@thumper1 I am using an iPad too. The left is the list of categories and the color is a line at the far left margin, one color per category. The right side has color too in the form of the circles of the posters.
I am not sure why the “college majors” are not listed alphabetically.
I can no longer find the list of Musical Theatre School that was pinned at the top of the Musical Theatre Major page.
Why are Coastal Carolina, Molloy College- Cap21 Conservatory, and Manhattan School of Music in the list of college majors?
I would say that it looks better on my phone than my laptop/desktop.
Haven’t read all the comments and just looked quickly (will log in later and test it out). However, IMHO one thing that may turn off new users is the overwhelming ads. I know ads are needed for revenue, but they overwhelm the screen (even on the current format) and make it hard to even read a thread. Under the current version, once logged in the ads are less intrusive. If you are trying to bring in new members, the initial experience needs to be a bit more inviting.
I tend to post on the public forum any info that is generally helpful, but take it to PM to help someone if conversation is more in-depth, for privacy reasons. In other words, private messaging is important. I hope that the new site makes new messages obvious when signing in.
@CCadminJon @CCadminSorin Did the beta testers get to test out the Trust Levels? If so, what did they think? Will CC posters all start out at Trust Level 0 in the new format?
I think the trust levels are right up there with the badges. They are a worthless use of space.
I don’t really understand the trust level stuff. Can someone explain? It doesn’t seem like something either students or parents would want to deal with.
Are you getting student feedback, or only adult/parent feedback?
@CTTC, I think we want to match the current rank (i.e. New Member, Junior Member, Member, Senior Member) with the trust levels.
I think “trust levels” implies something completely different than “new member, junior member, etc”.
Trust level implies some sort of vetting has taken place and that these trust levels have been earned based on the clarity and honesty of the posts.
In my opinion, calling this “trust level” makes it seem like a poster with a lot of posts should be trusted in terms of their information and posts more than a new poster. We all know that just isn’t true.
Just gone over for a quick look. Haven’t looked at in the detail some posters above have but I definitely like the home page a lot more.
“Trust” is a really poor word choice. That infers a lot of responsibility and judgement in setting the standards for that. I don’t think you want to go there.
Also “trust levels” based on what? # of posts? # of posts in college related forums/threads? Just because someone has been here 10 years doesn’t mean they are more trustworthy or knowledge than someone here for 3 years.
Yeah, ‘trust level’ seems to be the sort of thing that would be in the background, and probably honestly quite useful for a large moderated group. But to have it out front in user-facing places? In a forum where people are asking for advice it isn’t really the right terminology for users to be seeing.
ETA: @abasket, jinx!?
After repeated pleas from long time users to get their input before major changes the choice to roll out an entirely new site after a review by ~6 beta testers and a cursory check for bugs and log in issues is a curious one. Why not hold off on the roll out until the site has been thoroughly reviewed?
I use DuckDuckGo as my android phone browser. When I open threads I frequently get a “webpage not available” error message between posts. Other times the page loads fine.
The post function doesn’t work right on my phone. At all. I can see that my post was submitted. There’s a greyscale version of it. Right below that post is a duplicate of it (except it’s not greyed out) covered by the android “webpage not available” error message. Other times there are just the 2 posts (the greyscale and the duplicate).
The button inside the “reply” function should be “post” or “submit.” It doesn’t make sense to have a button labeled “reply” to open the text box and a 2nd “reply” button to submit the post.
The 3 dots at the bottom of posts on my phone sometimes opens the flag and bookmark menu, but sometimes it doesn’t.
The infinity scrolling is annoying to use and an inefficient way to navigate websites. We need post and page numbers. Navigating a site without them is like trying to keep your place in War and Peace when all the page numbers have been removed (i.e. not worth the effort).
Badges are a waste of space. So is the list of avatars on the thread titles. I don’t need to know who the most frequent posters in any given thread are or that 24 people have 100+ posts in the “Parents of HS Class of 2021” thread. I also don’t need to know that there are 8137 replies there or that someone estimated that it will take 1861 minutes to read them.
What is the purpose of the “summarize this topic” option and who decides which posts belong in the summary?
The trust levels are misleading and should be renamed or removed.
A lot of the colored vertical bars separating forum names all blend together. I don’t think they’re necessary, but if you keep them it would be helpful if there was some white space between them.
On my phone there’s no distinction between the forum and thread titles. They’re the same font, style, and size. Coupled with the infinity scrolling it just looks like thousands and thousands of posts. It reminds me of Facebook. I don’t like Facebook.
The red, horizontal “last visit” line has no relation to the last thread I actually visited. Or the one before that either. What is its purpose?
When you open a thread on a pc (in Google), the vertical scroll bar that’s supposed to allow the user to scroll to the last post is covered by an ad.
The post function works the same when the app is opened on my phone using Google (duplicate posts, one greyscale, one not).
The “last visit” horizontal bar doesn’t seem to do much on my phone or pc when I log in using Google either.
I’m going to say that on my phone this app isn’t functional. I don’t use the PC version, so if it rolls out like it is I won’t be able to use it.
I am not a College Confidential everyday user, but I do use other forums daily. I have always found CC to be clunky and difficult to use and the different forums to be random. It’s not that hard, y’all.
There should be geographic classifications, and classifications by major, and size of school. Why is there not a forum for every state? I go to “state forums” https://discuss.qa.collegeconfidential.com/c/college-search-selection/state-forums/602 and there are 5 states. Y’all, don’t know if you know this, but there are 50 states in the US!!! It’s just not that hard. Lord knows there are plenty of examples y’all can copy. I won’t name the college competitor sites, but take a look at TripAdvisor or City-Data. Those are forums that have subforums that make sense. On CC it’s like a really poor outline for an essay with random thoughts all over the place and no cohesive structure.
One thing I have liked about the old CC is the look and feel. It’s nice and clean. The new design is not. I am much less likely to want to come back to the new version.
Content seems small in relation to the page size.
Overall, I do like that all the forums are laid out for all to see. The right side is busy, and unnecessary, IMO.
I haven’t read all the replies, so this may have been mentioned, but nothing will open for me from the Forum Index page. I used to go there to navigate to whatever else I wanted to look at, but now it’s just a list of topics with no link when you scroll over them.
In case it matters, I use a laptop with Windows 10.
That’s an excellent question. We did get reports from others and we investigated the problem. Our hosting provider has promised us a fix, but it might not happen before we move to the new platform. An important reason for moving is that we will have more control over when updates happen and we can revert to previous versions when something breaks. (Plus the new platform has the equivalent of the forum index built in.)