Post your tech glitches, errors, issues, etc. here.

Serenity posted this in Mid March: Sadly little has changed, leaving SNAFU behind and entering FUBAR status

Time to fire the current “tech” team, and I’m using the term loosely, and hire a reputable company. Hope BCO has not paid in full for this sh.t show of a redesign.

Hopefully this will post. I keep getting logged out, and I feel so sad about this. I'm Stage 4 and both my husband and my Dad are also very, very sick. This community has been really supportive and accessible for me, until about a month ago. It feels like such a loss, and oof, I'm already dealing with so much loss. Seeing so few posts in my favorite threads makes me now feel sad every time I can get logged in and look. I guess the tech glitch (to get back on track here in this thread) is constantly getting logged out.

sf-cakes, I am sorry about the stressors you’re dealing with. What has happened to this forum makes me very sad as well.

Mods,

I think this should read forum not from:

USEFUL RESOURCES

• Discussion from guidelines

not sure if this was mentioned yet - in the signatures, all the HER2+ people have flipped to HER2- with two brackets after the minus sign.

It now appears that dozens of HER2 negative women are on Herceptin or other anti HER2 therapies. Please fix this

candy - They're looking at other platforms now. No word on whether the same tech team will be used or if they plan to change that. They're not saying much. Expect turbulence for months.

traveltext - “Nasty"? Unless you're talking about an actual festering wound, don't use that word.

"nasty pile on"? Traveltext, we have people who are seriously ill with metastatic cancer who've been cut off from the support that they have depended on for years. Given that, I think the feedback to BCO has been measured and for the most part, respectful.

Yes, "over 20 years ago, BCO has helped thousands and thousands of women, and hundreds of men, diagnosed with breast cancer". In what form has that help come? Certainly some has been from the information pages, although we all know that reliable breast cancer information is available on many sites, and the information on the BCO site has never been particularly strong - for any individual topic, there are better sources on the web. Most of the support has come courtesy of discussion board members who have offered up their time to embrace, support and assist those who've come to the site with fears and questions, whether due to imaging/diagnostic concerns, a new diagnosis, a recurrence, or struggles with treatment and/or in moving on. Without discussion board members, BCO would have helped thousands and thousands of fewer women and men.

Given that, why does BCO always seem to put existing discussion board members at the bottom of the priority list? This isn't a new thing; this is an issue I've been raising for 16 years. BCO has always prioritized the acquisition of new members over the needs of existing members, seeming to ignore the fact that without happy existing members who are willing to support newbies, new members won't stick around. This is an issue that has been evident time and time again in how BCO have treated long-time members (so many of whom have left the board or now only post on social threads), implemented changes, and run promotions, while ignoring discussion board member feedback and without consideration to the 'hot button' issues of members.

With the new redesign of the main site, BCO went ahead and implemented something that membership told them we don't want and will never use - I remember this from a board discussion years ago. Did BCO poll actual breast cancer patients, including a wide cross-section of discussion board members, about their new direction? With the graphics, design elements, member input changes and navigation changes on both the main site and the discussion board, did BCO do pre-testing with a large number of discussion board members? I haven't seen anyone say that they were included in any concept or beta testing, and many of the most active members have been commenting in this thread.

Traveltext, if you remain happy with BCO and see the recent events as a minor inconvenience, that's great. I've been here for over 16 years. I see it as a continuation of a pattern of behaviour that has driven away hundreds of discussion board members over the years, many of whom had been extremely active in welcoming and supporting new members. I can recall so much input that BCO has received over the years from discussion board members that could have helped them avoid the current mess, if only they had paid attention to the input. Was all of this avoidable? Probably not, given the outdated IT systems that BCO is operating on. But much of the burden put on the old system was caused by the magnitude of change, and so much of that change was unnecessary, unwanted and is unappealing.

Given all that, I think that I have a right to voice my opinion and my frustrations, without being told that I'm participating in a nasty pile-on or that I should be giving anyone any slack. I've been raising these issues for 16 years but have always backed off, giving BCO slack. For me, their time is up.

Mods- Thank you for the update. But "researching new platforms" ??? Researching, then changing,,,how long till the site is user friendly again?????? Are we talking MONTHS, A YEAR, what??? Can you give us some more detail?

Mods. Thanks for the update but it is really hard to plan (to move on or stay) without a general idea of timeline. As previous member has asked it makes a huge difference if it is days, weeks, months. Surely you can be a little less vague?

I know it’s belaboring the point and makes little difference now but I would love to hear from actual members who were involved with beta testing or any other type of real life testing of this quagmire before it went live. Did they really not notice any of the myriad issues that have been associated with this change? Did their feedback indicate that things worked well? I’m not interested in their individual identities but am incredibly curious about the positive feedback they gave before this change went live for all of us.

No one thought that expanding the user profile and changing the "look and feel" of the main site would impact the community pages?

🤯🤯🤯

Details in the user profile can be displayed at the bottom of our posts in the community pages. It's purpose for BCO may be to collect our data, but it's for the users as well.

I don't know how many style sheets are used for this site, but did no one check???

traveltext,

Interesting reply. I don’t want to parse every word the mods write but when I asked them directly if this, meaning discussion forum, was beta tested with actual bco members they replied that it was. I keep asking about this because I find it hard to believe that the massive snafus were not encountered by the testers. Everything was fine until it went live with the whole community? Forgive me if I continue to smell a whiff of deception.