[Posted and mailed] A quote from the NetSurf mailing list:
> In http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/over_to_you.shtml the > BBC says that "Over the coming months the BBC World Service will be > working on creating a new look and feel to the English site and we > could really use listeners help. ... To join in the discussions ... > please visit ... http://www.virtualsurveysdiscussion.com/news/express- > signup " > For me, using NetSurf, that link redirects to 'Access denied ...' at > http://www.virtualsurveysdiscussion.com/news/init-survey and no > obvious way of creating a new account. > Does anyone else fare better? I'm posting this on c.s.a.advocacy with a copy to the NetSurf list, as the topic was originally raised there; it's well off-topic there now, so I hope this copy will be excused as the thread has now been diverted to the correct place, and may be possibly of interest to NetSurf users. I tried subscribing to this forum using RISC OS Firefox, and was initially doing well, until Firefox did one of its "evaporating" tricks when I tried to set a username and password. I then got, unexpectedly, a mail from the person behind the website, saying "Thank you for joining the Tomorrow's News Research Forum." and so on. I then got a bit cross, and fired off a reply saying: Thanks for this; I'm surprised that my application got through, as it managed to crash my non-standard browser before I could enter a user name and password. As I obviously won't be able to contribute, and as my main interest is in ensuring that non-standard browsers would work with your survey, I think you had better unsubscribe me. The reply to this was: Which browser are you trying to use? Our community platform is compatible with most browsers - please let me know. My reply was (and I was still cross!): Thanks for this, but I'm afraid you will probably promptly lose interest when I tell you that I use RISC OS, and that none of the browsers that we eccentrics have available will cope with your site. It's a pity that a British, albeit very minority, system lacks so much official support in this country. His reply was (and how often have we heard and seen things like this!): Wow, I've not seen this OS since I was at school over a decade ago! To be honest, I didn't know it was still going. I've looked and I see that Firefox has been ported to RISC - do you use this and do you have any success with it? To cut the rest of the story mercifully short, I put him right about RISC OS. His reply was, in essence, sympathetic but negative, saying: ... please be advised that while I'm sympathetic to your situation, there's little we'll be able to do in this instance to optimise our community for RISC OS. If it's of any comfort, the html used is valid and compliant by modern standards, so with that in mind there's little more we can do. I do fully appreciate what it's like to be in a minority of OS users. I started using a Mac in the late 80's, and while the machines are fashionable now they certainly weren't then. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and it's something we'll have to be mindful of in the future. This seems to me to be an opportunity to make our voice felt. Perhaps if a few others would like to attempt to subscribe, and then reply to mailings along the same sort of lines ...? :-) With best wishes, Peter. -- Peter \ / zfc Er \ Prestbury, Cheltenham, Glos. GL52 Anne \/ __ __ \ England. and / / \ | | |\ | / _ \ http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk family / \__/ \_/ | \| \__/ \______________ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
