Frequently Asked Questions about the new ABC15.com

Since we launched the new ABC15.com on Thursday 05/27/10, we have had a handful of users emailing us about the following issues.

Listed below are the most commonly-asked about issues, and possible resolution to these issues.

CANNOT FIND A FEATURE I USED ON THE OLD WEBSITE

Please view the ABC15.com Sitemap to see an outline of how content is organized on this new website.

 

STORY LINKS NOT WORKING / "FORBIDDEN" ERROR / PAGE DOES NOT EXIST ERROR

QUESTION: Why am I seeing a "Forbidden" or "Page does not exist" error message after clicking on story links?

ANSWER: The link you are clicking on is a link from our old website format, which is no longer valid. For example: it could be a link you might see when searching in Google News, or a link you may have previously bookmarked in your Favorites prior to 05/27/10, or a link from the Yahoo! News or My Yahoo! page.

However, any links that you click on while on the new ABC15.com itself should be working fine.

We are aware of these issues and working with the major search engines to get them our new story feeds. Some of these aggregators are currently reflecting our old story feeds, which explains why some links are bad. This is at the highest priority.

UPDATE 06/01/10 5pm: The issue with links from the old ABC15.com going to "forbidden" error pages should now be resolved. However, since those old format links do not exist they should now redirect to the new homepage of ABC15.com. It will take some time for search engines and aggregators such as Google and others to fully index our new website, and provide you with search results based on our new site's link format.

CANNOT SIGN IN, OR AFTER SIGNING IN, CANNOT POST COMMENTS

QUESTION: I cannot sign in, post a comment, change my profile password, etc.

ANSWER: While the vast majority of our users transferred successfully from the old site to the new site, unfortunately a handful of user profiles did not transfer over correctly.

Some users might experience the following:

a) user can sign in successfully, but ABC15.com does not recognize the user on subsequent page loads

b) user can sign in successfully, but user cannot post comments

c) user changes their password, but ABC15.com won't recognize the changed password

If your profile experiences one of these scenarios, or something similar, you can try one of the following options:

1) Create a brand new user account with a different username, using a legitimate email address, and use that to sign in and post comments.

2) Submit a help request using the "Website Issues" Topic option in this Contact Us form , and let us know:

a) exactly what kind of problem you're experiencing with your user profile. Please be as detailed as possible and note any specific error messages or behavior by the website;

b) what username you're trying to sign in with;

c) your email you used when you registered your account.

We will then take that information and investigate further to try and find resolution for you.

 

NOTES ON USER REGISTRATION

Our new website now requires a legitimate email address for user registration. Users on the old website could register with a "fake" email address and get through the registration process, but this is no longer possible on the new ABC15.com.

When registering, the following fields are required:

-- valid email address
-- first name
-- last name
-- zip code
-- gender
-- date of birth

while all other fields are optional.