[Sticky] Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?  

RE:

• Definitely more presence from Prusa on these forums is needed. 
• With the soon to be available INDX, having a separate section for that under the Core One would be great.
• Perhaps a specific section on filaments would be useful. 
• A database of filament settings for Core One, MK4S, XL etc. With maybe a yelp-style user review and feedback. Although this probably belongs more in Printables than here
• Refactor the software areas: PrusaConnect, PrusaLink, PrusaSlicer. 

RE:

• Stable operation of the forum, without the daily periods of extremely sluggish behavior.
• Avoid the random auto-logouts. I still have not figured out when they occur, but for me it's at least once per day. When I look at a particular post, realize that the forum has logged me out again and I log back in, I get sent back to the root of the forum hierarchy, losing the post I'm looking at -- quite annoying.
• Avoid the random language changes. Sometimes system messages suddenly come back in a different language, often Czech I think, but I have seen other languages too. 
• Give users control over email notifications!! Currently, as soon as one makes a post to a thread, one is auto-subscribed to the thread, sometimes resulting in a deluge of emails if it's a busy thread. User accounts need a global setting whether emails are wanted or not.

Oh, and welcome back! Great to see that Prusa is taking an interest in the forum again.

Welcome back.

No contests, definitely no contests and no 'rewards' for posting - contests and Prusameters have destroyed Printables as a useable resource to the point that you will find posts on here about how to remove the Printables tab from PrusaSlicer.

Merging many of the forums would help reduce the number of near-duplicate threads - most issues apply equally to several printer variants and many to all.

Please make the software accept .3MF file attachments.

And greatly improve search...

New forums?  We have nowhere obvious to discuss designing for printability or incorporating mechanical and electronic parts into prints.

And if you know who is in charge of the once but no longer useful Printables - please drag him or her into the forums as there are a few of us who would like a word...

Cheerio,

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Posted by: @diem

No contests, definitely no contests and no 'rewards' for posting - contests and Prusameters have destroyed Printables as a useable resource to the point that you will find posts on here about how to remove the Printables tab from PrusaSlicer.

+++++++++ 100% agree 

Off topic but I am so tired of seeing people upload cones or spheres as original models. 

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

I completely agree with everything stated above.

Transparency and listening to the users of Prusa's products was once a great attribute to Prusa.

There is a tremendous amount of free to Prusa knowledge and problem identification/solving here.

Providing a method to escalate problems back to the product specialists. VS waiting hours to chat with CS over and over and over again, when they are not able to solve complex problems. It is only not effective, but is driving your supporters away. 

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Make the forum reliable. That includes seeing notifications, subscribing, unsubscribing etc. These functions work at times then don't work. Last 6 months or so NOT working for me. Forum needs to work on all browsers. Lack of reliability is death. PrusaConnect has been down all morning. It will not connect to my systems. I am now looking for a replacement.

I'll repeat what others stated, fix the common login. Once logged in I should be able to access ALL areas in the top menu without re-logging in.
In short all the list of things I was told by support that they had planned to fix on the forum. Just about the time Same Old Shane stopped being admin.

The number of beginners should be growing. They don't need dhigh end discussions, they need daily or weekly tutorials on key subjects. Then keep the tutorials up to date. Youtube based is fine, as long as there is an ongoing plan. For new users 3D printing can be very confusing. One example I read recently. A user tried to take the system out of the box and use it without cleaning the print sheet with mild soap and water. Everything failed to stick. Too often we think 3D printing is like selling cars in 2026. It is more like selling cars in 1920, you also need to teach people how to drive.

Instead of telling people to go to github to report problmes, put Github links in each of the main areas menus. MK4, Coreone etc should all have the proper github link.

RE:

I tend to get lost in technical rabbit holes, but the community aspect is really important to me. Facebook just disappeared me after eleven years with no recourse and for no sensible reason, so I can't use the Prusa group there. There are so many forums here for every Prusa printer ever made, but a social area would be nice. A deep engineering level forum on printing in general would also be really cool. A Google search usually find what I want here, but the location of many bits of information still eludes me.

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Thanks Shane. So good to hear Prusa sees value in this community also.

For me the technical niggles listed above, plus I'd add that if you follow a link to the forum from a notification email and find you're logged out, when you log back in you should remain in the linked thread, not bounced out to the forum home page.  And, can we fix attaching models to your post without zipping them please. Model files should for sure be an allowed format here.

Apologies if this thread starts to overwhelm. It shows you still have a thriving, supportive and keen community here. Welcome home!

RE:

If you post something on X/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok, it will be invisible to me. You have your own blog and I have better things to do than feed an algorithm. Might occasionally see something on reddit or YouTube. I have accounts with Bluesky/Mastodon; if you (Prusa Research a.s.) do, too, I might have a reason to go there on occasion 😉

Bothering to post this in part to see in which language the interface appears... (English is set).

Edit: a little "waiting" icon of spinning orange circles in the upper right read "Trabajando" while posting so I think that's still a bit of an issue. And there was a very brief green toast popup on the edit that I couldn't quite catch, but I'm pretty sure it was in Spanish. 

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Welcome back, Shane! Loved what you wrote--until you said "contests" . We need those as much as a wart on our nose  

Heres's my wish list, roughly in order of annoyance. 

• It recently has become almost unusable in Mac Safari. Can't edit posts, just shows a blank box
• Fix constant, unpredictable logouts
• Let us upload 3mf files, at long last
• Be present and respond when and where it makes sense. It's mind-boggling that you have Prusa staff mingle in that cesspool of bad advice called Reddit but no one ever shows up here, in their own forums. 
• No more confirmation messages in random languages
• Sanitize the list of forums. Way too many. Does each printer really need 5 or so subforums. 

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Probably forum subsections should be minimized ) or expanded a bit in certain areas?), not allowing to post not in subsections ( so that posts gets a bit in a weird subsection.. but not really in subsection, this is really mixed up now).

Clean up the topics - people often don't even bother to post on the section for specific forum but just write in General asking for help, so decreasing forum count could help. That will be super boring taks of moving posts. Also reminding people to keep on topic, because recently people started to derail the threads.

Reviewing sticky posts if they are still valid after the years ( things were fixed or missing images), promoting other  threads as sticky ones.

Maybe nominate some new mods?

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Now that I've had a full day to think about this... The website software is broken in many places and has already been commented on so won't dwell on that. 

• Moderators need to be more involved and recenter threads that have gone off-topic or otherwise vier into politics. 
• Threads that have run their course should be locked. 
• Search is useless
• Definitely rearrange the forum sections. 

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Ok, so what you are telling me is if I ever need to get the attention of the community quickly, I should just make a post about a contest... OK 🙂 

The last sentence in my post was just random thoughts and ideas, nothing is written in stone. 

Also, I did mention about the tech issues, I have already taken down notes on the issues and I will talk to others and see what can be done about them vs. the current set up of the forums. I have looked a bit into things and I can tell you that I have also experienced some of the concerns that you have all brought up.

For the Moderators, our mods are community members who do what they can to moderate the forums. I will re-evaluate things and if I need more mods, then I will ask a few people I know to jump in and lend a hand. 

- For staff being here.... Dam, not even a full 24 hours and people want other staff members than myself. I see how it is 🙂 (joke). 
In general; 

- Reason why its recommended to go through customer support at times is because certain private information is required that would not be a good idea to give online, and also its a means to properly document and track issues. I honestly can't ask nor expect a support agent to read a thread that is X pages long to get the full story as it would take a good amount of time with some of the posts and can easily go off topic. So once the community support option has been exhausted on here, then its off to the official support channels. 

- For reaching developers, Github is going to be the place to do that and submitting tickets. Those tickets are immediately assigned to the developers for review and to take action on them. 

- For the comments about adding, changing and restructuring different areas of the forum, I take all of those down and see what can be done gradually, I do need to consult with web developers first about getting the bugs out of the system here first. 

So, Tech issues I know 🙂 
No contests 🙂 

Please continue with the feedback as I would like to have the forum serve the community better and the more input I get from the community the better 🙂 

RE:

Posted by: @same-old-shane

- Reason why its recommended to go through customer support at times is because certain private information is required that would not be a good idea to give online, and also its a means to properly document and track issues. I honestly can't ask nor expect a support agent to read a thread that is X pages long to get the full story as it would take a good amount of time with some of the posts and can easily go off topic. So once the community support option has been exhausted on here, then its off to the official support channels. 

In my experience, it’s often the opposite. I came to this forum after exhausting official support... the issues I was facing weren’t resolved through the official system but were ultimately solved here by the community. That’s exactly why I stayed: not only did I get answers, I gained deeper knowledge and had the opportunity to give back.

I understand the need for privacy when sensitive information is involved. But for the non-private, technical aspects of troubleshooting, having Prusa engineers engage more openly in forum discussions would be a net positive. It would preserve the collective knowledge, benefit future users facing the same issues, and strengthen the community rather than fragmenting support across private interactions.

RE:

Prusa engineers engaging forums can cause even faster burnout, so I would be cautious with that.

From other things, maybe sometimes linking to interesting reddit discussions could be beneficial? Sometimes people get some other ideas because someone posted url in Discord... I know each medium has it's pros and cons, and it could result in a single message getting repeated on all other platforms, but I believe for some important things it is worth it - many times some important statements from Prusa team memebers were done only on reddit and forums were silent.

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Posted by: @same-old-shane

- Reason why its recommended to go through customer support at times is because certain private information is required that would not be a good idea to give online, and also its a means to properly document and track issues. I honestly can't ask nor expect a support agent to read a thread that is X pages long to get the full story as it would take a good amount of time with some of the posts and can easily go off topic. So once the community support option has been exhausted on here, then its off to the official support channels. 

I can see the challenges of Prusa support staff participating directly in the forum: It's time-consuming, and it may be difficult for them to tread the fine line between offering constructive, open advice here and being official spokespeople for Prusa.

But can you please make sure that someone follows the discussions here and provides up-to-date digests to the support staff? As @hyiger has said, from our point of view the forum has frequently appeared to be ahead of Prusa support in the understanding and troubleshooting of issues. It's frustrating when you turn to support asking for spare parts to fix an issue that has clearly been identified here, and they don't even know about the problem. (Or claim not to know about it.) The deviating lead screw pitches on the Core One are a case in point.

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

Hello Same Old Shane.

I was very pleased to read your post. Bringing a breath of fresh air and creating a solid foundation between end customers and the manufacturer (Prusa).

I've been running a forum myself for 10 years, and as an admin, you always have to rely on outside help or on your people in the forum (moderators).

At this point, I would volunteer for new moderator jobs.

Back to the topic.

This forum needs to be cleaned up, I speak from experience. Resolved, unresolved, orphaned, or unclarified topics must be manually reviewed, processed, sorted, and, if necessary, deleted.

A forum becomes attractive when there are obvious contact points where known problems can be read about in an “FAQ” section, for example. I recall the tiresome topic of “Nextruder makes noise” or “it rattles and no filament is extruded.” There are problems that are not problems because the end customer or the person in front of the machine does not understand the system.

As far as creating new posts is concerned, I believe that much more moderation is needed. Let's assume there is an area in the forum where you can read up on things BEFORE creating a post. If a user doesn't want to deal with the cumbersome search function because it simply doesn't get them to their goal quickly enough, then they just create a new topic. The moderator notices that the new topic has been posted 345 times in the past, so the mod deletes the topic and refers the user to the FAQ in the forum on the topic or to other links. A collection of solved problems would be ideal here.

I don't know where Prusa hosts its forum, but between us: this forum format is outdated and obsolete. Working with this forum requires a lot of patience and dealing with formatting errors and timeout problems.

My forum (just for comparison) is based on WoltLab. It's like night and day compared to forum formats like phpbb3 or this one. Just saying.

Summary:

• Clean up/declutter the forum and separate useful information from unimportant information.
• Set up areas where users can find information on their own and possibly find a solution there.
• Hire more moderators who can and are allowed to maintain order and maintain the forum.
• If there are areas in the forum dedicated to Prusa printers that contain useful information, support can also use this. For internal testing in development or for improvements in production (See also electrostatic charge C1 and C1L)
• As far as the performance of the forum is concerned, I can only say that this should be addressed first and foremost. The way things are now, it definitely can't go on. Too many logouts, language changing automatically, timeouts, frozen page loads, and error messages when loading pages make the forum unappealing overall.
• I don't know whether it would be better to switch to one language (namely English) or to throw everything into one pot. In this day and age, where everything is becoming linguistically barrier-free, there is no longer any need to “separate languages in forums.” Everyone (regardless of which language they speak) should be able to write in one and the same forum/subforum, provided that all posts can be translated with a single click. As I said, this is just my idea and is certainly a bit of a pipe dream.

All other issues have already been addressed.

I look forward to your feedback.

Bye Jan

RE: Knock Knock.... Just a little status update, anyone home?

I forgot the most important thing.

When a new topic is created that cannot be solved with existing knowledge from the forum, Github, or Prusa help topics, it must be mandatory to “educate” the user seeking help so that they at least include the most important information in their topic!

It is unacceptable that the first 3-5 posts in the forum are used to clarify what the issue is, what settings are involved, etc.

The administrators should take a clear stance here in order to provide everyone in the forum who wants to help with a sufficiently good basis for writing solutions.

This starts with attaching a 3MF file and/or images of the problem in question.

- Reason why its recommended to go through customer support at times is because certain private information is required that would not be a good idea to give online, and also its a means to properly document and track issues. I honestly can't ask nor expect a support agent to read a thread that is X pages long to get the full story as it would take a good amount of time with some of the posts and can easily go off topic. So once the community support option has been exhausted on here, then its off to the official support channels.

Most of the time it's the other way around - A query from a new user with a new machine or kit-build problem is most likely to be redirected to Support as we know they have seen all the usual beginner issues many times over and have tailored responses for efficient resolution.  

The other common situation when we tend to suggest contacting Support is when we identify problems likely to be fixed under warranty. 

... to properly document and track issues ...

Certainly there are several frequent issues arriving here that might be usefully addressed elsewhere - perhaps in the 3D PRINTING HANDBOOKs

- Thoroughly cleaning buildsheets

- Properly drying filaments

- Never attempt to print anything from Printables unless it has a long list of positive Makes and comments.

- Regular maintenance and lubrication

- And perhaps, never attempt to print anything designed by AI

The posts most useful to Prusa -    There are a sprinkling of genuine issues and trends that should seriously interest Prusa engineers mixed with ones caused by subtle build/assembly errors that should be the concern of the manual writers.

- these are the ones you should copy to the relevant departments.

Cheerio,