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Poster: B. Bergeron 0582 Date: Sep 13, 2025 1:12pm
Forum: forums Subject: Frustration

I'm not one to complain easily, so maybe it's because I've enjoyed the Internet Archive for so long that I was caught off guard by how bad (i.e. impossible) communicating with another user is.

I wanted to message a user regarding something they've uploaded. Here's how it went:

Firstly, I create an account to be able to send a message to that user.

Once logged-in, I found out that direct messages are not a feature on the Internet Archive.

No problem, I can leave a review and we can talk through that.

Turns out that's not possible either; You can't reply to a review.

Okay then, I'll create a forum post, tag him in the text, and we'll talk there.

I land on the forum page. I see an exhaustive --- no --- excessive listing of sub-forum with no descriptions or indications. I picked The Forum Forum because it sounded meta, but at that point, I'm not the one to blame if I get it wrong.

Anyhow, I created a new post and started typing "@the-userna" and then... nothing. Of course! tagging isn’t a feature! Why would it be?

By this point I was getting irritated. I clicked the "Contact" link in the header, hoping to find a suggestion box to give IA some UX feedback.

I saw a phone number and links to Mastodon, Twitter, and Facebook. None of these are meaningful ways to send UX feedback. Maybe IA don't want to hear our feedback?

Or maybe they do. So that's why I took the time to go back to the "new post" form and wrote this post to highlighting how disappointing IA is for exchanging. I know it's not a messaging platform but, damn, what's that username for if users are walled-off from each others?
This post was modified by B. Bergeron 0582 on 2025-09-13 20:12:29

Reply [edit]

Poster: qwert290 Date: Sep 13, 2025 5:12am
Forum: forums Subject: Re: Frustration

Hi,
true, it's unfortunate that some of these features are lacking, but one has to give credit of how much content is on here, even if there were no communication features whatsoever.
I usually send a link to a forum which i start here and submit it as a review of an item.
To give feedback IA answers at info@archive.org much faster than here.

p.s. i'm no admin