On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 04:05 PM, Norman Pierson wrote:
Chris, not everyone is computer literate; I'm afraid you fail to grasp that. You and I are interacting on the website, which, I've explained, some of my members are unable to do because they can't work through the login system without having to remember every 30 days that they are not joining a new site with different credentials.
Actually you are mistaken; I do grasp the fact that some may not be computer literate. But overall there appear to be one or two paradoxes that I am struggling to resolve. (BTW I am uncomfortably within the age range that you mentioned in an earlier posting!)
Members must be sufficiently competent to switch on their chosen device (PC / laptop / tablet . smartphone) and find their email program, and then use the email program to send and read message traffic. In the case of anything other than a PC they must be sufficiently competent to keep the device battery charged.
For a person to be a member of
any group (via any forum provider) they have to be able to click on a few correct links, or send the right email. OK; some may well be refugees from Yahoo (like so many Groups.io users!) but even if they are they still had to join a group there one way or another. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they were sufficiently competent to get through a joining - up process.
Then in an earlier posting in this thread (Oct 29 #12925) you stated ...
but we require that all members log on to the web site, at least initially. OK; between you as Owner / Moderator and your members as individuals you manage to get that far.
At this point I start to struggle; to have got this far your members have already demonstrated a basic level of competence, but it all seems to go wrong when it comes to logging in again after the elapse of 30 days when the cookie expires. (It is worth noting that if the cookie expiring is a problem in that they are immediately denied access to the web - based version of a group then the list of basic skills clearly extends to being able to find the web - based version in the first place.)
Why is logging in again such a challenge? I really do not understand this, given the level of skill that the members must already have demonstrated.
Looking a bit further back in this thread your message of 28th Oct (#12905) stated
My group is a paid group of old codgers who won't go to a website if it is difficult to obtain entry. In what way is it
difficult? I would argue that it is a
lot easier than some of the things they had to do to get into a group in the first place.
Your next sentence read They complain about "
not being able to use the website", followed a few words later by
I'd appreciate a way to have my membership get on the website easier.
This seems to present another paradox; if regaining acsess to the website really is so difficult, I would have expected your members to find using the web UI complex beyond description.
Can you help me here? How can your members find their way around the website, and benefit from it, if just logging in every 30 days so problematic? To me it is counterintuitive to be told that while logging in is a problem, navigating around and using the website isn't.
After some time pondering all this last evening I finished up going back to an old copy of
The Games People Play by Eric Berne because I started to suspect that there was an element of game - playing going on; a combination of
Ain't it awful and
Why don't you... yes but.
But
who, exactly, are the players?
Chris
