# Off Topic > Suggestions for Improvement >  > [SOLVED] Issue - Even Rep Points Again

## Mordred

I was informed by abousetta that new forum members are giving even rep points again.  This is another example of "it's fixed" when it obviously is not!

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## arlu1201

Do u mean the grey rep points?  I saw one this morning.

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## Andrew-R

I've had +rep from users with less than 5 posts yesterday and the day before, and it's showing up as green.  So if there is still a problem it doesn't sound as general as it was last time this issue was raised.

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## Mordred

Yes Arlette, they are back!

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## arlu1201

Hey all,

Got an update from the tech team.  They have fixed the issue with the grey rep points.  It shouldnt occur again.  Please feel free to revert incase u still spot them.  

@Mordred, if you do not see this issue recurring, please feel free to mark it solved.

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## royUK

> Hey all,
> 
> Got an update from the tech team.  They have fixed the issue with the grey rep points.  It shouldnt occur again.  Please feel free to revert incase u still spot them.  
> 
> @Mordred, if you do not see this issue recurring, please feel free to mark it solved.



Amazing, no-one bothers to let me know & I'm supposed to be Admin here. Vai I'm removing myself from Admin after work to night.

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## Vaibhav

Roy,

Arlette is posting updates here on the issues forum, so everyone gets to know, instead of letting each one know individually.  

As the tech team is working on resolving the issues, she is updating everyone here.

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## snb

You have no idea what you are doing; I stick to my observation that you live in a completely different reality zone. You create more problems than you solve.

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## Domski

Vai,

It seemed strange that Arlette suddenly started defending all the problems that were going on for it only to become plainly obvious that she was working with/for you and it now turns out that she is your official representative.

The most important people you should be considering are in this order:

- Your forum admin
- Your moderators
- Other contributors

I'd suggest pulling your finger out before things get worse but I find it hard to see how things could possibly be handled any worse than they have been.

Dom

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## Vaibhav

SNB, what are you talking about?

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## Vaibhav

> The most important people you should be considering are in this order:
> 
> - Your forum admin
> - Your moderators
> - Other contributors



Dom, thats the same order that i follow.  Since Roy, the mods & the contributors are all part of this sub-forum, i didnt post a separate update regarding the issue being solved. Arlette has been posting the updates directly on this forum so all are notified at once.  Why is the double posting required?

Also, i agree and apologize for not having informed everyone in advance that she would be assisting me indirectly. Since she had some time to spare, she volunteered to help me out in co-ordinating with the tech team.  Since she is in the same time zone as the team, its far easier for her to quickly make a call when required.

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## royUK

Vai, I am not joking. I am sick of this situation - remove me from Admin & come clean with your intentions. There's too much deception here & I want no part of it.

I challenged Arlette about her relationship to your business weeks ago & she denied it.

I will continue to post here but I am not interested in moderating or admin. We have lost so many top posters & moderators t & you don't seem bothered.

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## Domski

I'm not privy to your communications with mods and admins so I can only go by what I hear from people who are well respected across the Excel (and wider) community and it seems historically your communication with them has been appalling. These problems with the forum should never have arisen but even prior to that you didn't exactly endear yourself to them from what I gather. I guess this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

Dom

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## OnErrorGoto0

> Dom, thats the same order that i follow.  Since Roy, the mods & the contributors are all part of this sub-forum, i didnt post a separate update regarding the issue being solved. Arlette has been posting the updates directly on this forum so all are notified at once.  Why is the double posting required?



With all due respect, and I mean that literally, that is absolute garbage and is one of the reasons I resigned as a moderator, as you well know. To reiterate my previous analogy to you (regarding your announcement of the upgrade that started this whole fiasco), a chairman doesn't let his board, managers and employees know what is happening in the company by issuing a public press release. Not if he's got any sense anyway.
Also, it is painfully obvious that you do not pay any attention to the moderators. Nor apparently do you listen to Roy, which is remarkably stupid of you.  How he has put up with this for as long as he has is beyond me, but once he's gone, I imagine most, if not all, of the remaining moderators will follow suit. Still, perhaps that is your intention.

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## royUK

Who posts replies to queries raised in the mods forum?

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## snb

> SNB, what are you talking about?



Asking this question is illustrating and demonstrating my point.

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## royUK

> Dom, thats the same order that i follow.  Since Roy, the mods & the contributors are all part of this sub-forum, i didnt post a separate update regarding the issue being solved. Arlette has been posting the updates directly on this forum so all are notified at once.  Why is the double posting required?
> 
> Also, i agree and apologize for not having informed everyone in advance that she would be assisting me indirectly. Since she had some time to spare, she volunteered to help me out in co-ordinating with the tech team.  Since she is in the same time zone as the team, its far easier for her to quickly make a call when required.



I have not been consulted or advised about any of this fiasco.

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## Simon Lloyd

Roy, without you and the other mods here (most of them noted in the profession and even some mvp's) there will be a steady decline, it's like cross posting everyone thinks that if they post the same question in other forums it will be different people who see their question, but it's not and word quickly spreads to all the other forums of the crosspost, well this exodus of staff will be ringing out at other forums and eventually the users here will dwindle as a lot like to follow their favourite helper.

Look at Andy Pope, people purposely only post in the charting forum here because theyknow the guru resides here and will see it.

Vai, you really need to do something concrete and be open and honest with your staff, if the decline continues you'll be destroying the very heart of this community.


Google Me  :Smilie: 
Find me located here *Simon Lloyd* and what i'm about Here
The above is NOT a link to a forum so is NOT against Rule 13

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## royUK

The Forum is already showing the results of the lack of mods. There's more posts that break the rules being missed.

The result of applying our rules made for a more organised, less anarchistic forum than competitors. That's what attracted a lot of our top posters.

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## arlu1201

hey all,

The tech team has fixed the issue regarding grey reps.

If a new user gives rep to another user, without having any posts in his bucket, it will show as grey rep.  However, if the new user has posts, it will show as green.

Feel free to revert incase this issue persists.

Mordred, please check this at your end.  If you feel the issue has been solved, please mark it so.

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## teylyn

I found it interesting to read in a PM from Arlette that the gray/green rep icons are the top priority of the tech team right now, because the were "first on the list". The sort criterion of the list was not disclosed, though, so it may be the last item posted, or the first item posted, or whatever sort criterion the wannabe "tech team" may apply. Since their "technical" expertise is highly questionable, I'm not quite sure that they even know what a sort order is if they see it.

Just be assured that the more challenging issues will probably never make it to the #1 spot on the list. The things that have needed fixing for the last two or three years will continue to be ignored. What's your bet?

So, gals and guys, never mind forum functionality. We're at the beck and call of what the "technical team" considers prioritising. 

Whatever that may be. 

I suggest that we all look at other, more rewarding and satisfying places to answer Excel questions. They're not that hard to find. The Code Cage springs to mind. In contrast to this sorry excuse of a QA forum, the Code Cage actually works. You can post files from the quick reply box. Or apply code tags. Or do a boatload of other things that the sorry characters in charge of this forum will never figure out.

Then there is Eileen's Lounge, Experts Exchange, Microsoft Answers, Microsoft Technet, Stack Overflow (for the developer in you), Vbax and many, many more.

Please note that this post contains no links to competing forums, as this would be against the current forum rule #13, which was never agreed with the moderators, but rather instated solely by the owner, who is now systematically destroying this forum with incompetence and ignorance. 

In the past, posts like this have mysteriously disappeared, so I'll make sure to retain a copy of the verbiage and will repost in case it gets lost "accidentally"

cheers,

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## arlu1201

Teylyn,

I didnt mention that the grey rep icons is top priority.  What i said, is that we are picking the issues from the issues sub-forum in the order they are posted there.  The grey rep icons was the top in the list, so it was picked up first and actioned.  The others are also being worked upon as i write this.

The tech team is already working on the other issues affecting the users of the forum.  Updates on those will appear shortly.

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## teylyn

Arlette,

make up your mind, will you?





> I didnt mention that the grey rep icons is top priority.



In your PM to me you wrote





> We have selected the issues from the sub-forum from top to down. Since the grey rep icons was one of the top ones, it was resolved first and then the status was updated.



This just goes to show that neither you nor the tech team have any ideas on how to professionally handle issues with release management. You're all just kids playing in the sand pit. 

I've been managing projects like these for more than a decade and I flinch at every rooky mistake I see you and your "tech team" make. That would'nt be a fault as such, but seeing that you all stubbornly refuse to listen to your customers is the worst offence ever.

Look guys/gals/aliens: you don't have to re-invent the wheel. People have done this before and have documented their learnings. There are resources out there about how to do this properly, as in "right first time".  Well, that may be too late now, as we are well into fourth or fifth time right now ....

You all have no idea about even half-way decent project management, change management, unit testing, UAT, and production sign-off. (need to look up 'UAT'?? Project Management 101?)

As can be expected from a third world country, we are being served banana software. Or, to put that in PC terms: Companies in emerging economies struggle to meet customer expectations because they lack the experience of quality assurance that is custom in the civilised world. 

EF is a case in point ever since Vai bought it. Somebody had the funds to buy the site, but nobody has a clue about maintaining it. So now it's dying, because the owner's incompetence has driven the valuable contributors away. 

I'll keep rantng for a few more weeks, since I spent a fair chunk of my life on this site and it used to mean a lot to me and I simply cannot believe that Vai managed to kill it all for good. F Word.

You've managed to destroy this site in the past few months, despite the desperate calls for attention from members and moderators with regards to bugs and basic functionality. There is a long list of fundamental things that don't work on this site, quite more important than what color a rep icon is.

But, hey, your choice. Fix the gray rep icon. Someone may find this important. In the meantime, I and many other long time members will be off answering questions somewhere else.

For the next 6 months or so, the forum and your visitor statistics won't feel/show a difference. But if the majority of the regulars (most of them MS MVPs) no longer contribute here, there will be a sharp decline in the casual visits, because the search engines will not serve EF as a reliable resource anymore if replies to questions drop.

It's not an immediate penalty. There may still be time to turn it around, but from the way that Vai has treated the forum regulars and moderators in the past, I doubt that anyone will fly his banner. 

So, again (without links and not breaching forum rules) there's the Code Cage, Eileen's Lounge, Experts Exchange, Microsoft Answers, Microsoft Technet, Stack Overflow (for the developer in you), Vbax and many, many more.

You may actually be surprised at who is already there.

cheers,

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## arlu1201

> We have selected the issues from the sub-forum from top to down. Since the grey rep icons was one of the top ones, it was resolved first and then the status was updated.



 This clearly means that the grey rep icons was one of the top issues posted in the sub-forum, which literally means "its the first in the list of issues, when you open the sub-forum page".  My statement does not indicate in any way that its "top priority".  

I guess you can have a look now, since there have been more replies to other threads in that forum and grey rep icons may or may not be the first.

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## abousetta

> As can be expected from a third world country, we are being served banana software. Or, to put that in PC terms: Companies in emerging economies struggle to meet customer expectations because they lack the experience of quality assurance that is custom in the civilised world.



Teylyn, even though I feel and understand your frustration, can we keep this discussion civilized and not make prejudicial remarks?! Just to be clear I am not defending Vai, Arlette or anyone else. I just don't think that its proper to label all companies based in developing nations as second-rate.

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