TechRepublic's official feedback thread for the 2011 upgrade

I read in the water cooler, I will have to look again.

No, guess I have bugs, not the site.

I received 2 Alerts emails today.
The first one for the Q&A section was fine and the link worked and took me right to the question.

The second for this thread had only one clickable link, and it ended up as a blank (white) page.

This was a text only email. I was able to copy and paste a link. But, it took a very long time to load the page.

Chas

the longer one looks at it.

[i]Losing the blue post titles might help that. Or making it a deeper, 'grayer' blue, like what's in the 'Power Users' box.[/i]

This is the URL for the full, expanded thread: https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-340633?count=all&view=expanded&tag=discussion-thread;thread-sort

This is the URL for the thread, from Jason's first post, as accessed from links to individual posts: https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-340633-3412071?tag=discussion-thread. This thread, on my system (WinXP SP3, FF 3.6.13, NoScript allowing all except Google-Analytics and admeld), displays collapsed, doesn't give me the Expanded/Collapsed option, but allows me to display all posts.

Added: Interesting. Stripping out what appears to be the post number ('-3412071') and refreshing the page gives me everything I'm supposed to get.

Getting rid of all cache might help.

I am also getting compatibility issues, BTW.
I just now accidentally opened the site in IE (rather than Opera), and I got a blank when I tried to reply this.

Not to sound paranoid; but I see a list of people whom I'm following, but I don't see a list of people following me.
Having both would make it easier to fix the many cases of broken contact-hood, since they're usually mutual if they're for real.

messing around with arcane arithmetics again....

Look at the unofficial poll; last I looked it was 7 to 2 in favor of good, but bad was still "top" rated.
I guess it could be browser cache issues, but if not, then it must be doing something just plain wrong.

And everything else I could think of. Finally got to see my own avatar about 6.5 hours after loading it to Gravatar.

I use Safari on Mac and have yet to try reaching the site with either FF or Omni. Not sure I want to...

On Safari on Mac. No love, hon. Sorry.

Have you tried a browser other than FF?

My Touch isn't having that issue so far. Major difference is that my Touch uses the house wireless connection.

I have to wait until May to get an iPhone on Verizon. Early adoption would cost me around an additional $100 a month, so I'll wait.

*sigh*

David's right, you know. TR is in the impossible position of trying to please everyone.

There is a Google Docs link around page six (assuming you view 50 entries per page) that is attempting to gather up the issues in a way that will enable the tech team at TR to address them without things falling off radar.

Oh wait! I have the link right here... https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tyt9_mAgySTdvb1ot3cL2Wg&authkey=CJmbw7sB#gid=2

The last TR update was so many years ago that I was still using a Nokia cell phone that closely resembled a brick. You didn't get thumbs up, you got points for answering questions... if you were lucky. Peter Spande hadn't been replaced by Jason Hiner yet, and we still wrote our own News.

In twenty years of working in technology, the only constant I have seen is the mandate, "Change or die".

Oz, to be fair, TR has asked NUMEROUS times for feedback on what people want. I have personally started a few posts requesting such information. VERY often, all anyone got was crickets- INCLUDING me.

My opinion? They are doing their best. Realistically? They pay for the bandwidth and they assume all the risk. If they re-design my playground every few years, it's a small price to pay.

That Google docs link? There is a page JUST for suggestions.

Edit for typos and poor sentence construction

To reproduce:

1. I set my preferences to be "Expanded".
2. View thread
3. Set thread to "Collapsed"
4. Click a page number at the bottom

Result: Go back to the first page, in expanded again. This is NOT consistent, I don't know why. It's a now and then kind of thing.

J.Ja

We're rolling out a google powered search solution in a couple weeks.

what do you mean by "retain the search form on the result page"? the form remains in the top right. Are you suggesting it should be somewhere else on the page? thanks for your feedback.

I moderate another forum that allows people only 30 minutes to edit their own post. Beyond that time limit, they have to reach out to a section moderator.

The rationale is that that once something has posted, people generally will respond. If the original post is edited to remove references to the response, it leaves the respondent looking like an *ss.

I would hazard a guess that I am a small minority on this, but I would love to see an "edit" time clock that would disable the ability to edit after a specified- and communicated- length of time.

Edit: Clarity

According to Jason, this will be addressed in User Preferences.

Check out https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tyt9_mAgySTdvb1ot3cL2Wg&authkey=CJmbw7sB#gid=2 for better information. Look on the Bugs sheet- Line 26.

lots of good points here. we'll work on refining the layout over next quarter or two. It's a big site, this will take time. The list of post launch features and tweaks is huge. we'll keep coming back to you all to get feedback on what's most important.

We're working to improve the speed and loading of comments, including the use of ajax where it makes sense.

in the next several months we'll be rolling out some mobile versions of the site as well. stay tuned.

Roughly every ten or so minutes.

I'll add it to the Bug sheet.

Bug sheet is here: https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tyt9_mAgySTdvb1ot3cL2Wg&authkey=CJmbw7sB#gid=2

some like big font, some like small, collapsed/expanded, potatoes, tomatoes, we're working on giving you all more control over how you consume the site. more to come!!

hot tip - changes to user ranking are coming, and those that are helping answer questions and contribute positively to the community will definitely get some points! so keep an eye on the unanswered questions!

I'm seeing a lag in the last two hours or so between posting and smart device updating. I think that they are trying to stabilize things and possibly resulting in breaking others.

Please report this Bug here: https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tyt9_mAgySTdvb1ot3cL2Wg&authkey=CJmbw7sB#gid=2

I have a pair of glasses that have a number four rose tint specifically for online use. They help a ton.

Still- the brighter background has caused me to use my sunglasses for reading the forum. The eye strain is pretty harsh.

Please submit this as a Suggestion here: https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tyt9_mAgySTdvb1ot3cL2Wg&authkey=CJmbw7sB#gid=2
I haven't yet but will add my name to your report if you get there before I do.

From Original Thread:

My Links
Please tell me you didn't get rid of the My Links section! I had several articles bookmarked and tagged there and now I can't find it under My Stuff anymore...

[Reply from Jason Hiner]
It's still there
Go to your profile. Go to My Stuff. Go to My Favorites (that's what My Links has been renamed to).

[My reply]
No, actually it's not
Yes, I looked there already. I looked everywhere. All of my links are gone; there is nothing listed under My Favorites.
Can you tell me how I might get them back? Please?

EDIT: Issue added to Bug Sheet (Bugs - line 39)

I've set my preference for expanded

but when I navigate via links in my stuff

the pages always open collapsed

I've been getting 2 lots of 2 E-Mails daily with supposedly listings of my postings here one the Normal PreUpdate one and a new one. The New one isn't working it leads to a dead link. ;)

Col

Justin has a point.

You said:

> We haven't changed THAT much in the community, because we know that it's hard on the power users that have established patterns of working with the site.

Speaking only for myself personally:

1. The last time there was a major site overhaul/redesign, my approach to keeping up with the site was rendered essentially unusable because mass management of email alerts evaporated.

2. Off and on over a couple of years, I mentioned this, though after a while I stopped struggling to keep up by way of that workflow (see below). Unfortunately, nobody did anything about how broken it was.

3. I finally switched my approach to doing things to a completely different, less efficient (for me) way of doing it, which involved visiting the Website to use the list of site updates. It worked well enough for me to just keep up with maybe half as many discussions for a given amount of time as I used to.

4. Visited link colors stopped working in many cases after some minor changes to the site. At first, this more than doubled the effort it takes to keep up with discussions, because I did not have a quick at-a-glance way to see what comments I had or had not read, which is kind of a problem for high-traffic discussions.

5. Eventually, I figured out the necessary arcane incantations that were required to actually get visited links to show up properly for me.

6. While the group at last summer's TR in-person event discussed the coming changes, I brought up the horrific email alert management interface and the visited links issue. The software developer who was there (and maybe you too -- I do not recall for sure) assured me that someone would be looking into these things, especially the visited links thing (though the other was more important).

7. On Sunday, the overhaul was rolled out. Neither of these problems was fixed. One of them was worse than before. In addition to that, the way I had been limping along (using the discussion updates page) without my previous means of keeping up with discussions (email alerts) had evaporated entirely.

I spent a couple of hours over the last couple days -- a couple of hours; that is ridiculous -- editing my email alert settings for discussion subscriptions in the hopes I would not fall out of discussions entirely while I waited for someone at CBSi to come up with something that might make it reasonable for me to keep up with discussions in the long run. Having to manage every discussion subscription separately is not a long-term solution, though. It is far too labor-intensive. It is temporary while I hope that it will be different from the last few years, when every time someone broke something I used on the site it would just stay broken. I went from being consistently among the top three active members to being peaking at about #10 at my best, and slipping down to 80 or so at other times. I really hope the fact it is now worse than that for me actually gets some attention.

. . . because this time I am not sure I can find a work-around that will work in the long term. I might just become one of those TR writers that never interact with the community, because community discussion is not a paying day job; I only have so much time.

So. Maybe you "haven't changed THAT much" but, from my perspective, you changed a lot of what matters most (where "you" means "some set of people at CBSi and TR who made these decisions", and not necessarily you personally).

I have received emails from others who are having similar problems, though. Maybe "we", a dozen or so people, are the only people who have these problems -- but I for one would not like to stay marginalized for long. I am waiting to see if things get better for usability from my perspective; hope springs eternal, and I hope the fact that I'm staring down the barrel of complete unusability of discussions in the long term (for me, at least) is just a temporary hiccup. On the other hand, if I am perceived to be in a minuscule, unimportant minority, I guess I cannot fault "you" guys if you decide the cost/benefit ratio is not high enough to fix my problems.

You say to "Give it a few days." Fair enough. I will probably give it a few months, if need be -- as long as I can reasonably hold out. If something does not change for me, though, the time will come eventually when I just stop trying to keep up with discussions.

I have an idea that might help everybody a bit. Here it is:

Set up a bug tracker.

Seriously. This solves several problems:

1. You would not have to deal so much with duplicate reports of the same problem.

2. When there are duplicate bugs filed, you can merge them or at least close one with a note to check the other.

3. When a bug starts getting attention from developers, it can be marked as such so that people feel like they are actually being heard and their problems are being addressed -- so they stop complaining about something that should be fixed in short order.

4. When there is a reported issue that is not deemed suitable for fixing, an explanation can be posted in a central location so people will not keep requesting the same thing.

5. You get a brag list for concerns that have been addressed. Even if someone's pet issue has not been addressed, knowing that others' issues have been fixed helps them understand that the developers are accomplishing things, and they just have to wait for their issue's turn.

I do not know how much say you have over something like the idea of using a public bug tracker, but maybe if you like the idea you can spitball it at a meeting, at least. Frankly, the only reason to avoid using a public bug tracker for a community-oriented site that comes to mind would be trying to hide the fact you do not want to serve community needs. I really doubt that is the case with TR, though; I just think that communications are breaking down somewhere, and the result is a pretty chaotic "feedback thread" with several disgruntled users making the majority of the notable noise -- and understandably so, I think, given that breakdown in communication.

That's how it looks to me, anyway. Hopefully my suggestion helps. I just want everyone to be happy at the end of the day.

Every time I click on the next comment ina thread, Most of my screen is filled with all the Bumpf about Techrepublic and advertising, so I have to scroll down to see the comment. That is Poor.

Also at the bottom of each comment there used to be a 'next' tag, and this is gone, so that after I have read a comment I have to scroll up again to find the 'next' tag. Not Good.

Pretty looks good...
Need to see whts Further...

is that, when I click on a thread link, the page displayed doesn't even show me the first post until I scroll down past "Top Rated" and "Just In". Because of these and headers and adverts and the wonderful new spacious layout, the actual subject of the thread is a page and a half down.

I've no doubt that someone else has mentioned this - and almost certainly in this thread, but I haven't read through because I have rubbed the skin off my index finger on the scroll wheel, zipping down the narrow track of the stuff I want to read and admiring the clean white space to the left and right (there's a LOT of it).

God! It's SO BRIGHT.

In the previous version, I quite remember adding my personal photo. I browsed the local drive and uploaded it somewhere inside Techrepublic systems. I suppose that they didn't linked the image to my local drive, eh?
Anyway, I wasn't asked to create a new account with another web service, as it is now. And, what really makes me angry is that Gravatar doesn't delete the user accounts at request.

The tabs under Q&A are great, but after reading a thread and submitting a post, the only one-click way I have found to get back to the top level is to click the "Q&A" at the top of the page.

But when I do that, it always goes back to "Newest" - even if I was reading through one of the other tabs like "hottest" or "unanswered"

It would be nice to have a one-click way to get back to the top level of the tab I was already reading, instead of needing to start over again.

At the bottom of the discussions, there is a series of page counters for as many pages may be using 50 comments per page.
Roght now there are 8 pages of comments. The counter shows:
1 ... 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
I really don't get the dots between 1 and 2. It looks very non-archimedean.
When there are 5 pages or less, the counting is like this:
1 2 3 4 5
without the dots.

I can't think of a better way to say it, so: "What he said."

My few piddly gripes with the site before were not addressed. I have much bigger problems with it now. Sometimes an expert can be so caught up in academic theory that the reality falls short.

I've considered it more than once:

step 1, host avatar image on my own managed server
step 2, give TR my avatar URL
step 3, collect the logs as all you other TR readers download my avatar image
step 4, (uh.. ok.. I got not setup four yet)
step 5, Profit!! (this is where figuring out step four comes in ;) )

I'm not really sure how much of a concern it is but it does present an option to collect information on fellow TR readers.

so you expressed what you don't like, so what elements would be useful to display?

thread title, who started it, who last commented? and/or contacts that last commented? link to your comment?

Set yourself a number of posts per page. Such as 100.
The, go into yoru address bar, find "count=100" and change it to "Count=0.5"

You will now see several posts per page, but have twice as many pages as you have posts.

Lower is even more fun.

around posts.

But I think many of the bits I had problems with have been improved.

But the pagination thing - yow.

who insisted in typing in ALL CAPS because it was easier for him to read.

Both "normal" and "accessibility" browser settings have been around since, like, Mosaic. I'll adjust the browser to work for me - why suffer or expect the internet to change for you? Don't get me wrong - a lot of sites aren't set up for accessibility settings, and need to be changed. But why go too far for some particular flavor of accessibility, especially if the "better" font style is now also lighter?

Sort of.

It's also time to take it easy on the melodrama.

I promise to bring it in a little, if I have been overly theatrical. Hope I haven't come off that way, but maybe I have.

We haven't changed THAT much in the community, because we know that it's hard on the power users that have established patterns of working with the site.

I think people have less of a problem with changing patterns and more of an issue with functions which no longer exist. I have to agree re: visited links, and the Q&A forum still has poor comment boundaries. And a weird thread structure, but I'm guessing that is fully intentional. Text entry boxes - I don't get these. Four line scroll box?

But, at the same time, we need to keep expanding and looking for ways to make this stuff easier and more approachable and more efficient

That runs counter to everything in the prior sentence. You've changed a look (and probably a lot of important backend, which is great), but you have not at all improved approachability or ease of use, or efficiency. Just not seeing that at all. It wouldn't look any more inviting to me as a new user, either, as opposed to a user who may be used to the "old ways". Even the straight BNet comment format is more readable than the ZDNet and TR forum formats (but still with the ultra-skinny fonts that look nearly grey on a white background).

I just now went and checked a webcomic I've been folllowing, and the comments I wrote in the feedback section... and now they have this gravatar next to them!!
And it's not like I've posted there through a login or anything, I just provided my email address in the comment form as required! :0
Talk about nebulous...

Where have the print article and save as pdf buttons gone??
I really like to have those feature so that I can read when offline, I don't have Internet all time from where I am!!!

I am hoping that I can at least choose avatars per-site from the same email address as Justin mentions.

I am still really not happy with TR pulling the avatar from my existing Gravatar account automatically. A note that an existing Gravatar was detected and an offer to use it would have been just fine, if automated social connectivity was what they were shooting for. But the current behavior is just wrong.

That page now only carries my last 100 posts. It doesn't have thread titles, it only updates if I post.

I want to know when people post to discussions I've subscribed to.

Web pages are most efficient when little scrolling is required. With the oversized everything and massive amounts of whitespace, the quantity of scroll inputs has multiplied greatly.

On the forums, there is more junk occupying space then forum posts.

The previous format was much more space and workflow efficient.

Also, the color choices for the links at top is very poor. An off white background with lite blue links and white selected link? Extremely poor choice.

The link I clicked on from the email gave me a blank page.
https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/103-340641-3413035&alertspromo=100901?tag=nl.rCOMBINED

Stripping out everything from '&alerts' and after gives me the post in question, but the thread is collapsed, with no option to expand it available.
https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/103-340641-3413035

If I strip what appears to be the post number— -3413035 —I get the entire thread, expanded and legible...and responsive.
https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/103-340641

ie. I'm looking at the google cahced version of

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=34&threadID=31941

clicking on the actual search result goes to page not found
using cached version goes to OP only
and I can't get any further down the discussion than the OP
as clicking any post in it returns to

Page Not found

[i]I would like to see the newest response that shows up on the front page of the discussion carry a hyperlink to where the response is added (See my comment, "Context is evereything"). [/i]

However. When I click on the link, it takes me to the post, but everything in the thread but that post is collapsed, despite my default setting of 'Expanded'.

Nice to see you good folks working on navigational things, for sure. Thumbs up! :D

Please pay a visit to this link. :0

https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/questions/103-340761?tag=mantle_skin;content

[i]fix link[/i]

edit
Ok, I just looked in on that again, and it's showing as a Discussion, with Requests for Clarification that show as 'normal' posts, with Reply AND Request for Clarification buttons.
Oh, my.