TechRepublic's official feedback thread for the 2011 upgrade

It is not there, when I click on the site.

It should be to the left of the URL.

I've set my default view to "Expanded", but I'm viewing this thread in collapsed mode. There's a "Show" option on the page, but no "Expand" option.

I was wondering why you counted me as a contact last week, but are not following me this week...

How you been, luv?

In the old TR theme, scroll bars were automatically added with the pre tag to fix the chopping problem.

Then click edit, select the broken content, and press Control + V. BAM, your post is ready to be edited.

I'm checking into it. Sorry about that!

Many blog posts state "This blog post is also available as a TechRepublic download". Unfortunately the links no longer work and you get dumped into a general downloads page with no workable method of finding the download you wanted.

After 10 years, this may be my last week on TR. I'm going to search for a tech site that still cares about looking professional.

There are a number of visual issues as well as usability issues.

The key things I notice are, you can no longer answer specific posts, you can only ask for clarification, so if the OP asks a question, then a followup question, its hard to tell which answer is for which question. It is also hard for those finding TR from google, to tell which is the correct answer without the thumb system or some sort of "best answer" system. Personally I preferred the thumbs but the current system can work as well.

Secondly, the way it is displayed with the speech balloons, is hard to tell who posted what. Especially if there is a reply to one and it just appears below the previous posters name.

Also, Replies now open within the discussion, directly under the post being commented on, instead of in a separate page.

Peer messaging appears to be limited to mutual Contacts, although I haven't had any official confirmation of that yet.

I'm not seeing that effect.

Stephen,
I'm pretty sure I tried that the other day and there was no Favorites option.
Anyway, I tried it now and it works.
Thanks for your help.
-Michael

Or at least have all pictures appear as thumbnails or something?

I'm not interested in signing up for another site. Especially since I can't just use a garbage email address, (or can I?)

I set up an account and I *might* find a value in it at some time in the future, but I would have liked to take my time thinking it through.

There are sites that I use that I don't care to use a picture of me, others where I use a specific avatar for specific reasons, still others that I would prefer a more professional appearing pic. In my experience, one size rarely fits all.

This is my first visit to the new Tr. I'll pitch in my 2 cents after I explore a bit I'm sure. :D

BTW, I really did mean to be at the preview, but I totally had a brain fart and miscalculated Eastern time to Central time. Tried to get in 2 hours late!

And an allergy to wearing my glasses, I have long been in the habit of setting my font size on my display to work for me as opposed to assuming that a forum admin would cater to my needs specifically. Accessibility is a great and wonderful thing, but it tends to be built in at the individual browser level and should be set from there.

My $0.02, YMMV

Print/View All was mightly handy. :)

As for NoScript, I think that's what's been kicking me out when I vote. Took me too long to figure that out...

I tried to pm some peeps I [b]know[/b] are in My Contacts[/b], but couldn't. :0

[i]We use the service Gravatar to display profile images. The process is very simple. Go to Gravatar.com and create an account with the same email address that you use at TechRepublic. Associate an avatar with your email address. Voila, you're done. Your Gravatar will automatically show up on TechRepublic within about 10 minutes. Create one now[/i]

Or not.

I went out to Gravatar and uploaded an image that I wished to use. I found the site to be not terribly intuitive but I managed. That was about 30 minutes ago.

I have since logged out and logged back in to TR- a scary proposition as my old self seems to have gone away and I can only hope that my new self hangs around for a while. Still no love- I seem to not be able to set an avatar.

*sigh*

From the Discussion front door, I see the top two Water Cooler discussions- tres cool!

Here's the issue I see... I have to click "View More" to see a full list of Water Cooler discussions. If I read one, I can't easily navigate back to that full list. Near as I can tell, I have to go back to the Discussion front door, click again on the "View More" and then try to recall the last discussion I read. Some days, that is easy. Other days are not so much.

Like many posters, I enjoy the Water Cooler area as I like to think about topics other than tech and appreciate the insight that others bring to those topics. I can't be the only person finding navigation difficult.

I would love to see a clickable that will take me back to the full list of Water Cooler topics. I haven't tried this for other topics but if it is the same, I think a direct navigation option should be available there as well.

Edited to see what would happen...

Interesting- all formatting went away and my quote marks were suddenly problematic on editing. I've re-formatted but wonder what this is going to look like...

The idea of having only the Thumb Up button for the article, is useless for any statistics.The new version doesn't add a Thumb Down button for articles - which I was really looking forward to see included. Adding it, may allow others to judge the general contribution of an author.

These days, more and more web services lack the minimal respect for the user's privacy, but not allowing the users to completely remove their accounts.
Gravatar is one example of such web services. Their explanation is surreal, at least: "Because of how our system works, we cannot delete accounts completely." How the system works when it doesn't have one user's account, and why it cannot work anymore if that user decides to remove his account, these are qustions beyond any technical explanation.
I don't understand why Techrepublic doesn't keep the users' images in it's own database for this version, deciding to push the users to a service which lacks the minimal choice of removing the user's account.

I think I see two different things here. At the discussion top I see "Follow Via: [rss] [email]".. what I want is "Follow Via: My Stuff". RSS is a nice option but I don't want to require my web browser rss tracking. This would also mean a third party sync option or only having discussions tracked in one browser on one machine. Email is also a nice option but switching between browser and email client constantly is not optimal; even with the email provided link. I'm pretty much lurking on the site all day; Ideally, I should be able to log in, load the My Stuff page and see notices of activity in discussions of interest. I should be able to check back to the tab, refresh and know that there are new comments in a followed discussion.

The second thing is the "notify me" checkbox in the comment input form, but not this comment reply form. I'm not sure where those notice are supposed to arrive; I've seen some notices in email but nothing more then that.

That's really my killer feature; being able to sit on a page and see notices that new comments are in my tracked discussions.

Is pretty awful. I really don't need to see a synopsis, just titles. Too little information takes too much space.

[i]Forums View More, that is[/i]

In the previous version of TR, I often saved articles and blog entries. I see they are still listed within my Favorites. What I don't see is how to continue that practice in the new version. I see Add Favorite for discussion items, but not for the source document. What am I missing??

(Also received Permission Denied error; grrr!)

Not a quibble on how things are working now, just a thought for the back of your collective mind...

It would be interesting to know who is voting a post up or down. Don't know how possible that would be to do, just think that it could be interesting.

being able to view posts that have been collapsed due to negative voting. ]:)

It's great that these show up in my posts, [b]but[/b] They show up with no indication as to which thread and which post in that thread they apply, nor any indication what content is in the clarification. This makes keeping track of those requests impossible.

[i]close tag[/i]
[i]flow[/i]

Gravatar allows you to use a different picture on a per-site basis. It's a good system, and I like it, but it's not for everyone and it's not a good thing that TR forces you to use it if you want to use a picture.

J.Ja

Huge! looks like it was designed for three year olds. Cludgy, Slow, you must be a big Java fan, No thumbs? No motivation. Can't find anything. What's inconvenient about the Gravatar site? Spending 20 minutes trying to come up with a new user name and password combo that they approved of only to discover that they have no stock icons available and then having to search through my PC to find something {Ahem} acceptable to use. Wasted half my morning, I'll have my boss contact you with any questions.

I haven't tried the "Favorite" functionality, that might do what you want.

J.Ja

I bet that policy doesn't apply to governments, for instance.

This is now my third or fourth Gravatar account, thanks to the fact I don't use the same email address everywhere for purposes of keeping things separated.

There's probably some specific cookie you need to accept to prevent that behavior -- something that registers as a "third party site" origin for the cookie according to your browser, perhaps, even though it is likely to be some TechRepublic-associated property (just with a different domain name).

It seems that nobody designs Websites to make things easy for people who care about the technologies they use.

Is there any chance you could summarize the feedback from the other discussion here so there's a central repository of feedback, rather than leaving feedback that has already been offered in its own little largely-ignored ghetto?

Since I can't tell at a glance what I have already read, I find that I just head for the last page of responses. What isn't working well for me is that I have to scroll to the bottom of the page in order to navigate through the pages.

Would it be possible to make page navigation available at the top of the page as well as the bottom? That would make it easier to get to the last page or wherever I have left off.

Unfortunately, the list of discussions is completely useless now. It shows my own comments; it gives me absolutely nothing about most recent comments to discussions. No matter how much activity goes on in a discussion, nothing changes on my discussions list unless I make a comment myself -- and even then, all it tells me is that I made a comment. Well, duh, I know I did, because I'm the person who made the comment.

I actually kinda like non-wrapping, as long as there's a 100 column width box to use (or more), guaranteed for any reasonable display resolution (600x800 and up) and any reasonable screen zoom (150%), because it encourages people to write code with lines of a reasonable length. Then again, I don't care much about Java, C#, and VB.NET -- and I know line lengths tend to need to be much longer in those languages.

I guess I'm just being a little self-centered when I say "So what?" about line wrapping.

Ideally, it'd be something that allows dynamic updates (JavaScript driven, in other words) but degrades gracefully so that a page reload will achieve the same effect if JavaScript is restricted or unavailable for some reason. Unfortunately, it seems like almost everybody in the world has forgotten about the concept of graceful degradation of interfaces.

The problem is all those asinine "smart quotes" on the Web. Jeebus cries, people, this is a textual medium perused by technically oriented people; we need characters that can actually be trivially duplicated from a standard QWERTY keyboard whenever at all reasonable. Copying text from articles and pasting them in comments has been kind of a problem because of auto-replacement of totally printable characters with totally unprintable characters off and on here at TR, and it drives me up the wall. People are bending over backwards to do things that shouldn't be done in the first place, putting ungodly amounts of effort into implementing systems to automatically change text so it's less usable. It's absurd.

Smart Quotes Considered Harmful

Read it for a start on understanding the problem, if you don't already get it.

When I click on an active discussion, the first thing I see is the top rated post and the next is the most recent post. When the top rated post is truncated, I can hit "Read Whole Comment" and see the whole of the post but I have no idea where to actually [i]find[/i] that post. The same thing goes for the most recent comment- I have to go digging to find it.

It would be great if the title appeared as a hyperlink to the actual post so that I can see what the post is in response to without having to go digging.

cute little kitty. Is that yours? or a public domain pic?

I saw that and wondered if I was going a bit strange. Or if it was something that only I was seeing. If the PTB are hoping that posts that fall beneath the negative rep tolerance don't get read, why put them on the front of the discussion as "Top Rated"?

As with any change this sweeping, I know that there will be some "shake out" time.

ETA: This post should have been in reply to Boxfiddler above. Not sure why it ended up where it did.

*sigh* Off to reformat the entire post before saving...

I never took the time to set up an avatar before, but I was considering it... until now.

Why should I fork over my email address(es) and to some extent my online identity, wade through a bunch of incomprehensible legaleze which becomes null & void when someone buys out gravatar next year anyway... when I have 3 (yea, count 'em 3) web servers in my basement on my own static IPs. I have the ability of hosting my own avatar [and my own email... another reason to not sign up "just anywhere" - extra spam... ] yet it's not an option to host one's own avatar?

A lot of the changes to the site I dislike immensely -- mostly because I just don't like change. [ I'm a serious subscriber to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra. ] Any time that an option to host ones own images isn't available sounds like there's an underlying (and underhanded) motive (even if it's just PHB foolishness) for the decision.

I'm just sayin'...
"Merch"

I have NO WAY of keeping track of the conversations, short of waiting for the email alert, getting an RSS feed (I really hate RSS feeds for busy conversations, its inbox overload), or hitting refresh and hoping to notice what's new, because the coloring of visited/unvisited doesn't work.

J.Ja

I often wished in the old style that a latest post carried a parenthetical hint, like (close to the top), or (near the middle), or (at the bottom) for longish threads, like this one is getting to be. The hyperlink would take you right to it.

I also miss knowing [i]who[/i] made the latest post.

But a few hundred thousand more lines of code.

there's also a serious lag going on somewhere?

a way that we could publicly expose a bug list. It probably won't be something on the TechRepublic site, but we might be able to do a shared Google Doc for those interested.

No promises yet, but I'm exploring the possibilities.

below the narrow blue bar, I suspect we're going to be seeing even more Questions in Discussions from newbies. Had I not known to look around hard, I would have never seen them there. To deal more effectively with that long standing problem, those links need to be [b]WAY[/b] more noticeable.

[i]typo[/i]

On the laptop, that's my preferred method.

Looking forward to it.

Wrap-around hugs. :x :x

Get that poor thing out of there before it gets crushed! :D Don't know why you can't see yours. I'm not having any trouble seeing mine. My peeve at the moment is not having the capability to view this thread expanded. I've set it as my default, but it's displaying collapsed and there's no view option to select. So I'm getting to go through it post...by post...by post...

I've selected the ALL option for the thread because, like others, I'd rather scroll than click. But, since I can't expand the posts, I have to click next on each post. But when the page redraws, it falls from all posts to 100.

Even more interesting, the All option doesn't appear to be displaying all posts. Jason's introduction isn't visible at the top of the list.

I'm going to practice patience, assuming that there are still a lot of bugs to work out and lots of frantic behind the scenes activity...

I left a comment in the other thread https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-340622 so I won't repeat it here.

Another annoyance (perhaps it is just me), is that I have to click "next" or specific comment links twice (double-click) or the page just sits there. This new interfacve may be "modern" and cutesy but it is a PITA, in colloquial acronyms.

For those who have login or permission denied messages when trying to psot comments, if you logout, delete all techrepublic.com and techrepublic.com.com cookies and then login in a new window the problems go away (or have so far).

I sent you the plain text that I pulled together. I'll link the Google resource when I have it done.

ETA:

Linked: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoRoJ-kx4ueVdHl0OV9tQWd5U1RkdmIxb3QzY0wyV2c&hl=en&authkey=CJmbw7sB

I know they allow per email address, but I didn't see anything about per site.

Kinda too bright, after reading thru this thread, my eyes seem more tired than they should.

Any thoughts on a less bright white, turned down the brightness but still I think a less white, white would be better for reading.

Jason, the posts I've made in the Water Cooler discussions [u]do not[/u] appear in the badly mis-titled My Discussions (should be My Posts).

What I was expecting to find in My Discussions was the same thing we had before: a list of the discussions you have subscribed to, sorted chronologically by most-recent update, and including both the thread title and the title of the newest post.

But I've got expanded mode back now, with the Expand/Collapse option available. Thank you very much!

thanks for that perspective, will note it for feature improvements.

the page vanishes is and the title in the tab just changed to a URL

NT

J.Ja

Of course we can't make everyone happy, but we're working on it. We don't pretend to be perfect and all knowing. If you have constructive feedback, we are listening and want you, the community to take a role in shaping this site. TR didn't change a lot for a long time due to resources, but this is changing and the site will continue to evolve. Here's your chance at being a productive, civil member of the community. It's your choice.

as some have noticed we changed domains with the redesign, tr.com.com tr.com, which may be causing some issues. or you have a legit bug! Try clearing your cookies and let us know if you still see login problems.

please let us know your browser, OS and steps to reproduce. thanks!!

Motorola Bravo, Android.

Doesn't show all posts in a thread. Definitely the new format, didn't have that problem with the old.

[i]typo[/i]