Ugh. Just ugh. I can't believe we waited months for this. There should've been more upper-level oversight before this was allowed to happen.
Can we go back? Please?
Well hello! What's going on in he........AHHHH MY EYES!!!!
Apparently half my user name was chopped (markæric)... Software doesn't support unicode for usernames?
At the very least, I hope the forum software vendor is paying Parallax to use it. Otherwise it makes no sense. This layout is worse than Reddit.
Yes, we have a really good reason for the switch. I'd have to take you back ten months and about 800 hours of work to fully appreciate it. Bottom line is that this tool imported our prior work and vBulletin was fully non-upgradeable with our installation.
If you could help us work through some of the issues we'll improve the settings and style. Bump will be here full-time until we have a comfortable arrangement.
Ken Gracey
I recall last time, there was a test forum for us to play in (at least the moderators should get to play) and comment on. Yes, we complained but we also had some constructive feedback and generally legitimate concerns.
This time, all goes dark and then when the lights come back on, it like a bad road trip to Vegas!
I know a lot of people worked hard on this but well intended hard work done in a vacuum is not the answer.
I'm not surprised at all with the reaction.
It's usable, I can still make my generally worthless comments but it doesn't seem to support this community's objectives very well.
Code insertion?File attachments with typical code extensions (um, .spin???)
Just some thoughts:
Is the menu on the left necessary when you're in a thread? Move anything relevant to the top and make the posts full width. Between the borders and the menu on the left, nearly half the screen space is wasted.
Also, the border separating the posts could probably be a bit more obvious.
Yes, it IS responsive, but only for small smartphone screens. It just folds on larger displays. There seems to be just one breakpoint (desktop, phone), and on any screen wider than 800 px you get a lot of wasted space on the sides. It's probably the theme selection, though, so it's changeable. A different theme can set other breakpoints, and also allow a reasonable display of up to (say) 1200 px. Many of us have 2K monitors now, so even 1200 px is on the narrow side.
I am not usually so negative about this sort of stuff, but this forum doesn't give off a "professional" look. The other forum software was not responsive, but it had a classic interface that looked like it was a place where the pros hung out.
My message has raised concerns from Parallax. My criticism is being
seen as an attack on the company and not as constructive, so I'm
publically retracting the entire message in addition to all of my recent
posts. I may also consider resigning from the forums completely, but
I'm not a fan of "heat of the moment decisions", so I'll leave things
alone for now.
@Ken, I'm sitting here in a state of disbelief and shock that you would approve this for public consumption.
I was positive that this must have been done while you were out of the office and that you would be in the same shock as the rest of us.
I'm sure there are good reasons for moving from vBulletin, but even a limited temporary forum that could have been setup in a few minutes would have served the situation better than this. There are so many glaring issues (many have been raised) that I'm completely dumbfounded why this would be acceptable.
I am NOT a fan of this new forum. It looks like the support forum for "My Little Pony Online". I would vote for going back to the previous forum!
Watch it! That's Hasbro, my friend. Gotta go with a comparison with a Mattel product, for Erco's sake. He may no longer be with the outfit, but it hurts his feelings anyone would buy a Hasbro toy!
Yes, we have a really good reason for the switch. I'd have to take you back ten months and about 800 hours of work to fully appreciate it. Bottom line is that this tool imported our prior work and vBulletin was fully non-upgradeable with our installation.
If you could help us work through some of the issues we'll improve the settings and style. Bump will be here full-time until we have a comfortable arrangement.
Reasons of integration aside, or why new forum software was needed, I'm mystified by some of the choices. Parallax has gone from appearing to support a rich variety of product, to reducing robotics and quadcopters to also-ran status. Frankly, I'm dumbfounded by the choices here, or else I completely misunderstand your direction. There's so much to fix where do we start with our comments?
I use microcontrollers because they're a part of my workflow, but I'm not about them. I'm here for the robotics discussion. Now all of that is lumped together with one fodder folder. Not a fun experience to sift through random "projects" to find nuggets of interest. Was there an extra charge to have more categories?
Yes, I'm sure matters of appearance can be addressed. But that's just the tip of a very big iceberg. There are many systemic issues that need to be addressed first.
I'm sorry that Parallax shelled out 800 hours of effort before arriving at this. But there's an apropos Bible reference that applies here, having to do with pearls and swine.
I agree entirely that this new tool will require improvements in the appearance and style. Once I get through our inventory count in the next couple of days I'll turn my attention to the forum improvements with Bump and Jim. In the meantime please share your input here as we're reading all of it. My suggestion is that we use one comment per thread, as it'll be easier for us to turn them into issues internally.
My understanding is that this tool fully imported our past posts, including photos and code. We can change the look and feel to be useful, easy to read, etc. and keep our content.
Thanks,
Ken Gracey
If new forum software was needed, it would have been really nice to pick something that is technically oriented. This is casual chatter software. Not appropriate for us here. Not at all.
Go here. Http:www.atariage.Com
That software can handle our kind of discussion, and that community data set is likely larger than ours, and that software upgrades reasonably.
If we stick with this, it is absolutely going to impact the perceptions and that will not be good.
I'll actually think long and hard about continuing. No joke.
Why are you folks complaining? With the exception of Phil and Peter, most of you folks supported the forum change if I am not mistaken. At least give Parallax a chance to work out the bugs. Support the change you asked for.
Why are you folks complaining? With the exception of Phil and Peter, most of you folks supported the forum change if I am not mistaken. At least give Parallax a chance to work out the bugs. Support the change you asked for.
This is what I ask, too. I fully expected a rough transition to get to this stage - and now we shall bring it up to standard. I'm a proponent of evolving it a bit more live than in an unvisited beta site because we simply weren't getting anywhere, so I take fully responsibility for putting this tool out in front of you.
Give us some time to work out the changes needed to the forums, please. Long term, I'm expecting this tool to work much better for our needs.
Thanks,
Ken Gracey
I was in support of a change. Thought for sure a more appropriate choice would be made.
Also thought things like links, search, etc... would get thought through.
Had I known it was going to be migrate n go on software like this, I would have not supported it at all.
And who is this vendor? I don't know much about them. Will it end up a mess a while from now?
If this were my Web project, not one bit of this would be OK. There would be a test and tune and an over viability analysis done first and with a few representative peeps.
Give us some time to work out the changes needed to the forums, please. Long term, I'm expecting this tool to work much better for our needs.
Of course you have our loyalty. But I wonder if Parallax has reciprocated that loyalty. Were any members of the user community involved in giving you input before the fact? I have to wonder. I'm not talking P2-level sidetracking, but a small focus group outside Parallax HQ.
Any changes now are going to be a tremendous drain in resources. Ken, I have to agree with Mr. Potatohead. It's time to hire an outside consultant who can help you avoid these costly mistakes.
Or maybe I'm all wrong, and this forum is exactly what Parallax needs, and is after. I can only say in its current form (and I'm not talking how it looks), it has limited appeal and use to me.
Seriously, Ken, this should have been vetted by the users in beta before making the transition. This is really going to hurt Parallax, I'm afraid. I'd like to make constructive suggestions, I really would, but I don't even know where to begin. My initial impression is that it's too broken out of the box to fix.
My understanding is that this tool fully imported our past posts, including photos and code.
I'll have to take your word for it. I tried finding some of my posts that had extensive code, photos, and links to other threads. But I gave up using the search tool, and old links via Google just redirect to the home page.
Oh.. No..
Judging by the screenshots of the sites that use it, along with their very own community forum, I can only think that this is going to be bad. The look and feel is a drastic departure from typical forum layouts, and I imagine that it will take a significant amount of work to massage it to the point where it "feels" right not to mention implementing the features this particular site requires.
P.s.Just noticed I can't resize this text box. Ugh.
I think I will pass for now. Hopefully things will get a bit more organized fairly soon. Fortunately it is summer time and I have a lot more things to do than to try and figure out a new forum. Just an FYI Ken and Parallax, I agree with most others. This is YUCK. Definately not showing the professionalism that Parallax should be portraying.
Now, I don't know if the decision to go with vanilla forums was strictly because it's open source, but there's other open source options that aren't, well, terrible. Such as http://www.simplemachines.org/
This new forum is so broken there seems no point in posting anything new as hopefully there will be a rollback shortly to the old forums, in which case all new posts will be lost.
Wasn't aware of any discussion regarding a forum upgrade, however did no one at Parallax try to persuade Ken that an immediate live migration is about the worst thing one can do for any online forum?
If not, then thats probably one of the most important things a manager can learn.
Just on the surface from looking at Vanilla's site, it seems to be a rather interesting choice, though it is OSS. I have to say, whomever gave the go-ahead for this theme over the stock blue one they show on their main page should be should be forced to buy lunch for the team.
At this point, the important thing is to STOP DIGGING!
If possible, revert back to the original. If thats not possible, then Ken, you really need to kick yourself and buy lunch for the company. You always have a back-up plan, and you should know this.
If you can't go back, then do what you should have done in the first place.
Get a spare pc, install your Vanilla app, and start adding themes that utilize most of the 1920x1080 that people use in 2015, and that are more data dense, and can be user-tested online.
Microchip has an option in the top right corner that allows the user to select whether they want to use mobile or desktop theme.
You simply can not make both types of devices work acceptably with 1 theme.
Take screenshots and get a thread started labeled Themes or somesuch, and get input from the actual users. Maybe even take some suggestions.
Does this thing do polls?
Open source isn't necessarily the best thing when it comes to forums.
For communities that expect to scale and endure, serious vendors do that. It costs a littlw, but it's worth it. See the site I linked earlier. I know that admin, and he runs that one solo with some help from the vendor, who knows a black eye hurts them too.
When the open source, run it and go option is xhoses, that also means getting into the community business as much as it does whatever else the community aureounds. Not recommended, unless somebody wants a career owning that software.
Comments
Can we go back? Please?
-Phil
Apparently half my user name was chopped (markæric)... Software doesn't support unicode for usernames?
At the very least, I hope the forum software vendor is paying Parallax to use it. Otherwise it makes no sense. This layout is worse than Reddit.
If you could help us work through some of the issues we'll improve the settings and style. Bump will be here full-time until we have a comfortable arrangement.
Ken Gracey
This time, all goes dark and then when the lights come back on, it like a bad road trip to Vegas!
I know a lot of people worked hard on this but well intended hard work done in a vacuum is not the answer.
I'm not surprised at all with the reaction.
It's usable, I can still make my generally worthless comments but it doesn't seem to support this community's objectives very well.
Code insertion?File attachments with typical code extensions (um, .spin???)
Code insertion?
Someone mentioned pre ?
Very Bad Parallax
What place I find
FPGA discussions.
Entire forum looks very bad
Is the menu on the left necessary when you're in a thread? Move anything relevant to the top and make the posts full width. Between the borders and the menu on the left, nearly half the screen space is wasted.
Also, the border separating the posts could probably be a bit more obvious.
I am not usually so negative about this sort of stuff, but this forum doesn't give off a "professional" look. The other forum software was not responsive, but it had a classic interface that looked like it was a place where the pros hung out.
seen as an attack on the company and not as constructive, so I'm
publically retracting the entire message in addition to all of my recent
posts. I may also consider resigning from the forums completely, but
I'm not a fan of "heat of the moment decisions", so I'll leave things
alone for now.
@Ken, I'm sitting here in a state of disbelief and shock that you would approve this for public consumption.
I was positive that this must have been done while you were out of the office and that you would be in the same shock as the rest of us.
I'm sure there are good reasons for moving from vBulletin, but even a limited temporary forum that could have been setup in a few minutes would have served the situation better than this. There are so many glaring issues (many have been raised) that I'm completely dumbfounded why this would be acceptable.
Watch it! That's Hasbro, my friend. Gotta go with a comparison with a Mattel product, for Erco's sake. He may no longer be with the outfit, but it hurts his feelings anyone would buy a Hasbro toy!
If you could help us work through some of the issues we'll improve the settings and style. Bump will be here full-time until we have a comfortable arrangement.
Reasons of integration aside, or why new forum software was needed, I'm mystified by some of the choices. Parallax has gone from appearing to support a rich variety of product, to reducing robotics and quadcopters to also-ran status. Frankly, I'm dumbfounded by the choices here, or else I completely misunderstand your direction. There's so much to fix where do we start with our comments?
I use microcontrollers because they're a part of my workflow, but I'm not about them. I'm here for the robotics discussion. Now all of that is lumped together with one fodder folder. Not a fun experience to sift through random "projects" to find nuggets of interest. Was there an extra charge to have more categories?
Yes, I'm sure matters of appearance can be addressed. But that's just the tip of a very big iceberg. There are many systemic issues that need to be addressed first.
I'm sorry that Parallax shelled out 800 hours of effort before arriving at this. But there's an apropos Bible reference that applies here, having to do with pearls and swine.
My understanding is that this tool fully imported our past posts, including photos and code. We can change the look and feel to be useful, easy to read, etc. and keep our content.
Thanks,
Ken Gracey
Go here. Http:www.atariage.Com
That software can handle our kind of discussion, and that community data set is likely larger than ours, and that software upgrades reasonably.
If we stick with this, it is absolutely going to impact the perceptions and that will not be good.
I'll actually think long and hard about continuing. No joke.
There are some other ugly things to say, and I won't...
Do this right. This isn't right.
This is what I ask, too. I fully expected a rough transition to get to this stage - and now we shall bring it up to standard. I'm a proponent of evolving it a bit more live than in an unvisited beta site because we simply weren't getting anywhere, so I take fully responsibility for putting this tool out in front of you.
Give us some time to work out the changes needed to the forums, please. Long term, I'm expecting this tool to work much better for our needs.
Thanks,
Ken Gracey
Considering how people feel about the new forum, it might make sense to limit searches for certain 4-letter words.
Also thought things like links, search, etc... would get thought through.
Had I known it was going to be migrate n go on software like this, I would have not supported it at all.
And who is this vendor? I don't know much about them. Will it end up a mess a while from now?
If this were my Web project, not one bit of this would be OK. There would be a test and tune and an over viability analysis done first and with a few representative peeps.
http://vanillaforums.org/
Of course you have our loyalty. But I wonder if Parallax has reciprocated that loyalty. Were any members of the user community involved in giving you input before the fact? I have to wonder. I'm not talking P2-level sidetracking, but a small focus group outside Parallax HQ.
Any changes now are going to be a tremendous drain in resources. Ken, I have to agree with Mr. Potatohead. It's time to hire an outside consultant who can help you avoid these costly mistakes.
Or maybe I'm all wrong, and this forum is exactly what Parallax needs, and is after. I can only say in its current form (and I'm not talking how it looks), it has limited appeal and use to me.
-Phil
http://vanillaforums.org/
Oh.. No..
Judging by the screenshots of the sites that use it, along with their very own community forum, I can only think that this is going to be bad. The look and feel is a drastic departure from typical forum layouts, and I imagine that it will take a significant amount of work to massage it to the point where it "feels" right not to mention implementing the features this particular site requires.
P.s.Just noticed I can't resize this text box. Ugh.
Wasn't aware of any discussion regarding a forum upgrade, however did no one at Parallax try to persuade Ken that an immediate live migration is about the worst thing one can do for any online forum?
If not, then thats probably one of the most important things a manager can learn.
Just on the surface from looking at Vanilla's site, it seems to be a rather interesting choice, though it is OSS. I have to say, whomever gave the go-ahead for this theme over the stock blue one they show on their main page should be should be forced to buy lunch for the team.
At this point, the important thing is to STOP DIGGING!
If possible, revert back to the original. If thats not possible, then Ken, you really need to kick yourself and buy lunch for the company. You always have a back-up plan, and you should know this.
If you can't go back, then do what you should have done in the first place.
Get a spare pc, install your Vanilla app, and start adding themes that utilize most of the 1920x1080 that people use in 2015, and that are more data dense, and can be user-tested online.
Microchip has an option in the top right corner that allows the user to select whether they want to use mobile or desktop theme.
You simply can not make both types of devices work acceptably with 1 theme.
Take screenshots and get a thread started labeled Themes or somesuch, and get input from the actual users. Maybe even take some suggestions.
Does this thing do polls?
For communities that expect to scale and endure, serious vendors do that. It costs a littlw, but it's worth it. See the site I linked earlier. I know that admin, and he runs that one solo with some help from the vendor, who knows a black eye hurts them too.
When the open source, run it and go option is xhoses, that also means getting into the community business as much as it does whatever else the community aureounds. Not recommended, unless somebody wants a career owning that software.