Re: Pottermore v.10
 

What I did at first was to grab the handle of the spoon, and move it in an actual circle (not an ellipse) as wide as the mouth of the cauldron. That should work, assuming you are careful to move it in the proper direction. After you get used to that, you can relax the circle and flatten it into an ellipse. However, I still move it in an ellipse that is considerably "taller" than the foreshortened mouth of the cauldron.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

You can move it wider. I always move my physical mouse in a wide circle, with the cursor reaching the sides of the screen, and it always moves.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Well, yes, I didn't mean exactly as wide as the cauldron. I do encircle it. But I don't have enough room to swing the cursor that far without changing the speed of the cursor (which I don't want to do). :)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

The Pottermore Beta survey is now available to those who wish to take it in French, German, Italian or Spanish.

http://insider.pottermore.com/

Not sure why this wasn't done at the same time as the one in English, or why they didn't let us know another one would be coming out. Maybe it was part of our feedback?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Well it's the same one as far as I can see. Maybe they wanted to split the workload. I presume they have translators or outsource the translation work that needs to be done.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Definitely. I just wished they had let us know the survey would be available in other languages in the future, so those more comfortable with a language other than English would know to hold off, instead of trying to muddle through the English version. I just think it's more fair to them.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Yes, they should have said so of course. They aren't always that precise in their updates, something to work on IMO.

But since you can do the survey multiple times hopefully people with language problems will do it again.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

They also updated their Beta Update page:

So, the fixes from a few days ago seem to be server upgrades. But they have other updates in mind that will work on other aspects of the site. I wish they were more direct on what they might be....

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Well, they said it would be mostly hardware upgrades. Perhaps system updates, too.

The problem with being direct about it is that it would probably elicit a whole slew of questions they couldn't answer. "You said you were going to improve X! When are you going to improve X? You said it would happen Thursday, and here it is already Thursday evening and it hasn't improved yet! Aren't you on British time? I'm only on Eastern Standard, so it must already be Friday over there. Nooooooooooooooooooo!"

So coy is safer. :)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Well, they don't have to give specific dates. I know that dueling is coming back eventually, and that's good enough for me. Sure, I'd like it sooner than later, but at least they said that it will happen. I know what they are planning on implementing, and plan on being surprised when it does re-appear.

I'm more just curious what advice they've taken from us and plan on implementing or fixing. Dates aren't really important, I just would like to know what things may be added or fixed in the near future. That's just me, though. :)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Thanks for the tip. I've run into a bug a couple times that appears to be related to clicking too quickly: if I click or move the mouse too quickly, the animations screw up and the spoon (cauldron stirrer?) will no longer be in the place where it appears to be, so then I have to try to find it by grasping at various points around the cauldron. The same thing has happened with the mortar and pestle: I click, but the mortar animation gets frozen although the counter continues to move. The wand animation also usually involves lightning without the wand actually moving up - is that another glitch? If so, I'll report it to Pottermore.

At least the discovery that I can hit "refresh" to restart has saved me from exploding a third cauldron while on the second step.

As for the survey, it would've made more sense for them to at least announce that they'd be releasing it in multiple languages. For some things, it's better if the Insider doesn't try to get specific (*cough* opening dates *cough*) but for other things, the communication should be clearer.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

:lol:
I agree. They've already disappointed a lot of people by pushing back the date when Pottermore will open to the public. I think they've learned not to make promises that people will count on, when they can't follow through.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I know dates aren't that important (since they're fungible), but it wasn't nearly as funny to think about the likely response without the dates. :)

But even without dates, my experience with highly popular software releases is that people will start bugging you about it anyway. (Even only moderately popular releases.) It may be annoying to us who are waiting for things to be fixed, but them's the breaks.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Just been on pottermore to find a message telling me that a comment I posted in my common room two weeks ago hasn't been approved by the moderators. I don't even remember posting it. Here's what the comment said:

Comment: 'my potions have been glitched for two weeks now :('

??????? :hmm:

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

One overhaul I really think Pottermore needs to make is the comments section. I understand they want it to have strong moderation - heck, we even had to select our user names from a list - but I don't think the current system is working for everyone.

Perhaps they need to have some mods online in real time, reading over the posts?

Based on the issue with comments, the "out of the blue" announcement that the Beta survey is now available in different languages, etc., I'm thinking that Pottermore wasn't very well thought out. I understand that this is Beta, and they're using us to test the site, but I think some of this should be intuitive.

My personal opinion is that it's a money issue. We aren't generating any income yet, so they're doing the minimum. Once the e-books are available, I suspect more staff will be hired and most - if not all - of the issues will be resolved.

BTW - I've only one made one comment on Pottermore. Once i was sorted into Ravenclaw, I posted that "I feel as if I've come home." I made the comment on August 15th. My comment was approved Tuesday, November 8th.

ETA

Now that i think about it, the Beta Survey was probably not done in a very effective way at all.

I think, if you're going to ask multiple choice questions, in order to get the most accurate percentages, you only want the survey to be taken one time by each member you can get to take it. The Beta survey link could be accessed by anyone, whether or not they even had a Pottermore account, the survey could be taken more than once by anyone, and not all of the members may have been aware that the survey was available in the first place. If the staff is looking for accurate percentages on the multiple choice questions, the survey fails at this, IMHO.

Then Pottermore announced the survey was closing on a certain date, which will get those who are more comfortable with a language other than English to take the survey, and depending on their English skills, they may very well have mis-read the questions, furthering the problem. Plus, it would make it harder for them to add their opinions.

And then Pottermore, after closing the survey, re-opens it for those who prefer a different language.

If I had been the one doing the survey, I would have created a link to the survey on the top of each Pottermore account, and I would have something posted on Insider, asking people to log into their accounts and take the survey. I may have even sent out emails.

If the site is in a different language other than English, once the survey was ready in that language, the link to take the survey would appear on their account.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

When I went to Potions after Pottermore reopened, I found that I'm brewing Forgetfullness potion although so far I've only practiced Cure for Boils!!!!!!!

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

So it's getting close to being 3 months now that my potion has been frozen(since August 27th).

I've lost all hope that I'll ever be able to make a potion again at this point. It's just depressing each time I login to Pottermore.

Should I just delete my account?

Looking at the points I earned in the 2 days I had access to Pottermore before my potion froze is getting depressing....looking at that number 42 for months is starting to make me feel lazy and unsuccessful at earning points on the site even though it isn't my fault that I can't earn them. It just looks so bad I just want to delete the account at this point. It's just depressing because there is nothing else to do on the site.

Your position: 39,951

And even though I only had 2 days on the site in which I was able to earn points before my potion froze....I still have more points than the majority of people in my house. What is this? Do most people in my house just not care at all about earning points? In some ways I get annoyed that a lot of other people in my house could probably earn points if they wanted to and their accounts are working perfectly....and here I am wanting to earn points and I physically can't because of the glitch I've been in for nearly 3 months....and I may be patient....but it's really really getting to me at this point. It's just so frustrating to not be able to earn points for that long, and even more frustrating when hardly anyone in your house seems to care about earning points and their accounts are probably perfectly fine! *sigh*

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I wasn't able to register onto Pottermore, although much of that can be attributed to a four year hiatus from reading the series. I felt void after finishing the book, and than the girl I had dated at the time had no interest in the series. She was a hipster, didn't want to read the books because everyone else had read them.

You shouldn't delete your account Kathleen. I'm sure that eventually Pottermore will work itself out. You might regret deleting your account when everything works out.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Kathleen,

If you delete your account, you'll regret it if dueling comes back up, especially as no one actually knows when the site will open to public registration (and even then it might be weeks or months before the public actually gets in, if they stagger opening like they did with the Beta.) So don't delete!

Also, to give you a perspective: it's not just Hufflepuff where rankings are high with relatively few House points. 4 days ago, I had 44 house points and was still ranked in the top 20% of my House (I'd never tried brewing, and dueling's been down for longer than I've had access.) Now, I've been brewing a bit, and have 179 House points.

With 179 points, I'm at position 7,743 out of 167,688 in Ravenclaw, so it's not just that Hufflepuffs aren't doing anything. It just shows you that most people are there for the new information and not for the House Cup: they might've tried brewing Cure for Boils once, but most people don't care enough or don't have the time to be constantly brewing. Even now, I just started playing around with potions a couple days ago, and I'll probably get burned out on it in a bit - it's a useful distraction for when I'm not feeling well enough to do anything else and know I'll be hanging around the house, but if I'm going out, there's no way to pause a timer, and I generally have other things to be doing if I'm feeling well. Also, it gets frustrating to run into bugs: I had the purchasing bug described above, have dealt with the "you put the lavender in the wrong container!" when I know I didn't, and one time when I went back to do the second step of a potion (it said 100% complete), and instead of taking me to step 2, it took me back to the beginning. If someone's trying that for the first time and it happens to them, that may be the last time they do potions.

But anyway, don't delete your account! (If anything, help me out and send me some Flobberworm Mucus! I exploded a couple cauldrons before I got the hang of things, so my Galleon supply may run a bit low.) ;)

Edit: About people and points, I have 69 friends on Pottermore, and only 4 of them have 1000+ points. If I graphed it (which I'm not going to), there's one person who has 4 points, a lot with 30-50 points (which is about what you'd expect from getting all the objects and maybe doing a potion), and then a handful with more. I don't know if the people with 1000+ points have been dueling at all, or if they're just very dedicated brewers.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

At least one of them is/was just a dedicated brewer. :)

I did duel, but that was obviously only at the beginning, and I dueled maybe twenty times? My record was probably something like 13-5-2 (there are ties), something like that. Of course, that's probably twenty times more than most people.

As with many things like this, the points distribution follows a power-law distribution. A few people with a ton of points, and a ton of people with few points. I might take a survey of people, to see what their rankings are with various numbers of points, and see if I can't figure out the power-law parameters.