Well, I have similar thoughts about MS products and Mr. Gates. I'd forgive him if he made a $2,000,000 (or more) donation to OCF but until then to him!

Brian may have suggestions from the "internal" perspective. He is a Mac man so he'll probably just tell you to get a computer. I have some experience with nasty PC computer related problems but I won't claim to be expert. If you have not tried this; you might disable your Mcaffee and then re-boot (don't let Mcaffee restart) then see if it works. Also, if you have not scanned for ad-ware with anything except Mcaffee you might want to try downloading one or more other free products (Ad-Aware, AVG, SpywareBlaster) and running them. I have found that NO one product works to rid spy-ware 100% of the time. What you describe happening sounds a lot like that kind of problem.

If you search for those three products be sure you spell them exactly like I have in the post. There are other free products out there and many copycats. I have used all three of the above for a long time with good success. They are also highly regarded free versions (for personal use). Also make sure you are downloading the "free version" not the Free Trial Version. (Not a huge problem they will just tell you to buy when the trial is up.)

OK, Mark,

Now I feel overwhelmed (but not to same exteme extent as I did when I was diagnosed with OC)!

Craig, my husband is a computer geek, not me, and will probably say "screw the newletter" since we have not had any problems with subscribing on other sites. As for Brian, the "Mac Man", if I knew then what I know now, I would be a "Mac Maniac" too! We were too poor and they were too expensive back then, and now I think we are too old (and too invested in PC machinery) to change.

I will have Craig read your post when he gets back, but he might have already covered all the bases you mentioned. I'll let you know the results of his investigation. Thanks for your suggestions.

Maybe "Red" is symbolic for "well-read".

Catherine

I might note at this point in time that Chester builds and tests the entire OCF site on a PC, and the vast majority of visitors that come to the site are PC users (we can tell this from our data on the servers that collect it). I test Chester's builds on my MAC and if there are issues, I tell him about it.... but the site and the architecture is designed and built in a PC compatible world, not mine. If there is a problem with something on the site appearing or acting correctly it is usually on my MAC not Chester's PC.

Be sure that you computer is set to accept cookies. It likely is since the message board won't operate without it. I will forward this thread to Chester for his comments.

Happy Holidays,

The reason for this is that your email is already signed up. There is no detection or warning that says you already filled out the form (It is a function of the software that I have no control over)

Until they update the software to warn about duplicate emails, that's the way it is.

Sorry

That was a fast explanation. How many places have a webmaster that will solve a problem in 10 minutes at 9 PM?

Are you sure it it 9:00 pm where Chester is? :o)

Sorry that I over diagnosed the problem Catherine.

Sometimes I think that PC problems are like cancer: you just can't be too sure that it is fixed!

Chester (OCF Web Guy), Brian and Mark,

First off, Chester, nice to meet you in virtual reality! You have done a nice job! No, make that a FANTASTIC job!

I joined OCF on 10/04/08, the day after my diagosis. It is a given that my state of mind was not good under the circumstances. When I joined I did check the "wish to receive emails" button on my profile page. Is this what signs me up for the newsletter?

If so, I have never received any newsletter emails from OCF nor the confirmation email that says I signed up for the newsletter.

Maybe there hasn't been a newsletter sent since I joined on October 4th??

Earlier when I was working through Mark's suggestions, I thought that maybe the "wish to receive emails button" meant that I WAS already signed up for the newsletter, so I changed my profile to "no emails", and tried the newsetter sign-up link again, with the same results.

I did not mean to turn this into a big deal that probably doesn't affect other members.

BUT...

I did accomplish two things...

I got three RED GUYS talking together on this thread, AND

I got to meet Chester, the "Webmaster"!

Anyone reading this boring thread might want to drop him a line and thank him for making these forums work so well for all or us! He seems to keep a low profile (probably a good idea with this group), but his work is certainly appreciated!

Also thanks to the other two RED GUYS who frequently set us all straight!

Peace,
Catherine

Catherine,

Not sure I would know if e mails were blocked since I wouldn't get them?

No, that allows you to receive emails from other posters or OCF, it has nothing to do with the newsletter.

You are already signed up for the newsletter and that is why it wouldn't let your email address sign up for it again. So in Jan when we send the first one out, you will get it. There were designs to do this for several years, and we collected lots of addresses, but we were always behind the timeline to get one actually produced that was worthwhile.

Now that we have some help in the office, it will become a regular thing. But the web world has changed greatly since we first started collecting addresses of people that wanted it to come to them. If we sent out 10,000 emails with our newsletter in it, to people, and a bunch of them forgot that they had asked for this and complained to their ISP, we would get banned from those kind of mailings as a spammer. So we adopted this new op in or op out form that makes us able to do this in a spam crazy world, without making people unhappy, or getting our ISP banned by some large organization like Yahoo, AOL etc.