Tech Forum

As of yesterday, it seems I was chosen to be a guinea pig again. I'm experiencing an alternative study tools interface. I think I've seen this interface previously (or something very similar to it). It's a vertical bar on the left: The only problem is that whenever I select text, the toolbar quickly activates and then all the text is quickly deselected and the toolbar deactivates...meaning I can't make any notes. That's pretty frustrating. I'm using a private browsing window and I have cleared all cookies and cached data. But study tools doesn't work

<sigh> I just looked back over some history and realized that tomorrow is my 10 year anniversary on these forums. Study tools had several problems back then...and still has many problems. Despite the problems, I've managed to make thousands of notes over the years. I just hope some day the study tools will become more stable and usable to the general church membership. I have a software background and perhaps some patience and curiosity to solve problems so I've stuck with using the tools over the years, but I think a lot of people would encounter problems and give up and never attempt to use them again.

Perhaps the mobile apps are more reliable and church members are successful there. I use the mobile apps occasionally as devices to read my notes, but I find the large screen, mouse, and keyboard I have on a computer to be a much better interface for my personal study.

If the church put more effort into making this stuff work better, I believe it would be a spiritual blessing to the members who chose to use it.

mevans wrote: ↑Sat May 21, 2022 8:38 am I just hope some day the study tools will become more stable and usable to the general church membership.

This is my hope, as well. Until then, the only current feature I use is Bookmarks, which I have found to almost always be reliable.

I found a workaround to my current problem: use a different web browser on the same computer. I was using Firefox. I tried a private browsing window in Chrome and see that it briefly puts up the new, non-functioning interface, and then switches to the old one. I seem to be able to take notes.

I'm having the same issue. I write an email to siblings every night and copy and paste a couple of scriptures to comment on. Suddenly, I can't copy at all - logged in or not and anything else I can think of. Last night I had to save a pdf and copy and paste from there - it messed up the font on my email and was generally a mess. I will try mevans idea of using a different browser and see if it helps.

Could this please get fixed.

combinola wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 10:27 pm Could this please get fixed.

Your best way to get this request passed to those who can do anything is by sending feedback using the feedback link found at the bottom of the web page or on many ChurchofJesusChrist.org pages. We can discuss it here but there is little chance the people who can do anything will ever see this thread.

I haven't had time to test this out on other computers, but it looks like what I thought was another A/B test might be more permanent. All the browsers on this computer (where I usually do my study) now use this new interface. Based on someone else's comment on this forum, maybe it's being rolled out to everyone. I'm already finding problems with the recent changes. It takes time to research them, write them up, and submit them...and then it takes more time to convince the initial responders that it's something real and not the cookie/cache problem they want me to think it is.