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Community Feedback: New Forum Software Is Live!

61529 Views 1592 Replies 155 Participants Last post by  BobHall
We are excited to announce that we are live on our new forum platform!

It’s been a long time coming. Let’s face it. Sometimes older forum technology lags behind other parts of the internet. Although seeing the same format for a long time is comforting, the member experience shouldn’t include dealing with outdated, unsafe, slow software.

The transition to a new platform will never be 100% smooth but the days of dealing with out of date forum software are over. We have teams dedicated to building a world-class community for you. The development has been steady with regular software releases since May 2019. Asking members for feedback and coming up with ideas for improvement is what we want.

Speed and Reliability Are Key
No one should have to wait for information. This site has been built to be much faster and more reliable, period.

New Homepage Experience
Our algorithm will serve a personal customized feed based on your prior engagement with content on the site. If you’ve liked and or commented, or are following certain topics that are of interest to you, similar content will appear at the top of the homepage.

Search
We have introduced new search algorithms, powered by an industry-leading AI platform, to help you find information faster. We plan to roll out new features to continue improving search, and to power many additional areas of the forum.

Due to the volume of content, our search platform may take some time to complete indexing over the first few days after migrating. During this process, you may see a limited number of posts until indexing has been completed. We appreciate your patience.

Finding Your Way Around
We have made the design clean and simple to use. Near the upper right-hand corner of the community, you will see navigation icons.

The first icon is for what’s new on the site.

Clicking on it, by default, will take you to new unread posts. On that page, you can click on additional tabs as well, such as Popular, if you prefer to view active topics.

Clicking the list icon next to “NEW” will bring you to the full forum listing.

Clicking your avatar will give you a drop-down menu for all things related to your account.

You can also navigate more by clicking the 3 vertical dots.

Dark Mode
We have introduced Dark Mode. One of our favorite features allows you to access the site with a power-saving, and easier on the eyes dark mode. You can access it in the drop-down menu under the 3 vertical dots.

Save Bookmarks
Now you can save your favorite discussion threads and posts! Bookmarks are a handy way to remember and easily find great content or stuff you want to read later.

We also wanted to make it easier for new users to understand the lingo of forums. We have cleaned up various language to more commonly recognized phrases including:
  • Following - Thread subscriptions, and Watched are now known as Following
  • Conversations - Private Messages or PMs are now conversations and can be accessed from the user avatar drop-down in the main navigation
  • Showcase - Showcase is designed for users to "showcase" items/projects through the use of uploaded images, text descriptions and custom content categories. It’s a way to visually and textually provide detailed information on the content you wish to share. The showcase would be similar to a catalog, whereas the gallery would be like a photo album. It can be accessed from the drop-down menu with the 3 dots.
Take a tour and look around! Check out the Help section for some quick FAQs about the new platform.

Please keep all feedback, questions, concerns, requests for help, etc. regarding the new platform right here in this Feedback thread. This will help us make sure not to miss a request for help and also let us pass along your thoughts to our Product team. The Admins and I will be here to help along the way taking note of your comments.

- Community Management Team
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Hadn't noticed that projects didn't show up in New - That, combined with the lack of buddy email alerts, would explain why I haven't seen any for a while.
Within NEW, click on New Showcase.
View attachment 3857012

Or, if you prefer, simply click on Projects at the top of the site.
View attachment 3857013
Yes - I'd assumed that the new showcase would list new projects/journals by date created, but the new posts would include new posts on everything - so if someone posted to a project on, say page 5, of the projects it would still be on page 5 on the projects, but at the top of new posts.
It stops the necro-posts I suppose, but was usefull to see if someone put an update to a project at a later date.

Ah well, is there a way to sort projects by last comment timestamp?
OK, so I finally figured how to sort the projects by last comment - sort by last update in the filters on the projects. Edit, only sorts by last update of the OP instead of the thread like I first thought,
Any plans to add the sort option to the new showcase section?

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Let me look into this.
Ah, sorry, my bad - that sort option doesn't do what I thought it did, it's just last update of the OP instead of the thread.
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I think that I remember seeing somewhere along the way that "ignore" is what is now available instead of the blocking on the old site. It looks to me like the only way to ignore someone is to go to their profile page and hit the ignore button. I noticed that when someone has set their privacy settings so that you cannot see their profile, it occurs to me that you cannot ignore them. So if you want to harass someone it looks like you just have to make it so that they cannot see your profile.

Is there another way to ignore someone that I am not seeing?
Hover & kebab should work even if they've blocked access to the profile page I think
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Hey Bryan
As near as I can tell the main reason as to why there are less comments on projects is that less people see them.
The site seems to have switched to a more chat focused format - for better, worse or indifferent is down to the individual.

Go to the home page and count how many project images you can see - I get between 0 and 3 depending on how generous you want to be about what classes as a decent project pic, where there used to be a top 15 front and centre.
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I will politely ask....Are there any plans to work on any suggestions that have been made
As near as we can tell - no, or at least not on the project side, which is a bit strange as the project images should be an easy fix and transferable across the platform, the problem (and ways to fix) have been pointed out in tech terms quite a while back,
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