well?

all my devices are struggling to beyond usable.

you’ve won, i’ll pay

but i’m only paying if it’s going to work

The ads will vanish.

Does it become usable? No.

But it does become less unusable if that helps.

Yes, in the sense that I’d never use this site without logging in. Obviously, once you log in it’s just the same old crap but served to you much faster.

It still has the worst mobile text editing experience ever.

Think of the p as more of a laxative….

Most of

The ads will vanish.

I don’t mean the odd antiquated forum functionality, or the actual interesting content.

I mean being able to browse a thread without the browser dying

scotroutes wrote

Most of

The ads will vanish.

apart from the daily deals that are adverts but not adverts

Depends if your’e desperate or not.

I’m not.

I’ve come to this conclusion after a few years here:

– Loads of t**** – a handful of which can wreck a thread with their incessant, prolific negativity.

– But far more interesting, talented and subtly-witty folk.

– My meagre subscription keeps some people in a job for a place I like to visit.

That’s basically the basis of my decision as to whether to subscribe 🙂 (and yes, there has been a lapse – I’ve sent the email to @subs!)

So yeah, subscribe. 🙂

I know the content, been here long enough

I’m going to do it, where’s my wallet?

Thanks Bear and Llama

Right the deed is done

I have to say, as I look up at you all with my cute eyes, this is not the first time I’ve had a P you know. It’s just it is really not working for me without one nowadays.

it’s like going back in time

you can really scroll like an eedjit

The site crashed my work computer last night and my laptop today.🤨

Depressing really. Agree with @bear. Why can’t it just work? Even with a P I struggle. It’s the only site i pay for. Surely it can be better? This isn’t the 00’s…

Apart from the P giving you far less ads you get all the back copies of ST to look through….

Seems a no brainer to me. 👍

I never had time to lo back through old copies when I had a P.

It’s not working very well on any of my devices.

Imagine it as paying to get into the Ryanair Lounge at Luton airport.

Michael Leary still hates you.

You can make it usable but only using a common technology which you can’t talk about in a weird kind of Chinese democracy thought police thing

Don’t get me wrong, the quote function in a pain in the rear….. but I use the forum on Android and windows devices and that’s my only gripe really.

CGAF about what happens on Apple stuff. 😉

Works great on my phone. Never see daily deals and it runs smoothly too. It’s less than £2 per month. I’m poor and can still afford it. The power of P

expect ban hammer Bigfoot

funk, daily deals on my mobile

It’s not working very well on any of my devices

Working fine on my S9 with Chrome. Never had an issue with speed logged in or out.

Maybe make a list of which devices are having issues ?

Never see daily deals and it runs smoothly too.

The daily deals appears on the shiney new classifieds page. No where else from what I can see.

Everyone is different but I wouldn’t pay for a crap product in the hope that it might become slightly less crap!

Have the free hookers, with coke, turned up yet?

Functionally, it’s by far the worst forum I use, but paying does make it slightly less rubbish.

The daily deals appears on the shiney new classifieds page. No where else from what I can see.

Ah! That explains it. Not ventured in to the classifieds for a while. Need new brakes, but have grownup stuff to save and pay for, it’ll be too tempting if I see a bargain.

It might be a quirky forum, but I’d hate to see it or the mag disappear and two quid is a small price to pay to help out.

works fine on chrome mobile & laptop for me. I’m always mystified what the moaners are on about.  are you running some rubbish progs in the back round or have ancient machines or something?

quote function also seems fine if you know how to use it

works fine on chrome mobile & laptop for me. I’m always mystified what the moaners are on about.  are you running some rubbish progs in the back round or have ancient machines or something?

Chrome, windows if I’m not logged in the ads drag it all down, I guess with the P you don’t see it….

quote function also seems fine if you know how to use it

Is that in the instructions?

Quote gets upset a lot and you can’t quote in quote easily, the paste is a heap of shit and should have been sent back for a refund from whoever sold the shoddy bit of software.

rOcKeTdOg wrote

works fine on chrome mobile & laptop for me. I’m always mystified what the moaners are on about.  are you running some rubbish probs in the back round or have ancient machines or something?

quote function also seems fine if you know how to use it

chvck stw chrome extension works better https://github.com/chvck/STW-Extender-Tools

From trying it on my devices using a mate’s login (he subscribes to the mag and has a login but never posts) the answer is no, it’s still crap.  Ridiculously long loading times, sometimes fails to load at all, jumps about as different bits load and the thread freshness glitch where new posts aren’t recognise by the freshness counter thingy still there.  Occasionally chrome crashes and on my mobile it runs incredibly slowly even after leaving this site unless I do a cache clean.  No other site does this at all.  Using my login the ads suck so much data and processing power it’s ridiculous.  Even recognised bad sites for ads like bikeradar are nowhere near as bad.

The product is shockingly crap but for some reason I still come here.  God knows why, must be an addiction.

You know like how about ten years ago you wondered why people put up with this shit? And then you signed up and thought, oh right, the user experience was a bit shit before, but now i’ve signed up it’s a lot more user friendly?

And then you understood why people signed up to things, because it made the user experience, like, so much better?

This has not happened to me here.

Your user experience is bad, and you should feel bad.

To the original question, why reward inappropriate behaviour? Or in this case, why reward a shoddy product/service? I stopped griping on the forum about it and sent emails to tech instead, as for some reason I felt sorry for them. I’ve stopped feeling sorry for them as I rarely receive a reply and it still takes an age for a page to load, more often than not, it then stops loading to tell me that an error has occurred and it will reload the page, but never does.

Quoting, pasting, embedding, I’m not an idiot, but these functions have been really **** up and now no point in entering most conversations as I CBA to type out what someone else has already said.

And yes, it is resource heavy, the ads suck all my processing power on the iMac.

Overall, it’s the worst functioning website I tend to visit, and that includes the very bad and similarly performing parkers.co.uk car review thing, which is appalling, I tend to browse now on here once a week for about 5 mins until I get bored dealing with page jumping or reloading.

Top work!

Been on here a while (>10years I think) and the current incarnation is the worst it’s ever been, even logged in as a P.

If I stumbled across the forum now there’s no chance I’d come back for a second visit (never mind considering subscribing), and this must be adversely impacting advertising stats.

Im gravitating more towards PB now, the forum content isn’t as good but it’s just so much easier to use if you dip in for 5mins

The whole text/page jumping, resource sapping ads and continued failure to remain logged in means stw has the dubious honour of being one of only two websites where I routinely have to use Reader View on safari. The other site is the awfulness that is ESPN, which I only use because Musa Okwonga is a great journo and writes some good Man U articles.

A lot of the remaining traffic on here must rely on brand loyalty, and I can’t see that lasting another year.

The mag is on the downward slide too; I used to enjoy Through the Grinder because the reviews were honest and you could tell the products had been given a good thrashing. Dropping that was a big mistake.

Yes user experience is terrible.  I still have a look on here regularly and have had some great advice (mostly diy tbh) and there are some funny threads but its drying up and I’m spending more time on other forums these days

Sorry guys in your pursuit of revenue it looks from the outside you are ruining the ux and the number of users (who produce a large amount of the forum content) are looking elsewhere.

Vicious circle means charging more for your p to keep it going or more ads…..wonder if you are attempting to cross subsidise the magazine with forum income.

Anyways I’ve never been a p so my opinion doesn’t count

Good luck to the team but it doesn’t look a great trajectory

Ridiculously long loading times, sometimes fails to load at all, jumps about as different bits load and the thread freshness glitch where new posts aren’t recognise by the freshness counter thingy still there.

That’s a vastly different experience to what I get.

I’m P to support STW and the Mag, as I’m oldschool and like printed stuff.

Cheers!

I.

That’s a vastly different experience to what I get.

Worrying isn’t it Drac… that it seems so different.

For my observation as “P” there is a final page jump as something loads right at the end a noticeable time after the rest of the page – that is across PC/Chrome versions, means I end up opening the wrong thread as it jumps as you think it’s just loaded.

When logged out the time it takes to load all the adds means the page jumps around a hell of a lot as it resizes the page every time one pop in to existence

If you don’t spot the page numbering glitch where it won’t show the last page on a big thread until you are .5 or 10 posts in then you should take a look or should we just hit a report when it happens.

That is before we get to the state of the text entry and how it can’t handle any kind of formatting, even stuff you can’t even see in the source. As nice as it is to see all the tags and what they do it’s not exactly good for reading.