Help with this site

Check current service announcements. Please report any issues you may encounter.

Known issues

This section contains a list of known issues with the ALT web site. We have divided it into two sections. Section 1 is about the content on the site and your use of the content. Section 2 is about use of the site for membership management and event booking.

Section 1 - Your use of the site and its content

1. When editing an account on the site the default time zone is UTC when it should be Europe/London [20/4/2011].
2. Google Translate does not handle https:// pages reliably. This adversly affects login and booking pages but it should not stop you using the site's information resources. Once you have translated a page, use the banner frame provided by Google Translate to make changes to your translation preferences  [11/4/2011].
3. Very occasionally the "recaptcha" system which we use for security purposes asks you to enter text in Chinese or Arabic! You may therefore need to ask the interfact for a new challenge using the button provided for this purpose [19/4/2011].
4. The left hand standard items "tag cloud", Join ALT, Events, should appear consistently on all or nearly all pages [20/4/2011].
5. A Twitter policy similar to that of Netskills is needed [21/4/2011].

Section 2 - Membership management and event booking

1. Invoice PDFs. If you choose to "pay offline" the system will automatically generate an invoice and send it as an attachment with the confirmation email. The PDF is unhelpfully called 'receipt' and for some membership transactions it does not display the amount properly. We are working to resolve this. [14/2/2012]
2. We have not yet integrated our use of jiscmail lists with the new web site and itend to do so between now and the end of May. One thing we will need members to do it occasionally to review their profile to ensure that they are subscribed to the lists that they wish to be. [18/4/2011]
3. Postcodes. The system forces a user to enter a postcode which is not good if the user is from a country like Eire where postcodes are not universally used [21/4/2011].
4. Country and County/Province/State. The order of form fields on the membership/account pages is unhelpul. Country needs to come before County/Province/State so that the user is offered options in the latter that are driven by the former. [21/4/2011]
5. The inclusion of a PDF of payment receipts. The system emails a payment receipt as an HTML email, with a PDF attachment of the same information. The email should mention the fact that there is a PDF version of the receipt attached. We will fix this. [21/4/2011]

Help and FAQs

About the site: The site has a fairly uniform feel, but is buit using two different platforms - Drupal and CiviCRM. Drupal provides the overal content management system and the overall framework in which the site runs. We use Civi for membership management.

1 Getting around the site

1.1 Most navigation links have popups telling you where the link leads.

1.2 There is a conventional search window and a site map.

1.3 Internal and external links. We signal whether a link is to a page on this site or to a page on another site (including sites we run ourselves). Examples: a page on this site; a page on another site.

1.4 All pages have a breadcrumb trail immediately below the banner.

2. FInding things from the old ALT web site

2.1 We have some of the navigation structure of the old site, but not much of it.. If you cannot find something that you used to rely on, the old site is archived here and it should function more-or-less normally.

2.2 If you get stuck you can send us a message.

3. Keeping up to date

3.1 We encourage you to subscribe to any or all of the wide range of RSS feeds that we provide or subscribe to our opt-in mailing lists.

4. Managing my membership and account

4.1 New Members, please refer to our Membership pages.

4.2 Members who are renewing their membership should refer to renewal FAQs.

5. Helping us to help our users

5.1 We particularly want to learn about broken links, navigation failures, browser crashes and the like. If you report a problem, please be as specific as you can.

6. Google translation

Google Translate does not handle https:// pages reliably, and for your security we use https:// on all pages invovled in logging in, booking, paying etc., which are therefore adversly affected. But you should be able to use Google Translate if your main intention is to make use of the site's information resources. Once you have translated a page, use the banner frame provided by Google Translate to make changes to your translation preferences