Instructions please!

Dear Spikes2003,

Thank you for your advice. Unfortunately, your first suggestion is both very time-consuming (with a slow connection - I live in a rural area) and can have undesired effects - I tried clicking on what thought might have been a scrolling-down button and found that it negatively affected the number against the comment in question, even though I totally agreed with what the comment said. I don't want to do worse things by just randomly clicking!

Your second piece of advice would be helpful if I could find the QA section with explanations to which you refer. I have gone to the help section but can only find FAQs, which (so far) consist entirely of UNANSWERED questions. Please could you explain where the clear explanations to which your refer are located?

Thank you.

Are you using a phone, tablet or computer? The need for instructions for people who do not find it easy to just click and try is a very good point. There will inevitably be a learning curve for a new set up.

Also are you talking about the blip site or the help site? - they have a separate arrangement and set up. I think the scroll button you refer to is in the help site (here) not on the blip site and is to vote on how helpful the answer. For example if you found this answer helpful, you can click on the up arrow to the left and it will move it up nearer to the top. However if you thought this was a rubbish answer then you could hit the down arrow and it would go further down the list. Other people can also vote on the answer without commenting.

I think inevitably we all need a little patience since the amount of dramatic changes there have been take a lot of time and the kinds of people who design things like this are not the type that are going to produce very helpful how to instructions for people who don't think in the same way.

It you take things step by step, first see if you can see how to add a new entry,

Hi MariainWales
I have been doing lots of exploratory clicking, and while the site is structured somewhat differently a lot of it is the same as the old but in different packaging. Could you say what particular action you are trying to do- maybe we can help you until a more detailed set of instructions is given.

Dear blouseybrown and littleclicks,

Thank you for these helpful responses! I am using a laptop, and last night I just couldn't work out how to do anything or where to start. I have now (very time-consumingly) worked out how to view other people's blips. (They don't look nearly as nice against this horrible white background!) but haven't yet tried to post anything - I'm too put off by the unpleasant appearance and general clunkiness of the new site to feel motivated to even try.

I still haven't worked out how to do things like see the whole of a photo at once (I seem to be getting the 'go large' version all the time, and only half of it fits on my screen at any one time), see which of my Blipfriends has posted recently, or edit typos in my comments, but I gather that these functions have been removed (without any explanation as to why, or any indication as to whether they will be returning).

And I can't work out the purpose of some of the icons (there's a whole set under a heading called 'awards' which includes both blue and grey square buttons, none of which seem to do anything when clicked on). The first blue one says 'comment, star, follow and write a biography' but nothing happens when I click on it. I have no idea what the rest of that vertical row buttons are for either.

Do you know anything about the place within FAQs where 'everything is very clearly explained', to which Spikes2013 refers? (She has now deleted her original response, it seems, but her reply to my reply is still there.) Being told that the explanations which I need exist, but being unable to find them, increases my frustration with this mess which has replaced the Blipfoto I used to enjoy using.

But I am comforted to be reminded, by your responses, that the site is still mostly peopled by kinds souls such as yourselves! Thank you!

Dear Spikes 2013,

No, I can't see three little lines at the top right - and I can't find any answers in the FAQs, only unanswered questions. I think you must have access to a different version to the one I'm looking at. Perhaps it depends on what sort of machine one is using. I'm using a laptop. I don't have any of the other things.

I am glad for you that the new site is no problem for you - and I notice, from your comment on another thread, that you were one of the (apparently very few) people whose views were canvassed beforehand. Perhaps these two facts are connected.

What I hope is that the site might be made user-friendly both for people like you AND for people like me. At the moment, it suits you, but there are many others, including me, for whom the changes constitute access issues.

Dear Spikes,
Sorry to hear that you have misinterpreted my comments as 'tracking you down' - actually, I haven't done any such thing (wouldn't have a clue how to do so, even if I wanted to!) What I have been doing this evening is to search for the answers-to-questions to which you referred, and in the process I have read all the threads which appeared to relate to the issues which are/were a problem to me, and commented on them when I felt had something to add to the discussion.

It's disappointing that you seem to have been so riled by people having different needs, visually, to yourself, especially given, as you say, that your needs appear to have been met by the changes.

Praise where praise due - thanks, Blipcentral, for the Established Users' support pages, which I have finally found this evening (here, in case anyone else wants them: https://blipfoto.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/categories/200213163-Established-Users-Support. Don't know whether they were there last night but I certainly couldn't find them then!

A little more detail would be helpful in places, but the instructions are helpful and so are the indications of which features are in the pipeline for being restored and which are currently unavailable.

So, thank you!

If you scroll right to the bottom of the page you should see the help link in middle of the bottom black footer. When you click that there are 3 boxes. The one on the left says "Got a question" with a button below "check out or FAQs". Click on that and it opens the blip help centre (in a separate tab on my set up). Then there are 3 options: FAQs, Established Users Support and App Support. The Established Users Support section and FAQs answers a lot of questions and, looking at how it has grown since I last looked, I think they are adding to it all the time based on what is being posted in this forum. There isn't a way to add links to these comments but here is the link if you can cut and paste it https://blipfoto.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/categories/200212713-FAQs

I know it's frustrating and upsetting when something you are familiar with and has taken a long time to get the hang of changes beyond recognition. I had a major strop last time big changes happened here and little did I know they were minor compared to this. But my advice is to try not to get upset and be patient. A lot of the things will settle out, remember you re not alone and that if you encounter something you cannot figure out you can be sure that someone else has too. Or if something doesn't work at all it isn't necessarily because you haven't figured out how to do it yet, it may well be that they just haven't got around to fixing it yet.

This place is 2 things - a place for photography and a social network. Some of the issues relate to taste/style/design/look and others relate to communication. The people are all the same.

The the awards, they are new. I reckon the blue things are the ones you have achieved and the grey ones are those that you haven't yet but could. So far not all explained. There is a mention in the FAQs of them. They are not clickable just badges. I think all will become more clear with these once the dust settles.

Re the size of photo, lots of people have mentioned this and they are working on it. It is too large so you cannot see the whole thing at one time and many people have mentioned this.

Similarly with the ability to edit comments or to delete them even on other people's blips (you can delete on your own).