Request for Forum User Feedback

Thank you for listening.

From our point of view 'If it ain't broke don't fix it "

Seem that the changes were for your benefit (cost reduction ? ) not for the majority of members.

I would like to see some kind of notification for new posts on threads I'm following, even if it is only a daily summary email.

Thanks!

I would like to see some kind of notification for new posts on threads I'm following, even if it is only a daily summary email.

Thanks!

I seemed to have stopped getting email notifications again from the various threads I have been on for a few years. This appears to have started about when the changes to Patient.info were made. What is happening here and how can it be fixed again?

First off, thank you for the old format to the forum. I miss it because the posts and communication between members proved to be invaluable sources of information for me, and thanks to the old format, I was able to chart a treatment program that worked for me--and for that I am forever grateful. I also found the forum section of your site to be of most valuable section, and I used to frequently recommend it to friends and family for their medical issues.

However, with the new format, I feel cut off from the forum. I no longer receive any notifications. The sense of community I had is gone. I used to be on your site almost every day, and now I find I usually forget to check it--sometimes for 2 weeks or longer. You used to send out a weekly summary of posts to the forum, but you stopped doing that a long time ago. Perhaps you could at least bring that back. Though the changes you've made diminished the value of your site for me, I understand you felt the need to make them.

1. Restore a mechanism to get emails for any new topics or new replies to topics on a forum.
2. Provide a way to find all posts made by me or by some user.
3. Provide a way to do more advanced types of searches. i.e. to search on a phrase rather than on individual words
4. When search results come up, they should zoom in on the specific places in a thread where the search term is present. There should be a way to do a NEXT operation which will automatically jump to the next place in an extremely long thread where the search term occurs. Currently you have to scroll through potentially dozens of pages of a thread and manually search for the line(s) that contains your search term. This makes search almost unusable.
5. When you are presenting a long thread it renders it in the browser incrementally as you scroll down. You also have buttons to navigate to the NEXT page. This is extremely confusing. It would be more intuitive, faster and more efficient to render a fixed size page of text that is not too large that it causes a noticeable delay and then require use of the navigation buttons to move forward/backwards through the thread. You could still have prefetching but this could be happening in the background without impacting the user experience.

Hi all,

Thank you for the comments. We are reviewing the status of emails for new discussions and all replies in discussions with a mind to reinstate. In the meantime you can see all of your notifications on this page https://patient.info/forums/me/notifications. I have also requested that this page is improved with discussion titles and snippet text of posts etc.

Re - Provide a way to find all posts made by me or by some user.

You can see all of your posts by going to your profile page here https://patient.info/forums/me

You can view posts made by other users by clicking on their name.

I have asked for improvements to these pages as well.

Re the search - I am aware that the search is not very good when it comes to the forums and I have asked for it to be changed especially for the inclusion of an Any/All search to enable phrase searching.

The incremental/infinite scroll feature is under review as it has caused a few issues.

Regards,

Alan

It would seem that you made changes because a minority asked for them. From being a daily user I'm now probably a monthly one and now I'm finding better things to do.

If there is no subject there is no point in looking at any.

Please consider adding a feature allowing a user to post a poll question, whether the answers are Y/N or custom as entered by the user. Should also have the option to make the responses anonymous. This capability seems to be fairly common in most forum web services and would be highly beneficial in this forum.

I just stopped getting Patient in my email why?

I too went from a daily user of this forum for years, to not using it all after the changes were made. I concur with many of the suggestions already made.

Here's my two cents:

How about a way to opt in for receiving emails with the first post of any new discussions in the forum. Having an opt in would hopefully reduce the number of emails, and just having the first post would also do that.

Thanks.

Rich

The Prostate Problems forum used to be one of the most valuable resources I had. For months now I have not received one email notification from this forum. When I select "follow" for any discussion for notifications, I still don't receive them. Even logging on and finding the forum is harder than it's ever been. Can't you just restore it to the way it used to work?

The lack of email notifications from threads that I follow has all but destroyed my relationship with many people I used to follow. It is much too time consuming to try and search threads that I follow to see if any new posts were put up and some threads are so long that it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I know most others feel this way from personal emails. You should at least re-instate email notifications from threads people follow. If they complain they get too many emails then they can always unfollow them or just delete them but why destroy what was otherwise a great forum for people to help people.

Please add a search function.

Add a history tab for historical posts, if it is reasonable to do so.