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Community Feedback: New Forum Software Is Live!

60712 Views 1592 Replies 155 Participants Last post by  BobHall
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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 Although seeing the same format for a long time is comforting, the member experience shouldn’t include dealing with outdated, unsafe, slow software.

The transition to a new platform will never be 100% smooth but the days of dealing with out of date forum software are over.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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Maybe the search function is limited to the 500 most relative results? 500 seems like an unusual number of results in a search, sounds more like it hit a maximum limit.
I mentioned the issues using prefixes weeks ago. The maximum results are 25 pages of results with 20 per page.
Also, what is a prefix?
No one has explained it and seems to be redundant with category. I suspect that only showcases posted since the conversion have prefixes based upon your initial results.
For the search you were performing, the prefixes of Journal, Workshop, or Projects would only search those specific areas for your related search. By leaving it empty, it should search for all that are listed in the showcase.

~Mike D
Hmm, since I only wanted to see projects I'm not sure why selecting a prefix of "Projects" lost all the matches.
sras and Lazyman, I may have figured "prefixes" out. Prefixes have only been used since the changeover to the new software. When you add a new Project you can now add a Prefix (but we still aren't sure what a Prefix is). You won't find any projects using a prefix as a filter that was posted before Sept. 20, 2022.
  • If you do a search for "chair" and select Projects in Prefixes, and leave the Categories blank or choose All categories, you will get 9 results. All 9 results have been added since the software change on 9/20/22.
  • If you do a search for "chair" and leave Prefixes blank or choose Any, and in Categories choose Projects, you will get 500 results.
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Unless there are prefixes different than category, I don't see how they could do anything but restrict the results to items posted after the conversion.
Unless there are prefixes different than category, I don't see how they could do anything but restrict the results to items posted after the conversion.
Exactly. If you choose use "Projects" as a filter in Prefixes and the prefix is blank, it won't show up in the results. None of the projects posted on 9/20/22 or earlier have prefixes because they didn't exist so they won't show up if you use any of the assigned prefix groups. You must leave the Prefix filter as "any" if you want to search all history.
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WHERE can anyone find anyone else's "workshop"? Very UN-workable at this moment... I cannot even find MY OWN workshop...

And NO, I do not plan on reading +76 pages of entries "hoping" to find an answer. Sorry... This latest "fix" is nothing such.
WHERE can anyone find anyone else's "workshop"? Very UN-workable at this moment... I cannot even find MY OWN workshop...

And NO, I do not plan on reading +76 pages of entries "hoping" to find an answer. Sorry... This latest "fix" is nothing such.
Hi Mike - Click on Workshops in the brown bar on the main page. Also here is a great resource of FAQ's that will answer most questions and help you navigate the site: FAQ's
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Hi Mike - Click on Workshops in the brown bar on the main page.
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Unfortunately that has not helped at all. NOT a criticism, just that much still needs to be done to make this usable.
Unfortunately that has not helped at all. NOT a criticism, just that much still needs to be done to make this usable.
Workshops then select filter and then start to type in your profile name in the created by and it will generate a drop down menu of members. Select your profile and it loads all your projects/workshops. Not ideal but...
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You can find workshops at the end of your showcase list, last page. It should be the last entry if you have loaded a shop description.
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Just to follow up TravisH's post, when you use the Filter, leave the Prefix set to "(Any)".
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  • If you do a search for "chair" and select Projects in Prefixes, and leave the Categories blank or choose All categories, you will get 9 results. All 9 results have been added since the software change on 9/20/22.
  • If you do a search for "chair" and leave Prefixes blank or choose Any, and in Categories choose Projects, you will get 500 results.
Thats really really bad UI - you specifically select Projects and it hides 95% of the projects.
I would like to suggest to bring back a bit more info about the original poster, especially in the projects posts.

Right now there is simply his nickname and the date of the post, maybe along with some tags. The original posters name is not clickable.

Before there were direct links to the artists page, his/her projects etc.

The people commenting have more info next to their comment in the form of avatars, joined date, posts etc. than the original poster!
I'd like to comment on the design of the new website by starting with the fact that I'm computer literate.

That said, my comments on the design are as follows-

  1. Navigation-there doesn't appear to be any way to navigate from a project I'm looking at to the lumberjocks profile-am I missing something? In the old website, it was easy to go from a project I reviewed to the jocks profile to see what other projects he or she had built, their background, and their shop. It appears now that I have to approach each of these pieces of info through separate pages-not a very user friendly way to get around the site.
  2. Use of a webpage "real estate"-the Projects area is a huge waste of webpage space! For example, there's lots of wasted space in the line item design of each project entry. Why wasn't the "thumbnail design" of the original website carried over to the new design? In the old design, the thumbnails could be quickly scanned and I could go directly to the project I was interested in. Now, the current design has me scrolling in a very time-consuming way to see if there are any projects I'm interested in viewing in more detail, e.g. more pictures, description of construction techniques, etc.
I used to visit the Lumberjocks site on an almost daily basis with the old design, because it was fast and easy to navigate. Now, I'm finding the navigation through forums, projects, shops, jocks, etc. tedious and time-consuming-and I'm starting to wonder if I'll be using it anywhere near as much as I used to.

If I'm not using the new features correctly and causing my own issues, please point me to the instructions.

Thanks for reviewing my comments.
This earlier comment echos what I just posted... sorry. However, it can't be that we two are the only ones that are unhappy about this?
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This earlier comment echos what I just posted... sorry. However, it can't be that we two are the only ones that are unhappy about this?
There are lots of unhappy people regarding this. Unfortunately we have all but given up any expectation of improvement for project posts. The only response has been "We're looking onto it"
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Sad but true.
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Yup, probably my last project post has been posted here.
For now, I am posting my projects on the forum that shall not be named.

If some of the things commented on are fixed on LJ , I might come back. However, it is discouraging when there appears to be no progress or updates on any changes.
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