topic Re: Feedback on the restructure in Our Community

Feedback on the restructure

hevi — Wed, 10 May 2023 07:50:33 GMT

Although the new sub forums improves the overall structure its not enough for a good forum experience. I think the majority of active users primarily are interested in the forum part of the community and it should thus be put front and center. My landing page still looks like below which makes it evident that a lot of earlier feedback regarding user experience must have been disregarded - or is it the platform interface setting a hard limit?

Some points:

The new forum overview is hidden away under the dropdown item. It should replace or integrate with the hot topics at the landing page.
It is not possible to quickly navigate between different sub forums. It should not be done through a dropdown and a new page.
There is no information about the topic of the latest posts in the overview.
It is not possible to get a list of all new posts (I will still have to use the unread bookmark to effectively keep track of the activity).
From the overview it is not possible to mark new posts as read.
User activity (posts/replies) are hidden away under user profile.
Search and filter is still quite detached from the forum, limited and cumbersome to use.

It is frustrating to see GS struggle this hard just to get a well functioning, effective and user-friendly forum in place - especially as there are many out of the box solutions available. I understand the approach with the integrating everything under one platform but is it worth it if Khoros can't be set up better than this?

For reference. Below is an example of what an user-friendly (and quite common) forum interface looks like.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

Lingwisyer — Wed, 10 May 2023 09:09:42 GMT

Yeah, the list of articles, rather than forum subs, on the side is an odd sight next to all the forum posts...

Re: Feedback on the restructure

DGSketcher — Wed, 10 May 2023 09:33:38 GMT

I rarely look at the right hand column anymore as there is no useful focus to the links. Having it configured as a menu like the "Anytype Community" above would be much more helpful.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

hevi — Thu, 11 May 2023 06:35:36 GMT

Yes, not to push a particular platform but there is a reason for Discourse being so popular. The navigation bar on the side and just one content field which remain in place with fast refresh time is a benchmark for all forum interfaces.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

runxel — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:21:45 GMT

Discourse is really the gold standard out there... A shame GS went on full we-do-everything-in-a-special-way mode again.

(Does anybody care about the unification of knowledge base + other stuff and the forum? I do not think so...)

Re: Feedback on the restructure

Strawbale23 — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:34:09 GMT

Really pleased to see GS implemented the new sub forums as requested!

But the execution is somewhat strange, as mentioned above. I was confused on the landing page: "where is the forum and forum threads??"

Not sure what the point of the column on the right is for. And the whole label thing....?!

To be honest if the time and energy spent on the new forum had been spent sorting out the UI and user experience of AC, half the forum would not be needed. Half of the people coming to the forum are asking questions because the UI and user experience is so unintuitive and overly complicated.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

David Bearss — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:30:18 GMT

For me the layout is cumbersome at best. GS trying to adapt to web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever we are at these days. Not working.

Even more annoying is how SLOOOOOoooooOOOOOWWW the whole website is. Makes me yearn for dialup. Pretty much unusable unless you have time to burn and patience.

I have not updated for some time and get grief for that but...... GS is not offering anything that I need. Except a crappy slow web experience. And so we continue our slow inevitable migration away to an undetermined alternate product. Not that GS cares about us single user offices but the upcoming "recession" will give an opportunity to shop around. Sad.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

Ignacio Azpiazu — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 03:13:08 GMT

Someone from GS once made a passing reference to how outdated or problematic the old forum was (?). I always thought it was a wonderful forum, probably the best out there, built on a couple of decades of experience.

If the leading idea was the ridiculous idea of merging the Forum with the Knowledge Base (probably with the misguided intention of procuring more traffic to the Knowledge Base articles –as if Google had not been enough–, something only the Knowledge Base article creator could care about, a strictly bureaucratic interest), then the problem is the leading idea itself. So that was a hopeless start. Now the development and the followup to the reception was even worse, and I always hoped at some point someone would reconnect with reality and just restore the good old AC Talk. The destruction of the forum has a huge daily cost to Graphisoft, which they are obviously not measuring.

[Btw, when you see things like “Advisor”, “Legend”, “Hero”, don't you all get the feeling this is being run without the slightest clue?]

Re: Feedback on the restructure

hevi — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 11:59:40 GMT

It is quite clear that the whole community initiative is marketing driven and likely a large part of GS´s growth strategy (together with the S/MEP lure) and I would not be surprised if a 60k member number is presented as an indicator of success - or justification for the takeover of the old relatively user-friendly forum.

The community platform seem to follow the same path as AC where the everyday need of the user is disregarded for "features" initiated by developers and implemented underdeveloped and where any feedback och request for change has to through GS internalisation processes which as you point to is highly bureaucratic.

Re: Feedback on the restructure

Lingwisyer — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 01:44:09 GMT

Yeah, the old forum, though looking outdated, was easier to navigate and read...

The idea of merging the forum and knowledge base, is good in a way, if it worked... Though that maybe just due to the still terrible inbuilt search and topic / thread suggestion function...

Re: Feedback on the restructure

DGSketcher — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 10:48:29 GMT

I do hate the thread arrangement and I can't seem to find an option that doesn't have issues whichever way it is organised. I am fairly sure important posts are being missed because they become buried in the notifications by other posts from the same person in the same thread. The old post order method worked, and it was easy enough to quote a post if you needed to back reference an earlier conversation.