Discussion on:

TechRepublic's 2011 upgrade: Simpler and lot more social

If so, which ones do you use?

Original post:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/techrepublics-2011-upgrade-simpler-and-lot-more-social/7473

But most know I'm socially celibate, at least electronically. This place is about it for me, besides a mostly ignored LinkedIn account.

No, i don't do the Social 2.0 thing, but I post references as useful at other sites. Not sure I'll be posting any more forum links, though. It is an unusable mess, even if I were to intend that someone read only one post.

Unfortunately, I link forum posts:articles at about 3:1.

Edit: I have to say that the forum is looking a bit better, at least for a single-post read. Must have been some styles were not quite engaged earlier. Note: Positioning of the edit function is now nicer, for sure. Kudos. Four-line field, not so much.

edit: Reload in place - nice. That wasn't happening before. Stripping CRLF from existing text in edit boxes, still bad.

We're definitely looking at tweaking several of the items you mentioned.

I do share things I think are interesting, or informative. I don't share on social networks, but I do word of mouth or insert a link in an email. The last share I did was an article TR anounced CompTiA was ending their A+ Cert for life. Thanks by the way, I took it Dec. 20th, along with a few other classmates and received my cert a few days ago. Had I waited, I would've had to renew every few years, so thinks for the heads up.

Have one on me.

Has you all quit chewing their fingernails yet?

The real one: Word of mouth, verbal communication, person to person dialogue.

Who told it is simpler!!!??? It is confusing. The Original Format in 1999-2000 was the best. The previous one was OK (You can sy good or average). But this new format is the worst I have seen anywhere.:(

Sorry to hear. Unfortunately a subtle change in design over time wasn't possible, we really did have to start clean. Can you provide some details on what you don't like specifically? we'll do our best to look into it. We'll continue to refine the layout and squash a lot of bugs in the next several weeks. thanks for your patience!

Actually the new format of the full site is Disgusting. One of the problems is that the sorting I want to keep in the Q&A and Discussions does not remain the way I want. I have to resort the way I want evrytime I visit that pages.

When I click on a heading to read the thread in a new tab,
1) The name of the poster is at the end of the message, but the Prev/Next buttons are at the top of the message - move them to the bottom so I don't have to scroll up to move to the next reply after reading a long message.
2) I expect Next to vanish when there are no more associated replies, instead it move on the to "next" heading in the thread.
3) I do not have permission to post a reply from the sub-thread in the new tab.

Yep, login was broken - two ways: 1) it said I was logged in when I came here from a link in a TR email, but I wasn't 2) Roboform saw the new logon screen when clicking the link at the top of the page as a new login dialog; it put in my email, but not my password. After logging out (from the email login) and then in again, then I could post replies.

Part of the problem was caused my My Account/Preferences not generating an error when I made changes without truly being logged in. (No, those changes did not stick, I just set them again.)

After seeing the new login dialog as new and my defining a new name for the login page (Techrepublic - 2011 re-design), RoboForm is logging in ok. BUT, it takes an unnerving amount of time for the login to be acknowledeg. Also, the right-click to activate the context menu so I can select 'Fill Forms' is being taken as an entry (I get a msg like "password required"); we RoboForm users also see this reaction on several other sites, so we know what it means... (stupid script).

I do like the faster page loads, and I can see a lot that I'll grow to like on the new format. Thanks.

Two things I preferred with the old format were more compact threads and the whole thread on one page.

It was ironic to read that the column is wider so we don't have to scroll the article as much, but I feel I have to scroll through the threads a lot more. All the additional padding and margins may be the fashion, but it feels a lot more clumsy to scroll though it all.

As for splitting the thread between pages, it does make it more difficult to find replies to my own posts. There may be some topics where I have less interest (or the rest of the thread goes off in less interesting directions), but I want to see any interraction on my bits. With the old format, I simply did a Ctrl+F in my browser to find my user name. Now I need to do it on two or three different pages.

That site has become unusable; but then it was anyway, so I digress!

of this site have become unstable; but then were anyway :P

In spite of the warm and highly intelligent community there, the forum change ruined it.

And I knew it. Didn't want to believe it, but I knew TR was going to feature-follow ZDNet.

Still, nice that it sounds like TR may finally have new hardware and new software. Despite the good things I hear about TR elsewhere, and within CNet sites, it was always the red-headed stepchild of the corporate family among the tech-type sites (regardless as to the parent company of the week).

Overall its good, but I dislike the new login screen, its not working with my auto fill anymore, cause its script triggered I can't let the browser auto navigate to the page, fill in the login information, and submit. I haven't tried the site at home yet where I have third party cookies turned off. Hopefully that glitch here has been fixed and I won't have to login every time I visit the site.

Also, the new maximum number of comments view is a bit annoying, I preferred the more condensed, but show everything on 1 page view.

The default is 50, but you can change it. At the top of every thread there is a "Show" option where you can select 25, 50, 100, or All.

And the preferences shows a max of 100.

The "All" option will be added.

That and the idea to have comments open where you click them rather than reloading the page, that would be awesome.

We'll look into the autocomplete issues. We do uses some cookies that are technically 3rd party, but in fact m beay cookies from another domain of ours.

As Jason mentioned it's at the top of the comments, and also on member pages there is a new space for setting your community preferences:

http://www.techrepublic.com/members/preferences#community

we'll be adding more customizable features over time, so this is a good page to know about. thanks for the feedback!

your animated avatar already, Sinister!

I was actually surprised my LastPass worked with this logon scheme, as it doesn't with CNET, the other sister site.

So I just pointed my login manager to it.

Pointed here, works good if I don't start on the TR site, but if I am already here, it just pops up a login dialog floating overtop of the page like normal.
http://www.techrepublic.com/members/login?path=http://techrepublic.com.com/5221-6230-0.html&tag=regPop;regSignUp

Till then, here is a link for your enjoyment
http://trevorsarchives.selfip.net/funpics/sigs/sbdance.gif

I love the new topical navigation, like this Project Management page: http://www.techrepublic.com/topics/project+management. It's great to have everything on the topic collected in one place.

However, the default sort is "Relevance," which brings up a lot of white papers and software programs, some of which are very old. Switching the sort method to "Popularity" produces great stuff, and using "Date" tells me what is new (though here again, lots of software updates).

I guess I'd like the default to be Popularity. Or perhaps tweak the weighting of "Relevance" to downgrade stuff that is more than a year old.

We're tweaking these topic pages so that we can surface the most useful stuff in each category (we'll ultimately end up tweaking each one). Appreciate you throwing out your suggestions, Stephen.

Everytime TechRepublic sends a tweet, the link that should be included is missing instead it says "null". Example: "Poll: Which edition of Microsoft Windows does your organization use? null" The rest of TechRepublic works very well and looks really, really good.

I can't reproduce that problem. Can you add the url on which you had this problem?

http://twitter.com/#!/techrepublic
Look at the last five tweets or so

Thanks, I misunderstood what you meant. That looks like a timeout problem on the Bit.ly API. We should allow for that, and I'll file a bug.

....already seems like...job security for some.
Btw....we can vote on our own comments.

Believe it or not, some of us do not spend our lives online.

While my favorite color is blue, that does not mean I want to see it EVERYWHERE! Who did you ask about the new scheme, 5 year old children? I don't know about other members, but I'm a professional and I neither need nor want pretty eye-candy. Would it be possible to provide a 'plain-text' theme for people like me?

I'm not sure if I can stand looking at this everyday.

thanks for your feedback, we're going to continue to refine the design and layout, and we are listening. please provide any specific details you can.

I noticed that there is no techrepublic.com.com anymore, it is techrepublic.com now!

Great

Some + votes result in a - vote. I know this because I'm choosing to vote + or - on posts with no vote.

I suppose - I just gave you a plus!

(edited) I did it again, it wasn't subdued so it must not have taken, despite showing on my page.

must have given me a minus, then. Because it's showing 0.