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New EN Forum Feedback Thread...
We are about ready to launch new Endurance Nation forums and we need some help. We’ll pause here to let you get back up off the floor. The link is on EN, under Forums…you’ll see New Forums which will take you to the Categories Page.
There’s a ton of reasons, but the three biggest issues were:
1. Broken Search - peeps couldn’t find what they needed.
2. Posting Images and Videos - Not having this pushed folks to use stuff like Facebook and Instagram instead of staying inside the Team.
3. Mobile Access — It never really worked and despite an external solution we had to turn it off.
So we have found an alternative, hooked it up to EN and imported a bunch of our posts thru early December. When we are ready to go live we’ll import all the most recent ones.
Here’s a walkthrough: https://goo.gl/0RFBuX
It’s shiny and new, and it works (please search for something or click the drop down to get more specific)!
But there are some things that we’d like your feedback on:
1. Where to send folks? To the category page that shows the infastructure…or to the activity page that shows the most recent conversations? You can navigate to either once you are there…but thoughts?
2. How easy was it for you to get over to the new forums from inside EN? Was it one click? Did you have to sign in again?
3. Please write a new post…was it easy to do? What can be improved there?
4. Are the forum categories intuitive? IOW, can folks poke around to find what they need? Or do we need to rename stuff?
5. Anything else?
We have a few more things to work on before our import, including making everyone show up as First Name Last Name vs username…but that might take a little while…
Here’s the temporary link only for you guys:
http://endurancenation.vanillacommu...Categories
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
~ Coach P and R
There’s a ton of reasons, but the three biggest issues were:
1. Broken Search - peeps couldn’t find what they needed.
2. Posting Images and Videos - Not having this pushed folks to use stuff like Facebook and Instagram instead of staying inside the Team.
3. Mobile Access — It never really worked and despite an external solution we had to turn it off.
So we have found an alternative, hooked it up to EN and imported a bunch of our posts thru early December. When we are ready to go live we’ll import all the most recent ones.
Here’s a walkthrough: https://goo.gl/0RFBuX
It’s shiny and new, and it works (please search for something or click the drop down to get more specific)!
But there are some things that we’d like your feedback on:
1. Where to send folks? To the category page that shows the infastructure…or to the activity page that shows the most recent conversations? You can navigate to either once you are there…but thoughts?
2. How easy was it for you to get over to the new forums from inside EN? Was it one click? Did you have to sign in again?
3. Please write a new post…was it easy to do? What can be improved there?
4. Are the forum categories intuitive? IOW, can folks poke around to find what they need? Or do we need to rename stuff?
5. Anything else?
We have a few more things to work on before our import, including making everyone show up as First Name Last Name vs username…but that might take a little while…
Here’s the temporary link only for you guys:
http://endurancenation.vanillacommu...Categories
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
~ Coach P and R
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Comments
What I like:
-I imagine the smileys will be replaced w people's avatars? cool.
-I liked the blue ground / white lettering. Looking at the "classic" now makes my eyes hurt.
-And the picture posting was perfect. and very fast.
-searching did what it should.
To the specific questions:
1. Where to send folks? To the category page that shows the infastructure…or to the activity page that shows the most recent conversations? You can navigate to either once you are there…but thoughts?
-I would prefer to arrive at the category page, with fewer categories, and an "unread messages" link.
2. How easy was it for you to get over to the new forums from inside EN? Was it one click? Did you have to sign in again?
-one click. easy.
3. Please write a new post…was it easy to do? What can be improved there?
yep, writing, adding photo and posting was intuitive and easy.
4. Are the forum categories intuitive? IOW, can folks poke around to find what they need? Or do we need to rename stuff?
The categories are intuitive, but there's proliferation. Probably 3-4 primary categories (MVP,training and racing, specific race / training communities, other non-tri stuff), and then branch off.
5. Anything else?
Great to see you guys tackling this. I'm all in favour of redirecting team energy and chatter to fora ... with all the other platforms and socials out there, it runs a risk of starting to look like an abandoned strip mall that used to have really cool stores back in the day, before they moved to that shiny mall on the outskirts of town.
Can't wait to hear from your teammates!!!
~ Coach P
Search: It seems to me that a search with multiple words searches for discussions with that exact phrase (as if it were within quotes) rather than for discussions with all or some of the words. Not sure if that is the intention or not, but it does make it harder to search for stuff if you have to know the exact phrase.
Where to land: I'd also prefer an "unviewed" landing page with the categories listed on the side. There is a "Mark all Viewed" button, but I wasn't quite sure
The formatting in the thread is very basic. It doesn't handle tables (either from excel or word) very well. Not sure we use those much, but thought it should be noted. I also had trouble getting center and right alignment to work within a post. Once I set it to one or the other, everything after followed. So I couldn't center something and the left correct the rest of the page.
The picture and link posts worked great and were a lot easier than before. The one thing I'd point out is that I didn't seem to have any control over the size of the picture (which made it enormous).
Copy/pasting text from a word doc works a lot better than the old forum (where the formatting would really get messed up ) except of course if you have a table in your word doc as I noted above.
I don't see a way to "Subscribe" to a Thread if I want to follow it. I've found that to be a useful option in the current forum. Will it exist in the new one?
That's probably enough for now. I'll keep playing with it!
Initial five minutes playing around, with the things I find most critical in my use of the forums:
I'm going to head over to my iPad, and see how things work on that...
So things worked pretty smoothly on the iPad. I tried Quote, and posting both a picture and a link, works fine. I didn't find any other display issues, except the one I already mentioned.
Reading others' comments, "Bookmark" is the thing to click so I get home email notifications?
Finally, is having the "Activity" tab really such a good idea? I'm already pissed that Nemo and Tim have more "points" (whatever that means) than I do! Coach P, I'm OK with him being ahead, he gets paid for it...
Only other thing I saw that I don't like is the forum "disagree" button. I'm 100% in favor of promoting the great forum discussions that are a key feature of this team, but I like making us go through the step of drafting a real reply. Even if we don't agree with something in the OP, a button makes it too easy to do a drive-by dis. The Feed has a "like" button only and not a "dislike" one - thankfully. If there are "dislike" or "thumbs down" or "disagree" buttons, I guarantee you're going to see some "what part of my post do you disagree with, Paul?" replies, which will create instant tension. If I want to see childlike tri-based tantrums and cat fights, I can go to ST. Any step we take toward making EN a bit more like ST - even if unintentional - is a wrong step, IMO.
I'll continue messing around and will report more if I see something interesting. Thanks so much for doing this.
+ yes we can set the landing page to being most recent categories on the side. Consider that done.
+ I was able to paste in the table from Excel. It took a table shape, it just wasn't formatted with bold etc.
+ the way to subscribe to a thread is to click the star next to the title. Then under your forum preferences you can choose to be emailed every time your bookmark threads are updated.
+ I don't see the link to Facebook you mentioned, Al…let me know where it is I am sure that’s an easy fix.
+ I let them know about the iPad formatting issue, thank you.
+ let's see how the activity tab plays out. Right now the rules are totally arbitrary so if we organize them properly that might be better?
+ I told agree I have removed the dislike, Spam, Flag elements to the forum posts.
+ for a more detailed search, you have to click the down arrow next to the search button. That allows you to specify the author as well as the topic or tag etc. It wasn't 100% accurate, but I was able to find a post from Al that he wrote about riding in the heat.
We are really excited about the update…thanks for your patience. A few more edits and then we roll over to the new forums in early January!!!!
~ Coach P
Here's a screen shot of the page I was talking about. It was a link from the "Profile" page, to a category called "Social". But I don;'t see it the link there now, but the page still exists..
Clicking on the Facebook link produces this:
{ "error": { "message": "Missing client_id parameter.", "type": "OAuthException", "code": 101, "fbtrace_id": "HR2R5avP1/4" } }Other things are gone from that sidebar list of links as well like, umm, the link to change sig lines, and the Quotes preferences. Could this have something to do with changing to the activity page as the landing page?