TechRepublic's official feedback thread for the 2011 upgrade

To a smiley face.

Might deflect the shilt that is sure to come.

Myself, I think you and your people done good.

As usual, TR uses a pleasing colour scheme, though a bit bland on a notebook without colour matching. Navigation is more complicated and will simply perpetuate the ongoing issue with people not finding their chosen content or posting in the wrong places.

NOTE: When you edit a comment, all previous formatting is lost and you have to space paragraphs all over again.

I've come to expect that though, no matter how many changes have been made and how many times TR asked for feedback to find out people want it simplied, it continues to look too busy and takes what would be very simple navigation and turn it into a confusing mess of links (techs, you can't live with 'em and you can't teach them what KISS means).

Oh hey, I just realised that, under a group of unrelated sidebars all offering links or ads, there is still a short Hot Discussions list (well a bunch of big blue bars with links anyway), hang on, it was on another page too, in a different place though.

Sorry but you guys could have done WAAAAAAAAAY better.

I know it takes a while to get comfortable with changes but this is just bad navigation gone worse. There's no logical layout, it changes depending on what page you are on, ads and galleries are mixed with links.

The right side bar is just a mix of rubbish with no logical layout at all. The last layout was the best yet, after many changes, but this is just good potential made to look like a mess.

Holy crap! Not only is my avatar missing, now I have to open a new account with another picture host. I only assume TR gets paid for image loads or something. So I grudgingly open an account with another hokey online host, pull my avatar from my current picture hosty, upload it and guess what? IT'S A DIFFERENT SIZE AVATAR NOW! So now I have to open in Fireworks, resize, trim redraw, all of my avatars (about 8 for the year) because, for some unknown reason, TR changed sizing and forces using their chosen avatar host. Thanks again fella's! Oh hey, look at THAT, ANOTHER mess of links in a big blue bar at the bottom of the page, NIIIIICE layout guys, didi everyone design a panel at home and then they were all just thrown onto a page with no rhyme or reason? ICK! Of course, you have to scroll by a hideously balanced left white space with bar after bar of links on one side, in order to get to it though.

Why do people do this when simple site changes to an existing format offer a vast improvements without redesigning the whole page and then reworking a ghastly layout for a year until it becomes sorta usable again. To think that with the money and resources C-Net has, this is the best they can come up with, a website that works like it was designed by n00bs on crack.

I've seen some sketchy changes here over the years, this has got to be just an early April fools days joke though.

I like the new profile layout. It's easier to follow contacts, update newsletter subscriptions, and set preferences. However, I can't seem to find an equivalent of the Updates listing from the old Workspace. Where is a list of the discussions I've subscribed to? I used this list to try to keep up with my subscribed discussions and now I can't find it.

Am I looking in the wrong place? Or is construction just not finished yet?

... after the content issues are sorted out.

First and foremost, I know how much work goes into something like this... you guys know that I'm real familiar with what these kinds of projects are like. I don't expect them to EVER be perfect or even go smoothly. The redesigned site I rolled out a few days ago was a year of work, and I'm very glad that my name wasn't attached to most of the project because I'm not thrilled with it...

The overall job done here is something to be proud of, and a lot of the feedback folks have been giving was obviously taken into account, and it's appreciated. So think of this as a "punch list", not as a set of "wow, this sucks!" criticisms.

One of the things that's really harsh on the eyes is this embedded effect on the text for all of the graphics. It's adding a slight drop shadow on the inside of the "bezel" that makes it hard to see.

Throughout, many of the color choices are making it VERY hard to read. White numbers on a light green button, for example (the comment counts), or a light green on a light grey background (like right above the box I'm typing in right now). White text on light blue buttons. All of these buttons need a heavier weight font so that they are readable.

The over all issue is one of contrast. The left arrows on the "Media Gallery" to the right are invisible for all intents and purposes... and I'm using a very high end monitor!

On the other hand, I like the increased font size very much!

The content areas are, for all intents and purposes, SMALLER. Why? Because the font size is cranked to a readable level (finally). I have no clue how i am supposed to include code samples in articles or comments when there is less than 100 characters' worth of width to work with. At least I use C# now where the whitespace didn't matter, but for Ruby, Python, VB.NET, etc. code... let's just say it's not going to encourage folks to post sample code.

The top few navigation bars are totally illegible.

The highlighted item in the "Blogs/Discussions" nav covers up the pipe character to the right of the button.

I like the "Collapse" on the giant buttons over the article. I never used them, and it's nice to be able to get those 150 pixels back.

The navigation, as is, is very poor. It will be extremely improved if the "blog" content goes into the main bins ("Mobile Development", "Leadership", etc.).

J.Ja

That's really odd, it seems like this kicked on/off thing is only happening to some people?

J.Ja

The votes shown in "My Stuff" seem to have no relationship to actual activity.

My picture in my bio box on my articles is missing.

In the bio box for authors, the normal right-click menu is broken.

J.Ja

I can down vote my own comment. I can up vote my own comment. Both are broken.

Down voting a comment when it is at "0" seems to not update the display to say "-1", but upvoting does.

J.Ja

The apostrophes are still messed up in many places. This is a Unicode issue, the system needs to replace the various apostrophe characters with the single one that HTML likes. A good example is the header on the poll here: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development/poll-are-microsofts-development-tools-headed-in-the-right-direction/3842

J.Ja

The water cooler is a leper colony. Unseen, untrackable, a lawless waste for the unseemly.That might be cool, in a banished to hell -sort of way, but you'll need to put a "My water cooler" list option on "My stuff", otherwise it's a given that we misfits will have to mingle with the posh people, just to keep track of each other and ourselves.

In English: Posts with the Off Topic tag don't show up in the "My Stuff", making the whole thing very unfriendly. There is a risk that people will just ignore the section, posting whatever in the discussions proper section in stead.That's not a threat, simly a prediction :D

Hi,
How can I save an article to my favorites on TechRepublic? I'm not talking about Internet Explorer's Favorites (if I was, I would be thrown out of TR). I'm referring to the list of favorite articles that every TechRepublic member can build - it used to be that every article had a Save button which would add it that member's list of saved aticles. I just read an article, but I don't see that Save link, just links to 3rd-party sites.
I hope that TR didn't get rid of that feature, since I use it often to access articles with good tips on any computer connected to the internet.
-Michael

I found the software area so useful and easy to navigate, now its awful, no filter for OS/Free/Date ect and the search section on the left is poor too. I simply wanted to search for backup software and its not possible unless you want to search 8000 pages manually.
I would put it back to how it was, unless there is more development on how it currently is. Or i am doing it wrong and cant see wood for trees?

Andy

Disgsutingly not good. Requires tremendous improvement. Too Slow!!!??? Unable to find many things easily. Too BIG FONTS and ICONS in Many places.
:(

Bring back the old one. It's much better.

EMD

and I will list the pros and cons of my experience.

Pros:
Profiles are organized better and include more information.
Overall, I think the site is organized better than before, but that doesn't mean I won't have to get used to it.

Cons:
Contrast. Right now, I'm typing in this comment box and I the black text on the baby blue box is very irritating...maybe it's just me?
Contrast throughout the site. Justin James covered it just fine in his comment.

When there are no comments to a post yet, it says, "The discussion hasn???t started yet. Why don???t you begin it." It should end with a question mark, not a period.

J.Ja

All you need is an email address and an image, plus then you can not only use it on our site but others as well.

From our perspective, we get a service that scales images well and keeps up with the latest security and decency filtering in images.

Win-win from our perspective.

It's a little weird that some of the content gets AJAX-y updated, but some doesn't. When I make a new post, it shows on my screen immediately, but the comment count doesn't change. When I vote up/down, the counter right next to the +/- buttons updates, but not the count in the listing below. Etc. It's just kind of weird to see the site act in some ways on a non-postback basis, but not in other ways.

J.Ja

When I do a "Share" to Facebook, the pictures Facebook wants to use are all totally wrong. The default (using the src_image header or meta tag, if I recall) should be either the TR logo or the article author's picture, not the first ad on the page.

J.Ja

The author's picture should appear at the beginning of the article to help readers quickly identify if an article is by their favorite authors.

J.Ja

The "Takeaway" area is good and I like that it's been tweaked a lot. But it's nearly invisible, with the light grey text on the white background and the light green "Takeway" text. My eyes float right over it, and straight to the actual meat of the article, rendering it less useful than it could be.

J.Ja

Look at the spam over by the water cooler, the OP has a -4, and yet it's "Top rated"...
Not how it's supposed to be, right?

With all of the low contrast going on, links really need underlining to be more obvious and visible. Just making them blue doesn't help them stand out, particularly to vision impaired users.

J.Ja

The links in the alerts email are broken. The links in the alerts email for the individual comments are not linked. Judging by the alerts email itself, I'm guessing that this is one of the "work in progress" items, though.

J.Ja

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. This could be easily fixed by adding larger values into the drop down, such as 1000 comments or more.

Finally, this gravatar thing is annoying, I don't intend to make an account, why would I need ANOTHER image hosting service, plenty of free ones online and I have my own web server.
The option to just provide a direct link would be nice.

All of my links, data & articles that I saved have gone up in smoke....Can someone at least return the ashes?
Totally disappointed. >:[

Looks good.

How are we supposed to know about this? There needs to be a link near the comments box for formatting help. I've never used the formatting because I have no way of finding out how to do the formatting.

J.Ja

Dim lTimeAtRes:
Dim sDisplayedValue:
Dim dtOne:
Dim C32Ext:
Set C32Ext = CreateObject("Object"):
lTimeAtRes = 0:
sDisplayedValue = Mid(vReturnVal,4):
If sDisplayedValue <> "" then:
if isdate(sDisplayedValue) then:
'Remove Date formating:
dtOne = DateSerial(mid(sDisplayedValue,7,4),mid(sDisplayedValue,4,2),left(sDisplayedValue,2)):
ltimeatres = datediff("M",Cdate(dtOne), Cdate(C32Ext.GetCRIVar("SY_Today"))):
End if:
end if:
vReturnVal = 750:
If lTimeAtRes => 12 Then:
vReturnVal = 250:
End If:
If lTimeAtRes => 36 Then:
vReturnVal = 0:
End If:
Set C32Ext = Nothing:

Fail

I'm attempting to mimic the behavior of the discussion threads to show the last commented on at the top. This allows some of the less interesting topics to drop off the list and not clutter my field of vision. Before you think me a complete moron, I did figure out how to to do it; however, the setting doesn't "stick." Every time I navigate back to the main page I have to re-set these preferences. A bit irritating, and I imagine it will only get more so over time.

Am I missing something? I do not see anywhere to set this as a static preference.

... it is completely unacceptable. It cuts off long lines.

J.Ja

I also noticed that when you do a FB share, it puts the count up (like it does for Tweets), but when your refresh the page, the count is blank.

J.Ja

Every site has their own list of what tags do and do not work. Some sites don't allow HTML, but prefer their own markup language (like Markdown). You might know about using pre, but not everyone else does.

And the pre tag formats them wrong anyways... look what happens to long lines, they run off the edge. Pre is truly the wrong tag. The *right* tag for code samples would do the following:

* Maintain spaces, indentation, tabs, etc. as types.
* Wrap overflow text.
* Use a fixed width font.
* Set the block in some formatting that makes it obviously separate from the main text.

J.Ja

Go to StackOverflow or MSDN and see how they do it. It's not just a matter of what we, the users should be doing. It's a matter of what TR needs to do. They need to provide a facility to post code samples properly, and they need to provide explanatory text.

I'm not avoiding your question, I already answered it above. :)

J.Ja

This is going to take some getting use to, a lot of getting used to..

Can't say if it's better yet, but I think you've been a bit too radical, my TR trained intuition is now failing me badly.

I also can't wait to try it on my wide screen monitor, I've a feeling it's going to suck even more than it used to.
Can I have a new wheel for my mouse, just in case please?

not nearly as useful as the old Print/View All, primarlly because the old way used the entire screen whilst the new way stays to a limited column size.

I do like that I can set my default view to expanded, however, and not have to click each comment to open and read.

Signing up for email alerts on a conversation that exists, but you are not posting in reply to the original item is "painful" to put it mildly. The checkbox isn't there, so you need to click the email subscribe button (which is like 30 x 30 and nearly invisible), then choose a bunch of options (which are not set to rational defaults), and then hope that the link takes you back from whence you came.

Please reinstate the simple "Subscribe to this conversation" link, and make the RSS subscription easier to get a hold of. Thanks!

J.Ja

KEY PROBLEM THERE!

It has a next link, but you don't know if it's a reply to the previous post or the OP without again scrolling down and finding its place. It's utter bollocks, a complete shite rebuild. They have made some bad changes in the past and slowly changed a link here or there to bring it into a semiusable state while it was completely rebuilt again but this is just hideous.

Even more ad and link space to scroll through before you find waht you came here for in the f'ing first place.

You want a laugh try Collapse/ Expand on that top banner thing...

so, I found the "My Discussions" which seems to show my comments. What I want to see is the list of discussions I'm involved in updating based on other's comments. I'm guessing those updates apear in the same location I haven't anything recent enough (or everyone is busy with the new UI).

when I checked this discussion for the familiar "subscribe to this discussion" link, I could only find the comment form field "Alart me when new comments are made". Is there a button I'm missing to "subscribe" a discussion without entering a comment to make use of the checkbox?

One of my favorite phrases when it comes to 'upgrades' is the phrase 'Where did they hide it today?'

The TechRepublic 'upgrade' is making me ask the question for the same reasons the questions are asked when dealing with software upgrades. It would be nice to have a before and after map of how to get to things so I don't have to spend a lot of time exploring.