Disabling automatic subscriptions? + other things

Yeah, I hate this platform too.  I quit on launch day, I came back about a month and a half ago, and now I'm considering quitting again but this time for good.  The only thing that's stopping me is I don't know what I'd do without OCN.

 

Anyway, do this:

 

1. Click Subscriptions
2. Click Edit Subscriptions
3. Wait a few seconds for this page to change (sigh lol)
4. Scroll down
5. Look for "Default for new subscriptions" (I recommend using Ctrl+F for it)
6. Choose "Don't Subscribe" from the drop-down list
7. The change is automatically saved

 

 

If they went back to vBulletin (that is, back to the way it was on November 8th), then I would be extremely happy and it would be like a huge weight was lifted.  Yeah sure, they had some stability problems with it and database problems, but it would be a hell of a lot better than this.

Edited by TwoCables - 8/6/12 at 11:04pm

 

Exactly!  Thank you.

 

 

 

You're welcome.

 

This is the same as every other Huddler site?  OCN is the only Huddler site that I'm on, and so if this is true, then I just have one thing to say:  "Oh, wow.  Now I'm angry."  They had 3 years.  They had over a hundred OCN members helping them beta test it.  It has been nearly 9 months since it went live. Therefore, there's no excuse for this crap.

 

 

 

Oh wow.  I didn't know that.

 

 

 

Yep!  Every damn day I say out loud, "Overclock.net:  just click and wait.  Sigh."  If I had other things that I could do every day to keep me busy, then I would not have come back here at all.  November 9th would have been the day that Huddler made TwoCables ragequit.  Who cares about how awesome this place is when you look past the platform?  Actually, how can you look past the platform when it's not transparent in the least bit?  VBulletin was 100% transparent.  Huddler is 100% opaque.  It's more than opaque:  it's like ramming my face into a brick wall at a high speed.  Yeah, I enjoy that quite a bit.  That's actually what I do when I'm not logged into OCN!

 

I told them during the beta testing that this was slow, but they told me that it would be much faster when it went live.  On November 9th, that turned out to be incorrect.  9 months later, it is still incorrect.  We never had this many problems with vBulletin.  The only problems I remember were occasional slowness and downtimes.  Ooo big deal. lol  I didn't care!  At least the platform worked flawlessly when it was up and it was never in the way.  Ever!  Like I said, it was 100% transparent for OCN.

 

When I came back to OCN in late June of this year, I complained about how this is no better than it was during the beta testing.  I was told that 7 months was an extremely short amount of time for a transition like this.  Uh, I thought that this is what beta testing is for.  OCN is too big and too high profile of a community to have a platform in this condition  It's no wonder I'm finding OCN to be extremely boring and slow these days:  the platform is driving everyone away!

 

I just want to scream at them one simple question:  if this platform is so awesome, then why is it noticeably less active today than it was when we had vBulletin?  Even with the problems of our custom-designed (or modified) version of vBulletin's occasional slowness and downtimes (database issues, Error 500s, etc.), we still had an extremely busy community.

 

 

 

Or more than that:  there goes our community, period.  I'm starting to understand why it seems like OCN is a ghost town in the middle of the night (central time).  When we still had vBulletin, omg, it seemed like I constantly had threads that I could reply to in Unanswered Threads.  Now?  lol if I'm up all night, then I go stir-crazy trying to depend on OCN for something to do.  It was never like that with vBulletin.

 

 

 

lol

 

When I quit that first time, the only reason I logged in was when someone sent me a private message.  Now I only have two reasons why I come here:  the first reason is so that I have something to pass the time every day.  The second reason is that I've become way to involved in way too many threads during these past 2 months...

 

I wonder what those who run OCN think about what Huddler is doing to this place (and has done to it).  I hope they regret it because I know I would.  It's killing OCN.  Back before launch day, I told a few of my OCN friends that Huddler is going to be the slow and painful death of OCN.  heh  It looks like that's happening.  I wish I would have been proven wrong.

 

Oh well.  That's the internet for ya, I guess.

 

I sure hope this thread gets their attention.  They need a good wake-up call.  Go back to vBulletin, guys!  This isn't working!  You're going to lose me again (for good this time) if you don't because no one is paying any attention to my suggestions.  I have many more to make, but I have given up because it seems like no one cares.  You begged me to come back.  I came back.  You said you wanted to know what I think needs to be changed and I did that.  I posted about 25% of my suggestions and I have run out of steam.  I'm slowly on my way back out...

Edited by TwoCables - 8/7/12 at 1:38am

When I first started using Huddler, the speed was terrible--both during the beta as well as immediately on release. I complained about this just as much as everyone else. It seemed my complaints were going unnoticed until Huddler started releasing updates with the sole purpose of lessening the site's dependence on Javascript and speeding up performance. At first, I couldn't browse the site from my netbook or my work machine. However, now they are both quite fluid and the pages no longer take very long to load. Here's what I'm on now:



Unlike many people, I remember how bad VB was... vividly. There was significant downtime and it seemed like every fourth or fifth click would give a 500 error. Additionally, there was one thing that we could do as mods that was guaranteed to crash the site and give database errors. Unfortunately, it was entirely necessary to keep on top of killing spam. Huddler has a replacement feature that is much more robust and it does this automatically.

There are definitely still kinks to work out and I somewhat agree that the move may have been premature. Perhaps these speed updates should have been forseen as necessary and implemented during the beta. However, it was entirely necessary.

TC, I'm not going to try to convince you to stay; if you want to leave, you can do so on your own volition. I do want to say this, though: Huddler is often criticized for ruining OCN. If OCN is to be considered "ruined", it is definitely not Huddler--it is the members who gave up on a community because they couldn't handle change. I still enjoy this community just as much as I did before the switch. There are bugs... to deny that would be vastly ignorant... but the only way to fix it is to help.

As usual, I complain and complain about this platform until I'm blue in the face, but then someone comes and says that this is much better than I think it is.  I went through the same thing during the beta testing, and even back then everything I said was ignored.  How do I know?  I lurked around after I quit to see if things would change, and oh my god..... yeah, I was happy that I quit.  Many things continue to remain unchanged as of today.  They told me to not worry that it would be much better once it went live.  That never came true in my opinion.

 

Anyway, I think I'm done putting energy into trying to help "improve" this platform because it seems to me that I'm learning first-hand what many others tried to warn me about:  don't bother because everyone's just going to tell you that it's fine the way it is and that you just have to get used to it.

 

So ok, if something ever comes along that can replace OCN for me as far as passing my time, then I'll be gone.  Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, so here I stay.  I hope it happens soon because I don't know if anyone has noticed yet, but this platform is making me as irritable as I feared I would become (which is one of the reasons why I quit before).  I'm trying to hide it for the sake of my favorite community on the internet, so I hope no one has noticed.

 

Anyway, I'm not posting any more suggestions for a long time.  I am spent.  It seems to me that at this rate, it'll be another 3 years before this place finally reaches the high standards of Overclock.net (at least, to the standards I previously thought OCN had based on how beautifully vBulletin functioned as far as its user-friendliness and intelligent design).

It's only partially true in the first place. While we DID move our data to Huddler's servers and thus gave them the right to require very specific access requests to get anything out of our database/FTP for review (which to my knowledge has only happened once so far), Huddler does not actually own us. Shogun retains its position and the site founder retains domain ownership, and all we did was change where the ads go, not how many we have. If Huddler is marketing-oriented it does NOT show in the software unless the site owner wants it to. The last round of beta updates to the test platform were better than what we had at public launch. The real issue is, nobody has any idea how or why that happened, not even the Huddler staff, who were as irritated as all of us were. To be fair, the revived issues were largely resolved, along with a lot of others. The development of the site from then on was screwed up in priority IMO (putting galleries before bug fixes and useful staff tools really got to me but I'm over that now) but we're creeping closer to where we're comfortable with it. It might take a while but it should be worth the wait. Intelligent design and vBulletin don't belong in the same sentence. I say that from administrative experience and from the experience of other webmasters with actual web development work and certs under their belts. vBulletin 4 would have been a step DOWN from 3, and development for version 3 was very near its end if not at its end when we made the big switch. Security holes would have had to have been closed by hand by BFRD, and each update would then run the same risks updates do now; broken/missing features that take additional time to verify and fix.

If you still honestly think we were better off with vB3 in the long run then you've truly mistaken the success of the old software/platform with the success of our staff and membership. We started on vBulletin and that's what we were familiar with, nothing more, nothing less. When you rob this many people of what they're familiar with and exchange it for a concrete strategic platform with growing pains, of course you're going to have anger and people leaving. It's our simple hope that there are those faithful enough to stand by the site and its principles that any change in software becomes irrelevant. The migration was a rather ludicrous test of character for everyone, even those that don't register but regularly lurk, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the results of that test. I can't speak for management on that front, though, but hopefully they feel the same way.

All that said, if you have any IM methods you regularly use I'd like to go over this more with you there instead (PM me); this thread's had enough distractions, I suppose.