I have a complaint, I feel like there's not enough tempvar videos, or badges ;).

In all seriousness though, I have no complaints as a user, everything is easy to navigate to and work with.

Richard,

As you know, I am one of a handful of people who have experienced your website in three different ways. Being the last appointed moderator, I am perhaps the only one of them who has experienced the modern website as a user. Now, as a moderator, like you, I experience it differently than regular users. But it's only been less than a year since I was just a paid customer. At that time, I had tow complains about the website. The first issue, which you have fixed since, was how my paid courses were listed. The second one, which I still experience every now and then, has to do with the other major part of your website, which is finding videos.

There are two parts to this problem. The first is the index location, which you have partially fixed by putting it as a main menu item where before it was buried under 'More'. Having said that, the 'index' is not indexed, and due to the positive aspect of your prolific production, it is an incredibly long document. All we have now is a simple page search that is part of the browser.

It would be very helpful if that index was actually indexed and a proper search feature was introduced, where the user could type their search words and a list of videos and lessons would be listed.

Now that it's coming up to a year since I finished all your courses, and I have made it my goal to watch all of your techHelp videos, finding those videos was a problem. I needed to export your video list to a spreadsheet sorted chronologically, maintaining the links so I could go down my spreadsheet clicking on the next video on the list to keep going. I believe you can enhance that user experience for regular users.

Than you Richard For all the things you do for us.

That's some very valuable feedback, Sami! Thank you. The Access index page should be indexed in the website's search engine, but it's only indexed for the keywords and phrases that actually appear in the index itself. It doesn't do as good of a job at figuring out context based on what's actually covered.

For example, if you search for "DLookup," you'll find what videos it's covered in. But if you search for "DLookup with two criteria," then it won't come up because that exact phrase is not in the index outline.

One thing that I've tried to make apparent on the search results page, both at the top and at the bottom, is a link that will take you to Google with that exact search criteria and search my site because Google does a much better job at indexing my site than my search index does. They're kind of the best at that. Maybe I should just make that more apparent.

I believe that there were two features on the old web site that are no longer present.
(1) Opening a thread which I have previously read but there are more recent comments, the old web site would take me to the last comment that I read previously.  Currently, I have to scroll down and try and figure out where I had left off previously;
(2) At the bottom of a thread, there used to be a quick link to return to the main forum.  Currently, that link is displayed only at the top of the thread.  For instance, in this thread "<- Back to Captain's Log" is at the top of the thread, but not at the bottom as well.
Thanks for everything that you do!  Very much appreciated.

I think the first point was changed at some point for the moderators to not have to scroll up to read through peoples questions if we hadn't seen the post yet and needed to catchup on the information. Maybe you can change how that behaves if you have the moderator tag Rick :P

Paul - if you click on a Notification that there's a new comment, it should at least take you to the bottom of the thread. I'll look into that. I know it works for me... but that's one of the problems I have. Sometimes things will work FOR ME, but not for the normal users.

Also - adding the link to the parent Forum back to the bottom of the comments list is a good idea. You're right. It used to be there. Added to list.

Hi Richardd, we need a way to quote another poster's message (or messages) when we reply to a post.  Some threads get pretty long with lots of posters, so quoting makes the discussion easier to follow for everyone reading the thread.  Quoting has existed since the Usenet days in the 80s and 90s, so I would say this is a pretty basic feature that should exist in every discussion forum.  Usenet allowed plain text only, much like this forum.  In plain text, quoting can be done by adding ">" and line breaks to the post.

I know you are super-busy so I rarely mention these things.  But since you ask, I answer.  

I would like the ability to edit posts as well.  I know this feature could be abused.  Some forums only allow editing within N minutes, so you may consider that.

Lower on my list is the ability to "favorite" or "follow" a thread.  Posters shouldn't have to post a message saying "Follow" (like some posters have done) just to follow that thread.  I know we see a red "New" indicator whenever there are new posts in the threads that we have read.  But that doesn't necessarily mean we want to follow those threads.  We need a separate "Follow" feature to differentiate threads that have new posts and threads we want to follow.

Further down on my list is the removal of certain character restrictions in posting, such as not being able to type dashes, colons, etc. in thread titles, or unicode characters in the body of a post.  Some forums have this kind of restrictions too, but this forum should at least allow characters that are used in Access, unicode and special characters among them.  When posters ask questions about Access, they should be able to type everything they see in Access.

I'd make the Search bar its own row in the header, full width of the screen.
As there is so much content it's easier to search for something then page through everything.
(Multi value search might be handy too)

Kevin: thank you. All valuable comments. Some of that's already on my list (like following a thread instead of posting "following")

Alex: NO.

LOL. Seriously... I was thinking about making the search box bigger, but not full screen width... that's insane! :)

Multi-value (you mean phrases?) works fine IF you use the Google search option. LOL

Google search is not very good at finding forum text that is dynamically generated by the scripts of a forum, because Google can't cache everything -- unless it figures out a way to run every possible script setting, which I doubt.  I often rely on the built-in search features of a forum to find exactly what I want.

Google's pretty good with my site. Forum posts don't usually change, so once Google spiders it, the page is in their index. It can take a few weeks to a month, but everything in the Forums will eventually show up on Google.

One way to do this without using input masks is use a password font

See? There you are. :)

But your point is well taken. I'm a database nerd. I should build a better, indexed search page for my own site. It's definitely on the list.

This is minor, yet it bothers me a little so I'll mention it. When posting comments, I see the buttons for markup (bold, italic, etc.), but it's unclear how to use them. Once, when I tried, the HTML became part of my text instead of changing its appearance. This is probably my limited knowledge, yet I'd love it if there were some indication of how to apply the formatting options. Maybe a little informative popup could be added (generated by one of those information symbols like a circle with an i inside.)

Jennifer

Welcome to Geck world.

Select the text you want to Bold, Italic or Underline. click on the markup button.

Yes, you will see the tags. ignore that. once you submit, your post will show the markup.

Yeah, it's not a true WYSIWYG editor. It will insert the tags around selected text, like Sami said. I might add a better editor in the future, but it's not a super high priority.