Why aren't forum issues addressed sometimes?

College Confidential Community
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Continuing the discussion from Ads won't close out:

I do monitor this tag, but it’s sometimes hard to provide meaningful updates. This is especially the case when I can’t reproduce the problem. Examples:

  • Problems that seem specific to just a few users.
  • Problems that are transient. Server errors (50X) can be difficult to track down.
  • Problems that happen on a platform we don’t regularly use. (I’ve had to borrow my wife’s iPad.)
  • Problems that require a fairly unusual condition to trigger.

There’s a lot of overlap in these conditions, of course. I consult with our developers for particularly pernicious issues, but unless one of us can reproduce, it’s really unlikely we’ll find a solution.

What can users do to helps us track down problems?

There are a few things you can do to help.

Screenshots

Pictures can be worth a thousand words and a screenshot can demonstrate a problem better than descriptions. This site has instructions for most all platforms.

What were you doing when the problem happened?

Were you posting? Reading a thread? Using the search function? Logging in? The more detail you can provide, the greater the odds we’ll be able to track down the problem.

The very best thing you can do to help is write up instructions to reliably reproduce a problem. That’s not always possible and I completely understand if that’s not something you want to do. But if you do take the time, it greatly increases the odds we can find a solution.

Provide updates

Sometimes problems happen just once or twice. But other problems happen every time. In either case it can help us figure out what’s happening if we get an update a day or two later. (It also bumps the thread, which can be useful when I get distracted while trying to reproduce.)

Thanks for letting us know about problems

I really appreciate reports of issues on the site. I can’t always do anything about it, but I know that for every person who posts about a problem, there are probably many others suffering in silence. We don’t want that, so your reports are quite useful.

4 Likes
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Thank you for answering. I do think Community Forum and Issues isn’t all that easy to find anymore.

I think it should have its own subforum right under FAQs on College Confidential.

Put Community Forum and Issues right under that.

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10 posts were split to a new thread: Ads getting in the way on iOS

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Not sure if this is the right thread but I’m receiving sporadic the blue circle notifications for new reply’s on threads I’m tracking.

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Try this new area…

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Thank you!