Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
I am finding it very frustrating to participate in the new Prusa forums. The inability to quickly find information and post pictures makes creating posts a very tedious process. In particular:
- The new procedure for inserting images is very clunky. I find linking to off-site hosted image sites like imgur far easier than uploading images. Not sure whether this is intentional, but creating picture-filled posts with examples is much more work now. The variety of off-site picture hosting sites is also leading to a lot of inconsistency, with some pictures on dropbox, others on google, others god knows where.
- I am no longer able to restrict search within my own post history, meaning I have to dig through many pages of posts to link back to previously-posted information. The causes a lot of repetition.
- The entire site is very difficult to use on a mobile device. The templates selected are not responsive to differing device screen dimensions. It's usable enough on a 5K Mac display, but hell on a phone or tablet.
- Font selections are atrocious for code examples. Distinguishing a 0 from a O is impossible.
I can understand the drive to update to a more modern platform to add more features, but with a site so dependent on quality user-contributed content, these sorts of issues really need to be addressed.
and miscellaneous other tech projects
He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking. -- Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
More examples:
- I don't seem to be able to send PMs anymore. Is that functionality gone?
- I can understand limiting the ability to edit posts, but the current time limit is too short. When writing long responses, I often switch between browser screens and notes, editing and correcting a post. The quick timeouts lead to poorly written or disjointed posts. As this is a technical support group, the ability to clearly and concisely convey technical information is important. Please increase this timeout until such time as it's proven to be detrimental.
and miscellaneous other tech projects
He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking. -- Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
I agree with Bob on all his points. The issues are large enough helping is no longer enjoyable; honestly it now feels more like unpaid work than my enjoying a hobby.
A pet peeve of mine is the treatment of images transferred from the old forum, a sore point. So much of the content of my prior posts was lost it really makes me angry.
Navigation in this new forum is simple to the point of making it difficult to track which threads I am participating in. So I wander around clicking here and there, and only offering an off-the-cuff suggestion rather than actually thinking about truly helping. As Bob said, search is laughable. There are tags that I still haven't figured out (green check, black tag, white tag)... no clue what they mean nor how to use them. I recall the footer once showed these, so I presume they were system searchable. Now they are just confusing artifacts. Or maybe someone has a key or used Wordpress somewhere else and understands them.
I can't post images - and the fact any effort to do so will probably be lost when some other change is made to the forum - I can't say that I miss the ability. Also, not having being able to post images saves me time: I simply move past threads where posting an image makes sense.
The real loser here is the Prusa customer needing help. But nowhere in any of Prusa's posts did I read they did this change to benefit the customer.
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
I have noticed that activity seems to have quieted down after the transition. I suspect many people feel the same and have simply moved on.
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
Definitely noticed the slowdown. I suspect issues with SSO though; people not getting it to work.
Plus there are a couple of miscues and/or some bad redirects.
So I was here, and I hit reply. I got a pop-up saying I had to log in to reply. (I came here from PrusaPrinters, where I was logged in) anyway I hit login, and got redirected back to the top of the forum, and to find my way back to the post. That’s pretty bad.
Perfect would be that being logged in to PrusaPrinters would carry over, i.e. “Single Sign On”
OK, failing that, hitting ‘Reply’ should redirect to the logon, and on success the logon should redirect back to the post WITH the editor active.
Failing that, if the login cannot redirect back to the originating page then maybe the “reply” button should be disabled if the user is not logged in.
When someone asks you if you're a god, you say, "YES!"
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
Another change: Externally-linked images are stretched to fit the margins, which makes no sense for a technical support site. The hole in this part is round IRL.
and miscellaneous other tech projects
He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking. -- Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
even more annoying, tab/page titles just say "Forum |" and offer no thread title or context as to what they are.
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
I really miss being able to mark the forum as being “read”.
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Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
Wow - they finally enabled direct image uploads. Thank you Prusa. Now to see if it stretches after I press post.
Modified in size, but not altered in aspect. Bob - there is a "constrain proportions" checkbox, if I am recalling correctly. Not seeing it today, but I have seen it back when files were NOT uploading. Might be missing from the UI Prusa enabled.
RE: Key functionality broken or missing after forum transition
I really miss being able to mark the forum as being “read”.
Well - I used the Mark Forums Read before it disappeared, and now all forums are always marked read. Not that it's a problem, but just sayin' ... Careful what you wish for.