Due to a combination of bugs, features, and administrator unavailability, the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum experiences the following problems.
See also: HTLAL Outages
Accessing the forum. Registration. Changing your email address or password[]
New members are approved manually. Changing an email address or password normally results in getting locked out of your account (since the confirmation emails aren't sent), so contact the moderators before doing that. (if you lose access you won't be able to)
Furthermore, outages happen every now and then.
Text and link formatting[]
Long words (character sequences) get a space added after 60 characters. Besides, links aren't recognized automatically. As a result, long links get a space in the middle that has to be removed when accessing them. (This doesn't apply to links created via BB-code)
Furthermore, this causes minor inconveniences when discussing the longest words.
Chrome[]
- The infamous Chrome bug breaks links when posting via Chrome browser
- Due to another bug, when posting from a mobile device or just a narrow window/text box, the text gets "squeezed" as the spaces at the end of each line (as displayed) are turned into line breaks.
Non-Western characters[]
- The aforementioned issue also affects languages that don't use spaces between words, like Thai or Japanese. The spaces are added more frequently.
- Unicode characters are not always processed correctly.
Administration tools and forum software[]
Due to not having administrator rights, the moderators are not able to:
- cancel a ban or issue a temporary ban
- add new languages
- appoint new moderators
- edit tags
- fix any known bugs or alter the features
Furthermore, the forum software is outdated and heavily customized, which makes upgrades practically impossible.
Problems when posting[]
Inability to start a new thread[]
Sometimes, an attempt to post a new thread results in a new post in another thread. This seems to occur mostly in the log subforum. There's no known solution, even for moderators.
Title length[]
The length of thread titles is limited to 41 characters. It's enough of a problem to have led to jokes.
Post editing[]
To prevent abuse of the feature, editing posts older than 2 weeks is disabled. This isn't supposed to affect the Logs subforum but frequently it does. In many cases this prevents people from doing long-term projects compiling some kind of materials/links.
Autocorrection[]
Certain names of languages, like Italian or German, are autocorrected to start with a capital letter. The feature is intentional, but this leads to them getting capitalized in other languages, whereas for example "italiano" shouldn't have a capital letter in Italian. Similarly, normal words from other languages can get replaced by asterisks if they are written the same way as certain obscene English words.
Staying logged in[]
It's possible to be logged in only on one computer/device at a time. The links with and without www are treated as separate sessions.
Personal messages[]
Each user's inbox is supposed to hold up to 100 messages at a time. However, for some members the limit might actually be about 70. That is, one's inbox says they can still receive 20 messages or so, but other members get the error saying "user's inbox is full".
Notifications[]
Some members aren't able to receive notifications. Changing the email address often helps, but as stated before, this generally leads to a loss of access to the forum. Be sure to contact a moderator in advance.