People have been buying licenses for Commercial Off-The-Self software and customizing it for a long time. I've been doing commercial software since 2004, and I've never worked at a place that didn't do this at some level. At the place I worked before the ad firm, that's all we did. To say customization of COTS software is rare is just dead wrong.

OK, but whether or not they are active in the forums is irrelevant. Can someone in the forums reach this person? I'm betting they can. It is possible to fix this problem; a choice has been made not to, apparently.

Maybe you didn't mean to, but you did. You post as though you have some kind of authoritative information, but it sounds more like speculation based on some not-quite-right ideas. If you know specifics and have some source(s) for the specifics, then please, by all means share it with us. Clearly, since the thread was merged, there are more people who would like to know what's going on. I read some of the posts Pseron was kind enough to compile for me, and it's clear that things are not really going as planned. Forum registration was supposed to have started sometime early last month, yet here we are today talking about a forum that still hasn't gone live. I'm sure these some of these folks would like to know why Beth can't take care of these relatively small issues on the old forums. If you can inform us in some kind of specific way, please do.

I'm not going to continue this back-and-forth. I've said all I need to, and I don't have the energy, anyway. If you have something more detailed to share, I'm sure the folks who have posted here would love to hear it. I appreciate what you said early on, but I don't see the point in carrying on with this discussion any further.

[Trista Jim]

I disagree. Cloud servers are completely a different thing, but now we're arguing vocabulary.

I do work in the "industry". Unless you have special access to the source code you cannot do much customization beyond the basics. You cannot modify Microsoft Office for example. Proprietary software severely limits customization, especially compared to open-source software, and as I previously said the forum software here has never been significantly modified for as long as I've been here (it's been updated, to make my definition of modified/customized clear: I am referring to additional functionality that was not created or planned to be possible by the original software creator)

I think it's relevant because we have no direct connection to Bethesda. These forums are community-ran, all moderators are members of the community. Until Beth comes on here, we don't have a real way of communicating with them. The best you can do is PM GStaff as he is the PR contact on these forums (though does not post often), but I still personally think you'd have better luck on twitter.

All my posts have said so far are that:

1. The new forums look like they are going to use Jive (specifically their cloud solution where they provide it as a service)
2. There's no communication going on here with Bethesda
3. There have been issues going on this forum for almost 2 years now without being able to get in contact with the admins on the issues, so I personally feel words fall on deaf ears here when it comes to pointing out software issues.

It is true that the new forum launch didn't go as planned. You had asked for ways of getting this forum fixed and my answer to that remains:

I agree with you that these forums are in dire need of fixing, but I don't think trying to raise awareness on here works because it hasn't for the past two years. Twitter is what I would recommend as your best bet, but even then I still don't have high hopes.

This is my personal viewpoint that has grown from what I personally have seen and noticed over the past two years. I'm personally really, really glad that the new forums are going to be a cloud service because as of lately, while I do think Bethesda can make great video games, I don't feel like they are putting enough resources into maintaining their current forums. I would love communication with Bethesda, in fact my greatest wish on these forums right now is for a Q&A session with the admins on Bethesda.net, but I am currently quite frankly very jaded when it comes to things related to maintenance of the forums.

[kitten maciver]

Mate, you have generalist knowledge and he has specialist knowledge. Smart men bow to expertise, asking for clarifications as necessary.

Take a step back and think for a minute whether you're really arguing something important, or you're caught up in being right (must admit, I have fallen into the trap of the latter a few times myself).

[Trista Jim]

I tried to send you a PM, 1Samildanach, but couldn't. If you can (and if you want to, of course), shoot me a message sometime. Thanks!

[Frank Firefly]

Thanks Pluto I got another one today while answering a PM but just entered the Captcha and it posted the message

The Captchas are a bit cruel though - I nearly hemorrhaged an eye from squinting at the blurry numbers

[Carlos Vazquez]

I dunno. It's easy for us forum members to say "fix that bug!", but I've heard a lot of programmers over the years say that bug quashing is not as easy as it looks.