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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 Although seeing the same format for a long time is comforting, the member experience shouldn’t include dealing with outdated, unsafe, slow software.

The transition to a new platform will never be 100% smooth but the days of dealing with out of date forum software are over.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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What's the difference between the "Showcase" and the "Projects"?

Seems to be the same thing with 2 different names...
sadly......yes:cry:
Het pottz, Have you gotten confirmation that project favorites have passed permanently into oblivion or is that your best guess?

Just curious.
Only thread discussions can be bookmarked within the forum software.

- Cricket
This is a huge disappointment - 12 years of project favorites gone

My understanding as of now is that project favorites are gone and will not be coming back. Am I reading your comment correctly?
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This is a huge disappointment - 12 years of project favorites gone

My understanding as of now is that project favorites are gone and will not be coming back. Am I reading your comment correctly?
Bumping this question...
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I was trying to find new blog entries today. One of the challenges is that the blog listing has new comments and new entries all in the same list.

It would be nice to see a new blog entry highlighted so I wouldn't have to sort through every updated blog to find the new content.
When you click on the forum node, they are in order. Over on the side, you can see the date of the most recent post.
View attachment 3854192

The current blog category (over time) will become our legacy (achieve) section. They will, of course, remain open to any new comments or questions.

New Blogs (Journals) should now be added in Showcase, within the Journal category.


Miscellaneous Showcases Tips

- Cricket
Thanks for the reply Cricket!

The most recent post doesn't address what I am looking for. I am looking for blogs that have a new chapter added. The list to the right just shows the latest activity.

That activity could be for:
  • Comments on old chapters
  • Comments on new chapters
  • New chapters
One clue is if the new activity is the same author as the creator original post. But that fails if:
  • The new chapter already has comments from other members
  • The original creator is comments on an old chapter
And I am back to checking every updated blog trying to find new chapters

I guess if we get to where each chapter shows up on a new page that will be a good indicator. Ideally the blog list would only show new chapters and the comments would show when viewing that chapter.
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That is one of the reasons we are working to have folks start using the Journals within Showcase as it can alert members when they make changes or add to their journals.

- Cricket
Do I need to follow a journal to get this alert?

Journals are the new blogs - right?
That is one of the reasons we are working to have folks start using the Journals within Showcase as it can alert members when they make changes or add to their journals.

- Cricket
Also - it seems like Journals should show up in the menu bar that runs the width of the page
[Workshops/Projects/Reviews/Journals] instead of [Workshops/Projects/Reviews/Blogs]​
Also it looks like the "Blog" section is really a "Blog Archive"
I am a bit confused but this is what I understand.????

Blogs are the old blogs and at some point will be closed to new entries but open to comments.

The Showcase includes Projects, Journal and Workshops. Any new Blog type entry should be posted in the Journal section.

I think it might be a good idea to show a link to Journal in the bar that currently is at the top of the page.
You beat me to it Redoak49!
You are correct. I am working on that. :)
That was fast!😀
Will we be able to edit past entries? I have a few blogs that I would like to at least add a Table Of Contents to enable better navigation. Better yet would be the ability to force new pages in old blogs.

What do you recommend for blogs that are intended to cover a long time span? I have several that I update over the years


Should I expect to move the content over to a Journal if I want to continue to add to it?
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Different topic:

It seems like there are few topics that could be added to the Reviews section of the Fourms

  • CNC machines
  • Lasers
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I will look into this next week. Do we have any current reviews on those items?
I tried to find some but my limited search skills didn't yield anything.

I seem to remember reading a write up or two on CNC routers and Lasers but they may not have been posted in Reviews.
never got an answer To this.

also, I’m now in a state wheee I’ve got the dot on my avatar telling me I have something new, plus a 1 on conversations, but when I click on that, nothing’s new.
Cricket answered a similar question of mine in comment #563
I will look into this next week. Do we have any current reviews on those items?
I did stumble upon one laser review

Will we be able to search through projects?

The current search capability is limited to forums. I tried to find evidence of this question and didn't find any.
I have a To Do list spreadsheet that has several links to LJ projects (they still work). Those links had the project number as part of the url. Those numbers were in the 427,000+ range. I've checked and can find projects all the way back to number 5. The new project page has 8333 pages with 20 projects per page or 166,660 projects. Where did the other 260,000+ projects go?

Or am I missing something?
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Cricket, I think that what makes this frustrating is that it seems like there is a relatively easy fix that creates a better, more usable blog archive that can be manually integrated by members with the new Journal feature we will use going forward. Here is my proposed "easy" fix:
  1. Delete all of the converted blogs.
    • The only downside I see is that there may be a few comments that have been added after the conversion but I believe this to be minimal and I believe that most will see this as positive if we can preserve the integrity and usability of the many years worth of old blogs.
  2. Rewrite the conversion code to simply copy each individual blog Chapter into a separate post (rather than appending all the chapters of a series into a single forum post)
    • Create the title of each converted blog posting with the "Series Name" : "sequence number"-"Chapter Name". This mimics the test blog I did last week.
      • This preserves the integrity of each posting, provides a visible way to tie each blog series together in order and should actually be a simpler conversion because the concatenated title is perhaps the most complex part of the conversion.
      • If bloggers want to go to the trouble of creating links between chapters, they can do it like I did in my blog test last week with just a little bit of trouble but even if they do not, a simple search using the series name, will give a a simple list of the blogs in the series.
      • If someone wants to continue a converted series with the new journal feature, they can use the same series name when creating the new journal entries and they can manually provide links if desired to tie them together by editing their original post of the last converted chapter The way that they are currently created, it is not really possible to tie the last chapter of a converted series to a new Journal because the subsequent chapters are embedded into the middle of a bunch of replies in those converted series.
      • Another issue that I see is that any blog favorites that might have been converted to bookmarks may not work and may need to be recreated. This may be a relatively minor issue but could be significant if anyone has a lot of converted blog bookmarks like I do.
    • An alternative and perhaps preferable option would be to convert the blogs into the new Journal feature making an even more seamless blogging experience.
Hopefully this can be done - it would be a significant improvement!
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Will we be able to search through projects?

The current search capability is limited to forums. I tried to find evidence of this question and didn't find any.
I just tried using a filter to find "projects" created by "sras"

The filter returned 0 projects

UPDATE: I repeated the filter but did not ask for a Prefix of "projects".

That worked.

What is a Prefix?

BTW - I would expect a search to be more capable than a filter. Is that right?
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Yep - favorited projects are gone.

From what I can tell they will not be coming back.

That's a 12 year collection for me wiped clean
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