Show of Hands

It’s very broken. Formatting issues, aesthetic issues, lacking of features.

I guess you’re not using SOH on an iPad, then. (No, I remember you’re using Android, right? I think there was some Android issue *way* long ago...)

If you were using an iPad and got tagged into a poll, you couldn’t tell what poll you were in or who made it. (You can on an iPhone; I don’t know about Android... and that’s true for most of this.) If you followed a reply notification into a poll you might not be able to tell what poll you were in. If you were a Standard user and tried to use the in-app targets to target a poll to Men or Republicans, you’d get an error message saying you had to purchase an upgrade to do that. (That’s a bogus message; targeting was made free for *all* users a few years ago.) If you then purchased an upgrade so you could do targeting and tried to target a poll to Christians (you have to *type* that one, it isn’t built in), the targeting would fail - apparently *all* typed targets fail from an iPad, upgraded or not.
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So if you purchased that upgrade in order to target to Christians, you spent $25 for *nothing.* (In one case I am aware of, an upgrade was *gifted* to a user for that reason.) All because of a *bug* that SOH has known about for ages and hasn’t fixed, even when they said they were going to fix bugs and asked us which we most wanted fixed. I said *that one* because it was unfair to some users and was SOH’s fault. Oh, and that means all SOHAH polls posted from iPads get seen by *children* as young as 13 - on an app rated 12+ in the App Store. (Not that SOH even has graphic sexual discussions listed in the Rules any more, or deals with them consistently when they’re not targeted, anyway.)

Even if you’re not using an iPad there are numerous other issues. I don’t know if the long-comment truncation error affects Androids, but it affects iPhones as well as iPads.

I could go on, but I’ll stop. There are quite a few things that really are broken.

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Great idea!

I often resort to composing my comments somewhere else, where I can flip back & forth between there and SOH, so I can see the entire comment to which I’m replying.

Either that, or have the comment page open on two devices - say, reply on my iPad while looking at the question on my iPhone. I guess one could reply on one device and look at SOH on the website on a computer, too. But it would be nice to just be able to move the reply window around, and much simpler.

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I’ll give them $5 for it

Derek ... some of us already paid many times that for the app.

I paid when they offered their tiers as well.

I admit that I did not pay back in the day but someone gifted me a subscription back then.

This user is currently being ignored

Meme wars need to happen!

I really, *really* don’t want to see pictures among the comments. I love that we don’t have pictures intruding in comments here. I really hate looking at comments on Facebook posts where in some places it’s most a string of memes, with things gyrating or bouncing around, distracting me from the words I’m trying to read. I don’t think they really add much to begin with.

Just use words.

Pictures of actual things, for a purpose, are fine, but don’t make everyone look at them. Upload them somewhere and post a link to them.

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It’s almost as if they don’t care about their users........ 🤔

Derek ... an alternative would be for the owners to shut it down. Would that be better?

Sure. At least that’s an honest representation of their feelings.

Derek ... why do we care about their “feelings”?

Because if they actually cared about their customers (us), they’d make the app worth a shit. I care about their feelings because the app sucks when you consider how little it’s actually changed since its inception.

That too! They did expand the character limit for both polls and comments a few years ago. I think it used to be 100 characters for each, if I’m not mistaking... It was incredibly brutal.

They should also allow for a larger number of votes in each poll instead of automatically closing it after 252 votes.

It used to be 100. Then they had a paid service for a brief while. Bottom tier would allow for 500 votes and was $25 annually. They nixed that when Tony sold the joint. I think it only lasted a year.

I wrote something below about why there aren’t more than 2 answer options, and maybe never will be (even if SOH ever does any more development), although they may have different ideas than Tony did.

Character limit on comments was 250 when I first got here, then increased to 350. It increased to 1000 I think in 11/15 (and was called “Susan’s space” by the developer in beta testing. Gee, I can’t imagine why...). I don’t remember about poll character limits.

Personally I think 1000 characters is OK. What bugs me is you can’t have more than 1000 characters or 20 lines, but sometimes you have less than 20 lines and still get an error message saying you have too many.

glux, the 250 vote limit - and a *lot* of the restrictions - have got to be about cost. (And Derek’s right, it was 100 initially. If you paid $25 it was upped to 500; paid $100 it was upped to 2,500.) That 100 went *really* fast if you had a lot of followers (this was before the Tap list).

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I remember the 100-vote limit. It was like that when I joined.

I don’t really know why they ditched that whole subscription system (originally it was intended to be an annual payment) except that it wasn’t at all popular among younger people without much of an income, or any income, or for anyone who was used to apps all being free. (Trying to relate it to something like one good cup of coffee or cheap beer a month - my strategy - didn’t help, either.) I *think* it’s still available - it’s still on the Upgrade page of the website - but I can’t swear that it still works and I haven’t recommended that people use it for a while. But I know a few people used it around a year ago and it worked.

I wish they’d come up with some way to finance the thing, because I believe that is the whole problem with lack of development and lack of fixing bugs. It costs just to keep the thing running; costs a pile more to fix or make it better. Money has to come from somewhere. It may not be that they don’t *care,* but that they just *can’t.* (I don’t know.)

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And this stupid BS commenting issue where it obscures the last line... fix that!

NOW that’s all I have... for now.

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Yeah that hidden last line can be infuriating to me.

Gents, snap out of it! While I don’t like those and other idiosyncrasies either, the app is a free forum that satisfies 90% of our needs at a cost of zero!

Yes, I wish @Tony were back, but it’s not happening. It’s time to suck it up.

Tony left?

🤣🤣🤣

Ben ... Tony sold the app.

I haven’t been on here in around a year. But thanks for the info.

Now I know why I haven’t seen product pic polls anymore.

The Message feature was never intended to be a full-fledged messaging system. It really was only intended to provide us a place to exchange outside contact info where other users won’t see it. I know most of us use it more extensively than that, but I strongly suspect that this is the reason it’s never been made easier or more pleasant to use on the *iPhone.*

That doesn’t, however, explain why it’s become all but impossible to use on the *iPad* and it hasn’t been fixed (except that virtually *nothing* has been fixed for over a year that would require an app update, and that surely would).

Matt, you don’t have a message number “badge” on the main menu on your iPhone, like you have for comment replies?

Multiple choice polls: Tony once wrote a cogent explanation for why *he* thought two-answer polls were good. I know he toyed with the idea of multiple answer polls for users and dangled them as a possibility once but didn’t do it - I’m sure there was a reason...
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...and I think the reason was more than just that he though Yes/No/Maybe polls were bad/a copout. Probably the expense to the system. Possibly that the data display sort of sucks, compared to a regular poll. (At least, *I* never get quite as clear a picture as with a simple A/B poll.)

The long-comment truncation error: YES, that. They’ve known about that since November 2015. It was high on our list of things to fix PLEASE in that poll where they asked which bugs bug us the most. Did you see that one? In late April 2017. The release notes for the promised update claimed “Lots of bug fixes!” We could find... one. (Plus they removed the Election 2016 section FINALLY, and gave us crappy new Rules.)

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Here’s one thing you can *try* if you see a line cut off: TURN your device to the other orientation. That helps *sometimes.* If you have a different device, look at it, and turn it. (It affects devices differently.) I suspect (but haven’t checked) that the web version will always have the correct full comment, so try there.

The worst case is when you don’t even know you’re missing part of a comment. And it’s a link you didn’t know existed. Or the punch line to a joke or the whole comment, which changes everything.

It really, really sucks.

So... don’t be the person who *causes* the problem: Any time you are writing a long comment (anything that shows less than 600 characters left, to be safe) throw in a blank line and then a single character. That should prevent the problem entirely.

And thank user cpaswr (at least in your head) every time, because he’s the one who thought of it.

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“Matt, you don’t have a message number “badge” on the main menu on your iPhone, like you have for comment replies?”

*Derek, not Matt


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Thanks, GA! Not sure how I did that... I hadn’t even been replying to Matt just before I wrote this.