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Let's put it to the vote...

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67 replies

by ansugisalas 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

We go with boolean vote rules; You have to vote + or - to each alternative; if for example you agree with "The new forums are a pain" but not with "I hate this so much, I don't know if I'll stick around", then you put a + on the former, and a - on the latter. Remember: Vote boolean, + is agree, - is disagree; one for each alternative, otherwise there's no comparing the results. This way we can tell that if the middle three results have high + but the last one has low + then most are still willing to stick it out, for example.
The alternatives are as follows:

The new TR is better and easier:

The new TR is not better

The new TR is worse and more difficult to use

The new TR is a pain

I hate the new TR so much

67 replies

by ansugisalas

Besides, there's no-one here but us, anyway.
We regulars appear to account for over 80% of the comments, so who's to be offended?

As for "better", yes it's relative; but it's how the change has been advertised.
"Better" is also - more importantly - fully subjective : so everyone is entitled to a having a point of view, and there is no single "correct point of view". Which is why voting can make sense...

by tony hopkinson

it's not nice and a quick glance at the posting stats, shows to me they did something quite wrong.

The changes say to me that our conribution to the site was and is not valued.
Whether that's questions answered, or off topic.

by ansugisalas

it was not understood how it worked...
What does that TR blog say about pulling the plug on a project?

by charliespencer

"TechRepublic for Long-time Members and other Dummies!"

I really hate to jump on the pile, but after a month I still can't reliably find new posts that have been added to a discussion since I last read it. Maybe I need to come out of 'Expanded' mode and switch to 'Collapsed'? I also can't tell which discussions were spawned by articles vs. those that were started from scratch. The link at the top should only be present if there's an original article to link back to; a link that just loops back to the discussion is confusing.

I've tried to keep an open mind, but the using this layout is like going from a sedan to a dump truck, when you expected a sports car. At least it's eliminated the 'Seven Levels' limit; nobody is interested enough to go that deep any more.

by ansugisalas

but the lack of visibility doesn't go away, nor does the wading-hip-deep-in-molasses difficulty of navigating inside threads.

by tigger_two

Trying to use the site has gotten MORE difficult, not less so.

The problem is not that things have moved or changed, it is that things that worked have been removed and the replacements just don't bring the same value to the table. It is more difficult to navigate in general and things that were once a mouse click away now require multiple clicks or are simply not available at all.

I've written easily half a dozen things that I would have loved to post as discussion starters- including one aimed directly at you regarding NASCAR, the tenth anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's death, and the impact it has had- if any- on the sport. I wanted to post at a time that I knew you were on so that I could get your input to it- as I knew you would have some.

In the old days, I would have looked at the ever helpful "Contacts Online". Now that is gone and I can't just send you a PM because they broke that function. Net result? While it might have been a good conversation, it never got posted.

Finding new posts is this side of impossible which I really think degrades the discussions, regardless of what section they are in. If you begin a discussion- especially in the Water Cooler section- and it falls off the front page, there is no good way to find it again. Getting to a list of discussions that is useful is difficult at best.

To your car analogy, it is more like being promised a Ferarri and getting a brick with wheels.

by neon samurai

I'm not keeping an RSS for each conversation and email doesn't cut it either. Watching the hot list in the discussions works as long as the discussion is in the top five but soon as that happens one doesn't get any simple notice in the user profile area. In the discussions, a "new" flag on comments within the last two days or current day helped also.

Now it's barely keep up with whatever few discussions are in the top three if you can remember what the post count was to spot if it's increased; and then if you can spot the new posts among all. After that, the discussion dies quick for lack of tracking.

by cmiller5400

[i]To your car analogy, it is more like being promised a Ferarri and getting a brick with wheels. [/i]

ROTFLMAO

by jfuller05

Why take away functions that worked perfectly? The my workspace was much better in the previous layout because:
-Your discussions were tracked with the latest post by a user other than yourself.
That is the most defining point. I can deal with a new glossy look to TR, while I don't care for the new look, I think that's a quibble. However, why change the navigation? I still haven't understood that. Why take away something that works and replace it with junk? I'm still not understanding.

I really liked the old workspace because it was just that: a workspace. Now, I have to wade through discussions to find a new comment and by that time I don't care anymore. I agree with all of your points.

I'm sticking around to see if good changes are made. I wonder if the staff understand that they are making the regulars upset? The average TR user probably doesn't care about all of the changes.

by rmerchberger

Ansu to keep his #1 spot on the "leader board?" ;-)

IMHO, that's the dumbest thing about the whole upgrade - constantly seeing the same 3 people who allocate more of their free time to this board than I have - seems like a waste of bandwidth to me. I wouldn't care so much if there was a "hide" button where one could change what side panels one sees (and even better - in what order)...

I'm just sayin',
"Merch"

by ansugisalas

I'll put in an equalizer right away! ;) Link will appear here, by magic, once I make it so:https://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-341561-3421080
Believe me, I have no interest in that spot. I keep hoping they'll convert the thumbs and figure them in, so someone else will be on the spot, so to speak.
BTW, another dumb thing - I am following you, and you can't know it if I don't tell you. Silly, ain't it? :p

by tigger_two

But it's a good point.

I have no problem with the Top 100. It has been around as long as I have. But sticking it on the sidebar doesn't really do much positive in my opinion. And I am still trying to understand the whole "Vote" thing. I like being able to communicate to a poster that I found value in their post, but the vote mechanism really doesn't allow me to do that. It is completely anonymous and, as we have proven several times so far, it can be messed with.

*sigh*

by seanferd

Power users should really probably be people more deeply invested in IT professionally. I do try to answer Questions, but I'd have to say that a significant number of them are stupid user (or stupid admin) tricks, not the heavy duty technical questions of the days of yore (and tech points).

Not sure how that function would be arranged - my take would be to dismiss it entirely. (Which, of course, you can do with the right browser and add-ons.)

by ansugisalas

Convert them 1:1, and let the thumbs alone decide who are the "power users".
The top 100 posters is not the same as the "most valuable members", I mean, srsly!!!
If you then want to make a conflated listing too, base it on the average weekly post count; that'd still leave the valuable members on top.

by who am i really

I can't vote + or -
I can click options in polls, but can't submit
I can post, but can't edit my posts
- clicking edit in Firefox goes to blank white screen,
- in IE6 the edit button doesn't even show on the page,
- and IE7 doesn't stay logged in, clicking the edit button in IE7 goes to a login page loop
- also IE7 requires 20+ yes, OK clicks just to display any page on the site

Sorry TR I'm not disabling NoScript, FlashBlock or AdBlock Plus
Sorry TR I'm not lowering the security settings from High in IE

saying i have to do that for the site to function is like saying :

[b]poke a few holes in yer next condom before you use it
or
hey doc you don't need to scrub before performing that surgical procedure
or
don't wear a helmet ...
or
saying to a Nascar Driver, "it's OK you don't need to use that annoying 5 point harness during the pre race test laps or during the race"

-
I'm driving a $5,000.00 piece of equipment here and I'm not lowering the security settings[/b]

by hal 9000

Surely those are not mandated for drivers. You need a 6 point Harness as those 5 Point Harnesses can do a lot of damage if you are in a collision.

As far as TR goes it's a ongoing Train Wreck that is getting worse not better.

Col

by seanferd

You don't need to disable noscript, but you do need to allow cbsinteractive and bnet for those bits to functions. Yeah, they have .... spread out on every related domain, now.

by who am i really

allowing the 5 top level domains
and it still doesn't work

no matter what I do with the exception of disabling NoScript
as mentioned in the "feedback" thread

I can't edit my posts

...

by ansugisalas

Put in a (-) vote here, for the cause.
It's probably not a good idea to vote down the OP, it will be a mess if people will have to expand it manually to see how the voting will be handled...

by hal 9000

We all know just how easy it is to mess with the results. So anything shown here is meaningless. ;)

Col

by tony hopkinson

14th in the power user stakes is that spamming fuckwit Anty1.

Generated a lot of traffic that Anty1 fellow, credit where it's due eh?
Wonder how many times he'll have to post Burberry to push into the top three?

That would be a good advert wouldn't it?

Sheesh

by tony hopkinson

pratt posting a well done message for every TR Blog in 2007, with a subject of Burberry.
Click View all, on ths Power Users waffle over to the right, there he is loud and proud at number 14.
You only need to read one of his missives, they are strangely similar....

by tigger_two

I'm surprised that there aren't more spammers in the Top 100. They post- however mindlessly- and therefore generate page views and traffic.

The one who surprises me is Jardinier. He hasn't been around in AGES and yet he still shows up in the Top 100. I can't for the life of me figure out why.

by maxwell edison

He's been around, but for some reason it hasn't registered with the TR data base.

Nonetheless, you're right. That top 100 is a joke.

P.S. and in some ways, Ansu has spammed his way to the top! It just depends on one's definition of spam. (Such as posting and/or replying to anything and everything for its own sake.)

by ansugisalas

they'd base the top 100 solely on the former thumbs score.
There really is no need to make ubiquitously visible that, which is otherwise ubiquitously visible anyway.
But I resent your implication that I post for no reason, or without rhyme :p

by boxfiddler Hot topic

if a member hasn't logged in since 'the enhancement', their last seen date is their join date.

by jasonhiner

The Top 100 as it is today won't be around too much longer. We're going to be changing the formula to put a lot more emphasis on quality contributions and not just the amount of posts. With the recent upgrade, we're now tracking a number of different user interactions on the site that give us a sense of how people use on the site and how much their contributions are valued by their peers. More to come on that soon.

Also, the term "Power Users" will be replaced with something like "Most Active Members" or "Most Valuable Members."

by tigger_two

I can think of people off hand who are more candidates for that Top 100 than some of the people currently there.

Keep the information coming!

by maxwell edison

After two or three seconds, your options .........

But suffice it to say, I liked the old layout better - much better.

by ansugisalas

Assuming ten voters:
7 chose to vote against the "is better" (some may have chosen not to be negative, alternatively, 8:- 1:+ 1:0), and 10 chose to vote for the "not better".
With 8 votes for "worse" that would suggest that two think the new is on a par with the old (or is that 9+ 1- for "worse"?) .
Of these 8, 1 doesn't find the new TR to be a pain (or is it 9+, 2-?).
And, surprisingly, it seems that half of those eight are unsure if they'll stay (that's a far reach assumption, but at least I know there were plus votes for that, and they're gone now, so that suggests a fifty-fifty agree/disagree ratio).
As you all know there are a gazillion possible combinations, so I took the easiest one and ran with it... but this should be a wake-up call for the PTB, regardless of the low scientific merit of the sampling.

by tigger_two

Basing the Top 100 on the old thumbs up or point system may not be the best of approaches either- but it really depends on what you consider valuable. Another site I am tied to uses a reputation points system in conjunction with a "Thanks" system. The advantage there is that you know who has given you thanks or rep. It is considered to be good manners to thank people when they give you rep points. That obviously won't work here as PM seems to be broken.

Back in the day, your blurb- the thing that tells you who posted and the date- also had a note to tell people if and where you stood in the Top 100. That went away with Tech Points (if I get a million, can I get a pony?) when "Thumbs" were introduced.

It would be interesting to see the Top 100 based not on quantity but quality of posts, regardless of location of said post. That said, I don't know how to make that work except by some kind of reputation system.... like voting. Even at that, the system is open to abuse- but then, we know that. In addition, value of content isn't something that can be determined in word count or any other single thing. Some people love me. Others hate me.

Personally? I have been at the top of the Top 100. Being there conferred on me the appearance of a supermodel without the need to diet and inflated my bank account by millions. If you aren't reaping those benefits, I suggest you remind the PTB to give you your due. :D

by ansugisalas

total votes generated divided by total # posts...
That'd put me solidly at 0,0000001 or something :D

by charliespencer

We don't need a system to inform people of a member's reputation. True community is built by participation. Interact with people and develop your own opinions of them. I realize this may take a new member a couple of months (something that is apparently unacceptable in this era of 'instant e-gratification'), but it sure seemed effective in forming a community here that gives (gave?) a damn.

by nicknielsen

There were people at the top who never obviously participated in the site outside their blogs. Limiting it strictly to quantity of participation gives me a run at the top 100. If they base it strictly on quality, I've got a better chance of winning the lottery.

Not that it will keep me away if they get the forums fixed. :D

by codepoke

The new TR is better and easier: -

The new TR is not better: +

The new TR is worse and more difficult to use: -

The new TR is a pain: -

I hate the new TR so much: -

I am turned off by eye-candy and pointless whitespace. Ads are a necessary evil, and ya'll's aren't overwhelmingly bad. I just want to read the expert commentary then all the intelligent comments. I don't want to click anything. I want to be able to set my prefs so every time I see an article, the comments automatically expanded every single time. Give me that and you can bury the comments under as many helpful clicky-things as it takes to make you happy. Right now I have to click wait to see the comments, which is what I had to do before so to me there's no improvement. Just more noise before I get to the signal.

I found the two upvote comments appearing before the comments extremely confusing until I figured out what they were. After looking at the feature for a while, I now know I can safely ignore it, so they add another 6 inches of scrolling to the clicks I need to click to get down to where I have to click and wait to see all the comments expanded.

The feature that keeps me from seeing all the thumbnails in a slide show without clicking is annoying, too. It's snazzy, but it's annoying. I liked being able to see all the thumbnails on one screen and click the two that interested me, but it is nice that they are a little bigger. Now I don't need to click through to the picture so often to figure out what it was. That's probably an acceptable tradeoff.

All in all, there's nothing in the new TR about which I'm passionately positive or negative. The more cleanly you give me the article and the comments, the happier I'll be, but I know that's no fun for designers.

by tigger_two

Where you see "Welcome Codepoke". Go to My Account. Go to Preferences. From there, you can set your preference to view "Expanded". What *should* happen is that the thread will always be expanded for every discussion you open to read.

I had heard that some people were having issues with this, but I believe that they were addressed a couple of weeks ago.

by nicknielsen

It was fixed on day 2 or 3. I'm still waiting for the option to set the default number of posts per page to "All."

by charliespencer

Are those of us who are prolific posters any more (or less) valuable than those who respond to questions? If it hadn't been for getting answers to my questions, I probably wouldn't have stuck around here. I didn't even participate in the Discussions for my first couple of years.

by seanferd

I would have to guess that the issue is elsewhere, and not with NoScript. You wouldn't have something like a too-generalized adblock rule, would you?

by who am i really

on two separate systems
one in workgroup
one on domain

Workgroup PC is XP-Pro SP3
Domain PC is XP-64 x86

I tried IE6 on the first system
and the Edit button doesn't even appear

the Domain PC was deployed with IE7 (not my idea)
so I tried that and I get the login loop when trying to do anything on this new site
clicking edit goes to login page
logging in goes back to main page
clicking through to where I was and clicking edit goes to login page
and round and round it goes

machines are at separate locations
and totally different ISPs and connection types

by seanferd

Preserve your techrepublic.com cookie. I had a variety of login-oriented problems until I did that. Maybe it will work for you.

Of course, sometimes the site just plain doesn't work. Click to vote and it loads a 404 page or other odd behavior.

edit: I am editing from IE6 right now. With the ghastly poo-brown graphics. But I like the post layout way better!

edit: No, this browser won't keep the auto-login. Cookies be damned for IE6. Of course, nothing renders properly, but that is mostly a plus from my perspective.

Right at the moment, I find (with several browsers) that voting a comment up visibly subtracts a vote. However, there is no change if I clear cache and reload the page.

by tink!

but it's disappeared. Maybe a glitch? Maybe I didn't hit "Add"? Who knows?

(and I don't remember what I posted so reposting is not an option...lol)

by ansugisalas

Maybe it got shaken loose when this thing was tornadoed out of Kansas... ;)
Now we got that feature tested too.

by jasonhiner

First of all, I want you all to know that we constantly read your comments, evaluate your feedback, and synthesize it into our plans and priorities. We understand the frustration that you have with a few of the new things (because, frankly, we have some of the same frustrations).

More on that in a minute, but I also want you to remember that we would only undergo a big upgrade like this -- which is time-consuming and expensive -- if we were confident that we could deliver a better user experience overall. We're confident that we've done that, even though we still have some important things that we really want to tweak and improve (especially in the Forums).

However, to help provide some perspective, here are a few of the highlights that we've seen from this upgrade:

-- Visits to the TechRepublic site are up over 25%
-- The number of people signing up for a TechRepublic membership on a daily basis has doubled
-- Sharing TechRepublic stuff on social networks is up dramatically (still nailing down a number)
-- Our content is easier to find in Google (and other search engines) than ever before and that is bringing more new people to the site
-- The TechQ&A has seen a major surge in activity and the quality of the questions being asked is a lot more impressive

Those are just a few of the successful aspects of this upgrade. I'd share more but I don't want to bore you or toot our horn too loud. The point is that there's a lot of good stuff happening.

The area where we still have the biggest challenge is the Forums. Honestly, we spent more time on this than anything else in the planning stages of this project because it is one of the most complicated parts of the site and it is the one place where every little thing you change is going to have unintended consequences for users. However, there were some things that we simply had to change as part of the upgrade to our backend platform and there was another set of things that we decided to change in order to bring our site more up-to-date with standards and best practices on the Web.

Forums is the one part of this upgrade that is still the biggest work-in-progress. We knew it would be. We couldn't rip out the old "Workspace" (which we desperately needed to do) and introduce a new format for the threads without having some unintended consequences in the process.

Since our UAT in January and the official launch of the site a month ago, we have been hammering on TR and making our notes on things that need to be improved, and continually synthesizing the feedback from all of you into those plans. We're targeting two main areas that we want to improve in the near term -- 1.) The display and format of threads (reducing the amount of scrolling to navigate threads and making it easy to tell which posts you've already read) and 2.) Making it easier to track the discussions that you are participating in.

For those having difficulty navigating discussions in the new TR (and we know that's a lot of you), we apologize for the inconvenience. Our promise is that we're going to keep hammering away at it until we deliver what we all generally consider is a better experience. The good news is that with the new backend platform that we've put in place with this upgrade, we can make incremental changes a lot more quickly than we could in the past. Stay tuned.

by ansugisalas

By the way... I just voted your post up and there was a wee bug: it read +11 before, but it read +1 afterwards.

Sorry for the megaphone tactics, but please let's hear regular reports as long as the site is under work, otherwise we get jumpy.
Now that we have feedback, we can go back to generating non-spam posts ;)

by tigger_two

I know it can be a pain to keep us all updated on this stuff but it is REALLY good to know which of our concerns are on the current list of things to address. The changes you outline will be incredibly helpful.

Please don't lose sight of- as you implement these changes to improve navigation on the site- the very real desire to easily see WHO made the last post in a discussion. Just as I follow particular people on Twitter, I follow particular people here. Knowing when/where they are posting is VERY helpful.

Keep that communication coming!

by who am i really

I don't keeps anything

all history, cookies etc.
are toasted at every browser close

and I don't keep my login info
I always uncheck "remember . . ." checkbox

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