How about a disagree button rather than a dislike button. I like the idea of a caring button.
Not being able to access CC on an iPad would be a big problem for me. I find the phone too difficult (can barely read the tiny print these days) and I pretty much turned my laptop over to my daughter for virtual school when her computer broke last spring, and use the iPad for almost all casual use. I don’t have immediate plans to buy another laptop for myself and can’t imagine doing so for this one forum (much as I like it).
I can’t remember the last time I used a computer to access this site. I use my IPad almost always. The iPhone is a PITA…too much scrolling…and I don’t see much of a change with the new format.
I would like an explanation of the posts that appear on the right side of my home screen. Are these latest posts? Most viewed posts? Posts of interest? I find that column useless.
I very much like the column on the left side of the screen which is the forum listings. I agree, there needs to be a way to navigate to other places from wherever you are. I was never a fan of the highlights, but at least they were always there for navigating elsewhere.
And again…the home screen should have the bookmark icon and the message icon.
I haven’t tried, but does Discourse make it easier to UNbookmark? The current CC is just not easy to do so.
I personally use bookmarks more than any other “special” function on this site. Please make it easy for me to find bookmarks.
Please don’t do dislike or disagree buttons. My city paper has those and it creates conflict and hurts feelings. It might discourage use of CC, actually, since someone might post, get a lot of dislikes or disagrees, and leave.
I don’t think you need like agree and helpful. I would be okay with just “like.”
Is this kind of major revamp really needed? Sorry, I have trouble with changes
I agree with @compmom about nixing the negative buttons.
One issue with the current platform is that it’s run by an external company that is not very responsive to fixing bugs or making changes. With the new platform, developers are in-house and can work on improving the site faster. This has been a MAJOR problem the last couple of years, so I’m glad CC is switching.
I only use a computer to access this site. I like the overall layout–I can see a lot more options and get to more things with less clicks…BUT…
…where are bookmarks? Those are essential for me.
…why aren’t the thread posts numbered or at least have numbered pages ? How on earth am I supposed to get to where I left off when it is time for me to read my daily favorites, School in the Fall and Coronavirus(I will always call it the original name), or Parents 2021? I thought I must be missing a trick, but others have mentioned the same issue. Please fix it. This is essential.
… agree with others the badges are not important. The value of CC, to me and many others, is the expertise on many threads as well as the sharing of parent experience and stress, which is NOT always shareable “around the office”. I come here to understand admissions more, to share what I have learnedfrom my own viewpoint in our area/ourHS/my education, and mostly to share camaraderie with others experiencing similar. None of that involves badges. Focus the upgrades on what your experienced users are saying this site is for, not what you think it should be for.
…I love the agree/ like/ helpful buttons! When my favorite posters whom I have grown to trust in their CC wisdom “agree”, it is very useful information !
EDIT to add: I just marked a 2021 post “helpful” , as did 5 others: Something about ND has about 50% applying TO so far . The helpful button is the only one that would apply, as I neither “like” (nor dislike) the info–it is just info-- and I cannot mark “agree” because this was news to me! So keep all of the buttons, please. Knowing that 5 other people also thought it was Helpful makes me understand that if I see real TO data on some other school, I will post in 2021 because other parents are clearly interested.
So I quickly used my computer on chrome to log in. It again self logs in for me so that’s fine. The home page is a visual nightmare especially for anyone with ADHD or the like. 3 ads playing in 3 different area’s . The typesetting and just lots of words all over the place. It’s like a hazard of information coming at me all at once.
But, once I chose the “latest” post then I saw the organization and that seemed fine. I like the “new” posts.
Once thing I would “highly” recommend is to have some memory in the program. I usually use" last post", engineering and University of Michigan on the site. Having these crawl up to the top of my most used sites would be extremely helpful. Many programs do something similar so no more searching around or extra steps. This would take out those steps and just have them there for my use and would make this more user friendly.
In fact, as I am typing this reply, the post I quote above has no likes or helpful votes, but 7 people have clicked agree—but there are other posts on this thread with a similar number of reactions distributed differently.
Which is some intriguing anecdata showing that forum users really do differentiate between those three options.
There is a very irritating problem with ad placement. Sometime a new ad is loaded and causes the screen to readjust. We’re working on fixing that.
It’s possible something else is going on, though. @Knowsstuff : I wonder if you see the same problems on https://meta.discourse.org/ ? (It’s the same platform but without ads. If you still see the issue there, it’s probably going to be harder to fix.)
We can see a breakout by device. On the current site, it’s split about 50/50 desktop and mobile. (Only a small number of visitors use tablets, but it’s still an important platform given technology trends.)
Internally we have a date we are aiming for, but it’s already been slipped once because of things we’ve discovered that need to be done before launch. I don’t want to say what our internal target is because that puts some pressure on us to release before everything is ready. I will say that I’m looking forward to a relaxing Thanksgiving.
I suspect you are right: many people will post in the wrong category. There are so many categories (which is a good thing!) that it’s pretty much impossible to find what you are looking for without search. I’ll see if we can make it stand out a bit.
It’s based on the title and body, but not the category, I believe. So that means if I type “2024 waitlist” I get results from 5 more or less random schools. I can turn that off, but I’d like to do some more testing first. It’s a potentially useful feature, but as you say, it serves no purpose if none of the results help me find what I’m looking for. I’ll see if I can adjust some of the settings of how the algorithm works to get better results.
I will look into it but we had this issue as stated with another company. It’s a page break issue. If you look at word and when it starts a new page, this just scrolls to the new page while your on the one before it. The engineers called it a page break issue . Once fixed it solved an issue in over 60 EMR programs that we all doing the same thing and why I know about it.
I will try to reproduce again and if I can record it will send it to you. It was reproducible at will yesterday on my mobile.
I don’t see it on their site but they also have a page counter thing. The page break I see it when you scroll half a page up like to the center of the screen it them shoots up to the full page up. Something just needs to be adjusted.
@CCadmin_Jon are you saying you can tell that I am using an IPad? Are you sure only a small number use tablets? Everyone I know using CC uses a tablet at least some of the time.
The use of even this new version on an IPhone is not terrific.
It’s latest posts across all categories. I’m not sure how that will work when the site is really active. It’s certainly something we will consider changing as we see how the new site gets used. It seems possible that as activity picks up, it will be more useful as people will see topics from areas of the site they don’t usually visit. But I can also see a scenario where a handful of active posts will drive out less active posts off the page.
The good news is this is much easier to change with the new site.
We explored a number of options and this one sets us up for many years to come. Instead of large changes, the new platform is flexible enough we can make adjustments that are easier to learn. It’s an investment that we think will pay off for long-term users.
Chiming in to STRONGLY argue for the “agree” and “helpful” buttons. Agree isn’t just, huh, nice, but “I think the same way” and helpful is helpful to show either that this post has given some specific advice, or the way that users have adapted it to show compassion. How else does one react to a tough situation someone describes, or something sad? Not appropriate to say “like” but skating by without reaction seems churlish. And a cursory thought about the message makes it easy to see what version of “helpful” is meant.
And badges, yeah. I have trillions of them, lol, and they mean absolutely nothing. So ditch them but please keep the reaction choices!!!
