The new forums look very promising. Can't wait for them to go live and see them in action. :)
A couple of suggestions/questions:
To follow up on this, we added the Edit Profile link and set the site title (top & center) to link back to the forums home. But you'll have to stick with using their emoticon markup for those.
J. Ambrose Little said:we added the Edit Profile link
And it was nice, while it lasted. It's gone now. I hope you resurrect it.
J. Ambrose Little said:and set the site title (top & center) to link back to the forums home.
It's overly large, and without the underlining that clues us that it's a link, it looks like a redundant logo. Less would be more.
May I suggest "Forums Home", in a font size that doesn't upstage the real Infragistics logo?
Thanks for the feedback, Ed. The Edit Profile link is back. Kind of reminds me of Kung Pow - Enter the Fist. There's a part where there was some bad editing in the original movie and one actor's clothes changed colors a couple times. They did a voice over saying something like "I am a great magician.. see my clothes are black... now they are red.. black again!" :)
Remember the forums are in preview mode, and the current style is definitely not the final style. We're working with our visual design group to come up with a good experience in that respect.
I was just pointed to this new forum and have to say it really looks promising!Here are a few things I noticed on first glance:1. There's only a quote button when clicking on reply and then only for the one message. Maybe you could put a quote button on every post to directly quote that message?2. While composing you see only one message (either the last or the one where "reply" was clicked, I don't know), way better would be to make all messages available while composing. Then it would be very practical to have the possibility to qoute any of these messages.3. Yes, I've noticed the "Related" tab. But that view has the rancid stink of the old "forum" where in the search you just get a list of the single messages. You even have to click the links to see the message. Do yourself a favor and do it like I suggested in #2.
4. The Control to edit the message is a bit wicked. I'm not sure if I could reproduce it but I had some weird effects while writing this post. Like when I type to fast, use backspace to delete a space all spaces are deleted (like rtrim) and when I then hit space the its trimmed right again. Also sometimes some spaces have been added which I didn't type. I know this behaviour from some other asp textbox which resultet were badly formatted. Especially when you format your text intensively. To be honest, I would prefer a simple textbox and some markups over some overloaded fancy control which just won't work. Maybe you could put an alternative to this fancy control? The HTML Button from this control is the right way, but I think an extra window is a little overdone ;)
5. I've had some trouble logging in: Well, I could login without trouble and was still logged in when I came back to the forum (yepp, I read the thread about login trouble). But usually I login using my companies account, for this forum I wanted to use my own account, though. My credentials were accepted, all right, but I always ended up with my companies account. This looks very much like an issue with the cookies, but I'm too lazy to clear my cookies just now.
6. Due to #5 I thought to be clever and use IE instead of FF because IE has it's own cookie cache. Trouble is, with IE I just get the "Oops something went wrong!" error. It doesn't matter if I try to directly access a post or try to get to the forums home.
Well, so far for now :)
But still, this looks way better than the original "forum" ;)
Hey, I just noticed something I didn't know about. There's a Quick Reply link at the bottom right of posts that does a DHTML popup and allows you to keep the whole thread context. Cool!
Posted from Quick Reply,
Hi joerg_neumann,
As mentioned in our welcome FAQ, these forums are an installation of the commercial Community Server system by Telligent. As such, the functional modifications we can make to them will be somewhat constrained, but we can certainly surface your suggestions to Telligent and you can do the same. We'll also look into how we can meet our customers' needs while working within the system.
1-3. I agree with you on this point. What I typically do on the MSDN forums and WWW.ASP.NET is do a CTRL-CLICK on the topic name, which opens the entire thread/topic in a new tab if I need to reference other posts in the thread. It's not ideal, I agree.
4. You can choose to use plain text, standard, or enhanced in the Site Options tab on your profile. You might try enhanced first; I think it is a bit better, but you can use plain text if you prefer.
5-6. I'll raise the cookie issue with the devs. If it is an option, my understanding is that if you have enterprise licenses, you can register your enterprise key(s) with your personal login. If you have individual-seated licenses, you can contact customer service to transfer the registration to your individual account. That might make it easier for you so you don't have to switch back and forth.
Thanks for the feedback.