Several members have expressed concerns about technical problems and how to report them and be updated about when they are resolved. Some issues affect all of us. Others are individual. Any problems you experience can be submitted directly to our Online Help Desk for individual attention and specific recommendations. If you are experiencing a problem that may be specific to your chat forum account, please submit a request there and include your login name and the email address associated with your account. Feel free to reply to this thread with comments about existing issues or to ask questions about a problem you encounter.
Many folks have been using the thread for forum related questions for this purpose, and it's fine to do so. That thread is very long, however, and was originally intended to help folks learn how to use our forum system. The focus of this thread is to deal directly with issues that indicate that something is broken, and to provide a centralized location for folks to discuss alternatives for something that isn't working optimally. We've got a great bunch of folks in our communities who have been sharing ideas in their support threads, and we'd love to see ideas shared in a way that everyone can benefit.
The three issues shown below are not a full list of difficulties folks have experienced recently, yet are the ones that seem to be affecting everyone at this time. I spend more time behind the scenes, yet hope to check in and update this semi-regularly when necessary. Hopefully I or someone else will have good news to report very soon.
Our current email problems affect subscriptions and other notifications including new passwords. This is not a problem with our forum settings or software, yet rather the email server or servers that messages are routed through. We do not have an estimate of when this will be fixed yet the folks who can address this for us have been notified and informed that this is an extremely critical issue.
Our Search feature seems to be behind the times and not giving results more current than late October; we aren't sure if it will catch up on its own or if there is something else affecting it. During several months where our Search feature was not working at all, many members found that using Google Search and limiting results to forums.provida.com helped them find things.
Bookmarks seem to have disappeared for some folks. The feature itself seems to function properly. We suggest creating a folder in the Bookmarks or Favorites of your web browser as a work-around and using that for saving the pages for threads that you want to be sure to find later.
I hope this thread helps keep you informed as to how things are progressing. If you have been posting elsewhere in our forums about technical difficulties with our forums and website, please post a link to this thread there to help anyone interested in reading about and providing feedback for problems to do so here and guarantee that we'll see it.
We want everything to work smoothly, and are working to achieve that. We appreciate your patience at this time.