Gather Glitchy Bitchy

perfect example. I did not change fonts or cut and paste or any such thing, yet my article has two fonts. AHHHHH

i spend a lot of time here complaining (to nobody in particular) about Gather's graphics capabilities which are very, very limited and limiting.

the login glitch is sometimes corrected (by YOU, of course) by quitting firefox and then opening again. it is Gather's problem, but seems to be a mac thing.

Thanks Bart. Yes, I believe you are right about quitting firefox. Many of my problems are consistent on Windows too (with firefox). But I so love my Macs best. I'm on the road with my trusty Powerbook G4 12". I had 1 17" PB G4 too for a while but it was too heavy. this little one is just right for traveling. Gonna get a new Intel-based one soon. I have an Intel iMac 20" and it ROCKS.

Thanks for chiming in. I think we Mac Gatherers are a minority. Although last time I was in Tom Gerace's office I noticed a nice Powerbook! Russ too (CTO).

Rich, I liked your bitchy article even though most of it went over my head. But, I'm going to trust a guy like you to complain to the top so that Gather works seemlessly for a newbie like me. I thought it was just my internet connection, but very often I've been getting frozen and I have to shut down and then re-log back into Gather. Problem is my attention span is short enough as is and often I forget which article I was reading or what my comment was going to be about. Can't blame *that* particular problem on the Gather Gods though. I don't think it's fair either that one person can cause rating problems or this reporting problem. It should take something like three or more complaints. As for the ratings, that's completely stupid anyway.

I have Explorer and I still have to log in every ten minutes (yes, REMEMBER ME, goddammit) and reload stuff so I can see it. It's stoopid.

Firefox with Windows XP also forgets the login, this is rather recent for me, of a few weeks or two weeks duration. Very bitchy here.

When I installed Firefox, it gave me the option to remember passwords on it's own, hence I don't need the "remember me" button. I do see your point though. Why have something if it's not going to work? I don't have display problems with comments.

I'm on aol dial-up and I have to relog every other time, I have had pages freeze in the midst of leaving a comment, I have a long list. PC

I thought it was just my elderly computer (and elderly typing). Some of the same problems here.

I have problems with Gather Glitches. I complained to Gather and they said a major upgrade is coming in about 2 weeks but I have no faith in their tech department. They do advise logging out completey and clearing your cache and cookies but three times a day is a bit much for that. I also have major problems getting in when I am running my firewall. I have tried two so far and they are truly incompatible with Gather.

Bongo says "The whole thing with allowing anyone to flag an article is a giant leap in the free speech arena. It allows people to freely say (with just a single click of a button instead of having to type the whole thing out), "this should be kept out of the eyes of children." "
What possible harm could manifest from a child viewing an image of Jeb Bush with a Moe Howard haircut? Some pea-brain flagged it.

Thanks everyone for the comments. Nanci B., it is late here and I am jet lagged it is really 4am for me, but I am having touble understanding why Gather would have any problem with your firewall. I will look at this when I have more energy. I'm on a Mac right now, which runs a flavor of Unix and just looked a bunch of netstat and ipconfig and other debugging tools and don't see much out of the ordinary. Hmm.

I use the option of firefox remembering passwords in firefox too, when I am not concerned deeply about the integrity of the login process, But even that is somewhat inconsistent. You see, Gather builds pages dynamically. Pages are not just retrieved from some file asset, they are built on the fly after making a couple of hits to one or more databases. This is what gives it some of it appeals as it attempts to build pages directly related to you. The way the password memory thingy in firefox works (I presume, never lstudied the source code) is it takes either a CRC or other hash of fields and looks for a quick match. if it finds one it does a more rigorous check to see if the prompts are indeed a page it has seen before. Again this is where the dynamic pages are both a curse and a blessing. Because they are built on the fly, there are times when firefox does not fill in the username and password. i have not figured out exactly what the criteria is for when it fails. Sometimes I get sick of investigating bugs on somebody else's site (especially since they DID;T hire me when it was clear they needed some web development expertise). ONe of the web thingys I built has 100 million users a day, so I am pretty good at tracking down odd behaviors.

Another MAJOR rollout? You have got to be kidding. This site updates more often then Paris Hilton swaps lovers. Sometimes it takes weeks to get throug the new bugs, Hey it's 4:15 AM and I've been up for 48 hours striaght, so excuse me if I say something like "if they ever get serious about this web thingy, they may want to hire me so we can get thing moving". I was really hot on working on a social network site, and I really liked Russ (CTO). It looks like the hob search is narrowed down to two contenders and I will have to choose one. It just frustrates me because I know this stuff and I know how to build killer teams but my phone ain't a-ringing!

I better try to sleep. I am not sure I am making any sense anymore.

Mugg, I agree. This whole thing of the anyone can flag anything is complete and total chaos. I would have loved to have sat in on that implementation deicsion. How hard would it have to figure out invite millions of new people, change all the rules all the time every day, define yourself ambiguously as a blog site for writers but please don't blog here, and then arm every bitter undersexed teen and/or spinster with a weapon of mass censorship. There does seem to be a lot knee jerk kinds of decisions made. I would love to see the use case that argued for this functionality. An experienced exec team would have squelched the schelch button faster then a politician can botch a "joke".

I haven't read the comments above, so I apologize if this has already been mentioned, but it is important to note that there are two types of content 'flags' on Gather (both appear as red text at the top of the article). One flag is a result of an article being 'reported' by a member of the community. This will appear in red, as "This article has been reported by the community". The second, and most prevalent, is a flag set by the author, to identify their article as having some form of mature content. To flag an article in this way (the latter) shows responsibility to the community.