What does 'Link to URL' do on this forum ?

It does .. but you have to grab the url from the address window - it’s not auto copied

Well that’s a bit clunky. Most forums have a similar function which auto-copy to the clipboard, or at least show a popup with the link in it. The mechanism here just flashes the screen, with no indication of what it has done.

Is there a really good reason why this forum doesn’t follow convention ?

By the same token, why should every forum software follow convention for absolutely everything? If that was the case, there might as well just be one forum software that literally everyone uses and no flexibility over which one you can use.

For me, the current behaviour is perfectly fine - it lets me decide when I want to copy/paste a direct comment URL and does the (rather useful!) embed thing when forum links are pasted in - they’ll only do that for users who have access to the topic too. It also means I can directly bookmark a specific comment to come back to later.

You should bear in mind that the forum software powering the OVO Forum is not in the same league as stuff like phpBB, XenForo, InvisionFree or vBulletin. Unlike all of those ones - which are primarily designed for social forums - the one powering this one is custom built for a specific purpose which is primarily customer support/customer community type use cases. That’s why it has features which don’t really exist on social forums like direct integrations with a whole bunch of tools both natively and via Zapier, and some other secret sauce which I know about but don’t talk about.

Maybe I’m expecting too much.

If I click a button then usually something obvious happens, but not here. As to following convention, there is usually a good reason for that. One convention is to inform the user that a requested action has been performed.

However, seeing as the discussion has degenerated into another ‘my secret, and I’m not telling’, I’m out !.

Sometimes, when I say “secret sauce” I might just mean it metaphorically and not literally.

In this case, I was referring to the people - and team - behind the forum software. They are the ones who are the secret sauce behind it all. It’s just that some of them are camera shy and don’t like to be named publicly - and I fully respect their wishes in those cases.

I had four problems that prompted my participation in this forum ...

1 - No explanation for unexpected electricity cutoff

2 - BOOST taking monthly payments to a closed account

3 - Statements from OVO with illogical maths

4 - No online account since I joined OVO

Not one single problem has been fixed by clever AI, special software, or secret sauces.

If fact, none of the problems have been fixed by OVO telephone, chat, or email support either.

( I did get some success when I emailed the office of a member of the C-suite, but even that succes was only partial. )

Examples of the problems that I have faced when trying to get answers are :

An agent who apologised for my gas cutoff. When I told her I didn’t buy gas from OVO, and it was my electricity that was cut off, she promised to ring me back.  That never happened.

OVO agents who told me to phone BOOST, and BOOST telling me to phone OVO. It was this impasse that forced me to email C-Suite. ( Luckily, just this week, I found there are OVO agents who can see BOOST accounts. I only found this by accident, no AI or clever software, or help from the forum was involved. )

An agent who told me there were no payments because there was no DD. I had told them in an email months before how the payments were being made.

These, combined with the hours and hours I’ve been going round on the phone repeating the same things a hundred times, has shown me the problem.

Front line agents do not have the resources or training to handle complex issues.

When an issue gets complex the agents are floundering. When it reaches this stage the problem needs asigning to an ‘owner’. This ‘owner’ should then be the single point of comms and be available directly to the customer. The ‘owner’ could then access the different parts of the business related to the issue.

All my problems involve software, but they are not IT problems, they are people problems. Very few of the problems we see on the telly ( Greggs, Sainsburies, Tesco, Ethiopian Bank, all this last week ) are real software problems, they are caused by engineers who don’t fully comprehend the systems they are working on. It is not totally their fault, as they are under pressure to get stuff rolled out, and things get less testing. The systems are so big and complex that I would not believe that any one engineer could know it all.

Anyway, once I get my refund I’m going to leave OVO, mainly because of the crappy support and lack of online account.

I think it has been shown time and time again that perhaps the OVO software team should pull their socks up.

@Hadders52 This thread has nothing to do with that. Please read threads properly first - it’s about the forum software which neither OVO nor Kaluza built. It was in fact built by inSided who are now part of Gainsight.

I doubt OVO Group will ever attempt to snap up Gainsight or even touch anything they do - it’s too far away from the type of stuff OVO is interested in building.