Vger

I tried finding a feedback link on the Ensim (Parallels) website and failed. In fact I find their whole site navigation to be decidely user-unfriendly. So I thought I'd post a few things here, in hopes UH can feed them back to Ensim.

1. Why, oh why, does the system keep asking, when I click on a link to go from server to reseller, reseller to site admin, site admin to user, if I really want to do that. It's pretty obvious I want to do that or else I wouldn't have clicked on the link. When you spend as much time as I do in Ensim control panels this gets to be REALLY annoying. So what if I did click on the link by mistake? It makes no difference and doesn't cause a problem.

2. The ISP control panel has the ability to set up cron jobs - so why not the Reseller and Site Admin panels too? Other control panels have this feature.

3. Other control panels have the ability to block IP addresses via the control panel, with no need to add them manually to .htaccess files. This would be a major time saver and give more control to Site Admins.

4. When you use the Search function to locate a domain amongst all of the domains on a server or in a Reseller panel it would be nice to have a history drop-down to cut down on the time taken if you have to go back to a domain several times.

5. The link to "Mailboxes/Users" - people do find this confusing. Why not just change it to Mailboxes or Email Addresses?

I am highly supportive of the security offered by Ensim working in High Security mode - it's excellent. However, in terms of features it has fallen way behind the times.

Vger

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UH-Matt

Hi Vger

All the things you mention (except 2,3,4 below) are actually fixed in the UH ensim skin, so will not be affecting any other UH customers other than yourselves who chose not to use our skin. I will pass on the feedback anyway, but just incase anyone else here on the forums feels like replying saying that the feedback is incorrect - this is all specific to the default UH skin, which UnitedHosting does not use.

Our custom skin fixes all the other points you mention, including removing the confirmation popups and renaming the various links to better named links.

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2. The ISP control panel has the ability to set up cron jobs - so why not the Reseller and Site Admin panels too? Other control panels have this feature.

There has been much discussion behind the scenes about this. The problem being that there is no way to resource limit a cron job. If a user adds a bogus/extreme cron or sets a cron to run every minute with a semi intensive script, its going to really hurt/kill your server and cause huge loads if not crashes.

On our shared/reseller hosting, even if they did add cron manager at site level, we would keep it disabled for the sake of our servers.

I will again raise the issue, because i understand with dedicated customers it may be a "nice to have" feature.

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3. Other control panels have the ability to block IP addresses via the control panel, with no need to add them manually to .htaccess files. This would be a major time saver and give more control to Site Admins.

Nice suggestion, much like the old sendmail blocklist a control panel managed apache blocklist would be a nice implementation.

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4. When you use the Search function to locate a domain amongst all of the domains on a server or in a Reseller panel it would be nice to have a history drop-down to cut down on the time taken if you have to go back to a domain several times.

Not sure I use the GUI enough to understand this, but i will feed it back.

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Simon

Why not just update the language files, then these name changes would have applied to any skin available on the server? I think from ISP level all the way down to User you have the choice to change skin, theres no guarantees that everyone will be using the UH skin.
(Matt probably understands more than anyone else why I'm really asking this question! )

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Simon

Can I add a couple of suggestions to this,

* Resellers/Siteadmins to be able to edit their own contact email address.

* Disk usage can be sorted by "allocated disk space", can we have that facility for the bandwidth usage reports (sort by allocated bandwidth)

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geebee

In File Manager could files and folders be listed alphabetically?

Simon

If your using the UH skin, I think this is already configured, I seem to remember some changes along these lines being made when the skin was first installed.

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geebee

so it is, well whaddya know!

Samizdata

Not if it interferes with normal .htaccess in the traditional Ensim fashion.

I can currently edit my .htaccess files from an FTP client much faster than I can log in to the control panel and navigate to the site, and experience suggests that Ensim would give less control, not more.

This idea immediately raises an alarm with me.

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Vger

It may cause you alarm, but many people have already used cPanel and wonder why Ensim doesn't have the same feature. On top of that, because they've never had to manually alter .htaccess files before, they don't know how to.

Vger

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Charles

You could also create a very simple PHP script to have a nice interface to edit the .htaccess files.
There is probably already one out there.

geebee

how about some chronological order to the dropdown menu that you use to view the monthly bandwidth reports in the reseller control panel? it seems pretty random at the moment.