Andrew, there are some complaints, bugs, suggestions being compiled here, if you had not seen it...

I seem to have been kicked off the site. Changed my password, but still have no access to "my account" with comment and blog post history. Any way to get any of this back, or is it just lost forever?

I still can't post comments (we'll see if this one makes it...)

Sorry, Andrew, I'm still unable to change my password. Am I holding my mouth wrong or something? :-)

OK I cannot reply at all. Every time I try, I get a message telling me to log in again, even though I AM logged in!

I still do not understand why this "improvement" was necessary or even desired. Can someone explain this to me? Sometimes it is best to remember the old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

My experience is that this method of posting and then submitting comments, etc... is vastly inferior to the previous format in almost every way I can think of. The previous format was easier to follow, easier to use and rarely presented perplexing problems. What's the point of going through all this chaos when there is no apparent benefit?

I am certainly open to any and all reasoning on this and eager to be enlightened.

testing, ignore this.

Did the link to reader blogs on the Cafe homepage disappear or it just out getting cleaned?

Hi Andrew. Thanks for working so hard to get the bugs out of the new system. I have one to report, although it doesn't seem to be consistent. Yesterday, when opened up a new tab of "comments" on a post, I was taken to a page with the post, but no comments were to be seen (the original post said there were 21 at the time). (I was able to get around it by clicking on the title of the thread itself, which revealed not only the post but the comments too.)

I'm hoping the ability to access our own comments under "profile," with an indication of any replies, is high on the list of things to be resolved soon. I agree with the others above that this was a crucial function of the old site, enabling real conversation to occur. I'm also hoping that you won't settle on something like the situation at Election Central after the change over a while back, where there was no way to track one's comments at all.

Also, I'm a little concerned about what's going to happen when and if we start having extremely long threads (300+ comments). For people like me on dial up, they may be essentially inaccessible. In the old software, it was possible to get around the problem by setting the maximum number of comments per page and/or by collapsing the comment list. Have we lost that permanently? I do realize that us dial up folks are probably a distinct minority, but I'm still hoping there's going to be a way to participate on long threads.

I'm still having problems with the site logging me out when I try to reply to a thread. I'm logged in now, but when I clicked "Send" just now, the comment did not go through and I was told that registration was required. I've copied the post though, and I'll keep trying to get this posted...

Hey Andrew, I think I've identified a problem:

Sometimes when the screen says I'm logged in, I send a post along but it fails. If it fails in the Cafe it says: "Must be registered to post," or something to that effect. On ElectioNCentral it says "Your comment has been sent to the blog owner for approval."

What seems to have happened is that my login has timed out, but the site doesn't tell me that. If I refresh the page and log in again, I can always get my comment through.

So the bug seems to be: I'm getting logged out rather quickly and that I'm not being told I've been logged out...

Hope that made sense.

MISSING COMMENTS on Gitlin's thread

Bothering to report this because others might be experiencing the same, not because I care about my lost comments.

On Todd Gitlin's thread
this morning/last night around 12:30am I made a comment, or so I thought, hit send, everything seemed to go as usual. After about 1/2 hour, when it didn't show up, I did this test comment on your this thread, 12:57 a.m. That one showed up almost immediately after hitting send. But my comment on Gitlin's thread still hadn't shown up. So I tried again, rewritten, slightly different, hit send, and it seemed to go through. It didn't show up either. As of now, many hours later, neither of those 2 comments on Gitlin's thread has shown up. (At least not for me, maybe someone else can see them?)

I notice the count of comments on that thread says 21 on the introtext on the front page and 15 on the inside when you click on it. My non-geek guess about that is that 6 comments, 2 of which are my attempts, are hanging in the system somewhere.

You know, in light of common reactions here, I'd be curious not only about the motivation, but also about the process. I'm an editor who's worked on textbooks and online reference projects. When we've done something, other than because a client or insane manager with power ordered it, we went through a fair degree of market research among actual and potential users (user and nonuser reviews, as the jargon has it). Could be written reviews, Survey Monkey, or focus groups. I'm wondering if any of the usual suspects here were asked, or did Josh and Andrew just sit together and think of what looked interesting.

Slow, slow, slow, slow. Really, very unacceptably slow. Minutes for a new post to appear? That's insane. Couple it with errors on posting and you never know if something went through.

And just now, when submitting a comment on another thread, database errors:
Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at /var/www/cgi-bin/mt4/extlib/Data/ObjectDriver/Driver/BaseCache.pm line 63 at /var/www/cgi-bin/mt4/extlib/Data/ObjectDriver/Driver/BaseCache.pm line 63

Also, from a security standpoint, broadcasting the actual paths to files probably isn't the best idea.

Next and previous links above article:

On this article right now, previous takes you to http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/06/obama_pulls_ahead_in_delegates/

which is no longer on the front page, and is from another section. When you get there, there's no Next link to get you back here.

Also, I can live without the gui, but why no preview button? Is it just because the site is already waaaaaaay too slow?

Andrew:

I cannot read the comments in Hartung's new post. It is indicated that there are four comments but I cannot see them.

Bruce

This new format will probably cause me to find another place to spend the hours I now spend here. Even if all of the obvious bugs get fixed the basic value of the site has been drasically reduced.

Right now I find that the various sites un-do my sign on at odd times as I try to post something. But, there is no notice that I have been un-signed on. Then it takes 10 minutes or so for whatever I tried to post to appear, if it appears at all. Meanwhile I finally notice I am not signed on, so I again sign on and repost my comment, only to find that my original comment finally made it to the site as an anonymous comment.

If I want to see what responses I got to my comment - too bad. I can't do that.

The things I did with the old format in a few minutes would take hours to do now, and I don't have that much time to waste here.

I will likely continue to read TPM for up to date political news, but these other sites are of little or no value to me now. It is my loss, not the administration of this family of sites loss - you folks obviously don't care what we users think.

Well, this may or not post....obviously the bugs are owning the site.

As an organic gardener, I would recommend that next time there is an changeover, some attention be paid ahead of time to what the growing ones [your purported audience] actually need and prefer, rather than using an unprepared new format so overrun by bugs that not much is thriving in the new environment.
I write this with sadness......it has been an eternity in internet time since the switchover last week.

I'm trying again. It shows my logged in. But I'm not. So I log in again. Then I post. Nothing appears. Then a very long time later a post may appear, but not every post just a post once in awhile and by then it's time for it to log me off without telling me as it just did again so maybe this will post and maybe it will not....

Hartung's latest post currently shows "Comments (21)". But when I click on "Comments" or on "Read more," I see only eight comments (which is also the number the page, at that level, reports).

How do I get to see all 21 comments?

Just an FYI to those who are having problems accessing comments. I found that clicking on the name of the article, rather than the "comments" link at the bottom of the article, seemed to do the trick (I opened the article up in a new page - don't know if that makes a difference). Of course, there are a variety of bugs now that seem to appear inconsistently, so I can't guarantee that'll work.

I wanted to let you know, Andrew, that on the Election Central front page, there are no events listed under "Events." I clicked the "View more events" link, but even then there were only two listed, both expired.

Edited to add: I was logged on when I wrote this, but when I clicked "Send" just now, it asked me for my Username and Password once again. :Sigh:

I really feel slighted here, I don't even get a ghosthead or an indentation where a ghosthead would appear?

In my profile, I got to the space for a logo, the button said "browse" and it linked to my own computer files, I chose the picture I had edited, maximum 64 pixels wide, what more do I have to do ??????

OK, I'm back here for another bug report. Ironically, I found it when trying to access this thread to see if there had been a reply to my previous post. Finding this thread was nearly impossible, as clicking on the link to the archive for February 2-9 returns a "page not found" error. Luckily, I had provided a link to this thread in a reply to a current blog post and so was able to return here.

Andrew, I have to own up to being perhaps somewhat excessively grumpy about the change. I was an Edwards supporter and the new site appeared almost immediately after Edwards' withdrawal, so this site suddenly being no longer being useable felt like a one-two punch. So, my apologies for my grumpiness, which isn't entirely of your making.

I really do hope you'll post another bug report/new site features thread, and discuss where you are and where you're going with the site. I realize the change-over must be feeling pretty frustrating to you too right now with all the complaints about the site - especially since there were many TPM denizens who were asking for some of the very changes that you're trying now to institute (I'm thinking particularly about the desire for greater visibility for bloggers' posts, a request that I saw frequently on the old site). We must seem an ungrateful bunch.

But the reason we're all so frustrated right now is that what had seemed very much like a real coffee house, where we all could sit down and have some interesting, leisurely, and meaningful discussions, has for the moment morphed into something more closely resembling the digital version of speed dating - or musical chairs. We miss the cameraderie of the old site - the current situation is very unsatisfying to those of us who deeply appreciated the opportunity that TPM had kindly offered to us in the past. Some more reassurances from TPM that the tradition of in-depth conversation will continue once the bugs are worked out would probably be very helpful right now.

Wordie,

If you click on House Brew you will find this thread right at the head.

Hep me. Hep Me. I have fallen and cannot get up!

The only place I can login is at the TPM front page. The system will not allow me to login at TPM Cafe. I often have to login in when the TPM Cafe shows me logged in. This happens most frequently when I comment (almost always with Pulitzer quality commentary!) and I get the little login prompt below the comment box. If I try to login it gives me an error message.