It all still seems great and the speed and little enhancements have been noticeable. But a couple things still go through my head every time I'm in poking around.
1) The notification bell/pull down lists, I think, every activity that's taken place since you cleared it last. I wish it would just list the threads I've interacted with, liked or subscribed to (btw, what's the difference between liking and subscribing?), because it's all just a giant summary of site activity making my activity impossible to track.
2) On that same area, the individual items in it are described as "so and so replied to a discussion" and most of the time there's no indication (or it can't be read) of what discussion was replied to, making it kind of a useless waste of time to try to decipher.
3) When I read through and entire thread it'd be nice if it de-highlighted it in the list of recent discussions so I can tell that there have not been any new comments since I've read it.
Not urgent or critical, just little pissy stuff. Thanks for all you do and this great site.
I appreciate the feedback! 🙂 My responses:
1) The notification bell/pull down lists, I think, every activity that’s taken place since you cleared it last. I wish it would just list the threads I’ve interacted with, liked or subscribed to (btw, what’s the difference between liking and subscribing?), because it’s all just a giant summary of site activity making my activity impossible to track.
I agree. This new system has a toggle for showing all activity for everyone, or only showing activity based on each member's connections (to other members), groups they've joined, activity they've liked, etc. -- The latter is the eventual goal, but I wanted to let people make their connections and such for a little while first, otherwise the activity feed (home) would be crickets.
Liking is a reaction to the post and nothing more, but the live notifications will start because of your involvement with the thread. Subscription is a purposeful election to subscribe, which would include live notifications as well as email notifications (if you've configured such in your account settings).
2) On that same area, the individual items in it are described as “so and so replied to a discussion” and most of the time there’s no indication (or it can’t be read) of what discussion was replied to, making it kind of a useless waste of time to try to decipher.
I agree, these need to get better. I don't really have a timeframe for you though.
3) When I read through and entire thread it’d be nice if it de-highlighted it in the list of recent discussions so I can tell that there have not been any new comments since I’ve read it.
The current forums are pretty basic, which is a complete opposite from the previous iteration. We lost a lot of functionality from the old forums, but much of it was either unnecessary or unused. But it was very stuck in its ways and not very extensible, unless you bought their proprietary upgrades. I did buy many of them, but they were all pretty clunky. It was pretty nice to look at, but certainly not ideal in the backend. Plus, it was a massive weight on the server, even when I tested it on a super expensive high-end server just to see if that would cure the problem (it didn't).
But yeah, there are plans to improve the forums. I knew we'd be barebones at the beginning but hoped that would be a relief in many ways. I think it is, but we still have some things that need to be put back in (like quoting and polls).
