The Forum is getting a new look

Bridlington1

Exodi said:

Bridlington1 said:

I just hope we don't end up with that ghastly text editor we had the other month.

Specifically what didn't you like about it?

The current quoting system is messy - I find myself in HTML view more often than not.

Judging from the negative replies in this thread already - I'd just like to say to the MSE team not to be discouraged. Humans are hardwired to resist change and I spend half my life dragging my team kicking and screaming onto systems which they usually end up accepting are superior later on.

If you tried quoting anything with a quote in it you got a link to the previous message in the conversation instead of being able to see the quote itself. You couldn't simply edit quotes or even embolden/italicise bits of a quote that you were referring to. In order to refer to specific sections of a quote you needed to manually copy and paste the relevant paragraphs into a new quote. There was no preview button, random spaces kept appearing in-between lines. It became very difficult to follow a conversation with links appearing all over the shop and in general the editor just became a real pain to use.

I'm not resistant to change in general and am in fact more than happy to embrace new features/systems that actually improve the way the forum works, irons out any faults with the old systems and make things run smoother in general. I am however resistant to changes that don't make life any easier whatsoever and just end up being generally annoying. If a new text editor was rolled out that was more user-friendly or even if it was just as as user friendly than the current one and was a real improvement to the current one then I wouldn't be complaining at all, in fact I would most likely welcome it. I just don't want the text editor that was rolled out on this forum the other month that's all.

Time2Go_25

Exodi said:

Bridlington1 said:

I just hope we don't end up with that ghastly text editor we had the other month.

Specifically what didn't you like about it?

The current quoting system is messy - I find myself in HTML view more often than not.

Judging from the negative replies in this thread already - I'd just like to say to the MSE team not to be discouraged. Humans are hardwired to resist change and I spend half my life dragging my team kicking and screaming onto systems which they usually end up accepting are superior later on.

There are some who dislike change, but what most people dislike is change for changes sake and change that is not properly tested and the last one was a prime example of that. 

PipneyJane

Thanks for the heads-up @MSE_JC. 

Fingers crossed that it'll fix the formatting issues we now have with signatures, and restore the ability to colour text within a paragraph.

- Pip

dave2319

Exodi said:

Judging from the negative replies in this thread already - I'd just like to say to the MSE team not to be discouraged. Humans are hardwired to resist change and I spend half my life dragging my team kicking and screaming onto systems which they usually end up accepting are superior later on.

I think what matters with negative comments is whether they're valid points or not. Yes, sometimes people complain for the sake of it but I think the comments in this thread so far are perfectly fair, based on previous "upgrades".

So what I would say to the MSE team is: thanks for rolling back the last one, and please keep listening to the negative comments as long as they're valid points, because it's better to do that than just listening to the positives.

Cherryfudge

A couple of things I'd like to see in the latest version:

1) Our old emojis please!
2) A bookmarking facility. When I'm 94 pages into a 400 page thread and for some reason click on the most recent post, the current system will make me search for ever after for any page that isn't the most recent one. So I'd like to be able either to bookmark or (not so good) search by page number.

Oh, I forgot - the return of coloured text would be fab if you could see your way to it please, tech people!

Spoonie_Turtle

deannagone said:

I suspect that the light yellow background on the warning of the upcoming changes is not gathering enough attention.  This thread has only had a hundred views so far.  Please do something to make it stand out more.

I completely agree - at minimum it needs to be red and saying it'll be offline for the upgrade.  The current announcement doesn't communicate the scale of changes.

elsien

Any improvement on the search function would be very much appreciated. 

cymruchris

deannagone said:

I suspect that the light yellow background on the warning of the upcoming changes is not gathering enough attention.  This thread has only had a hundred views so far.  Please do something to make it stand out more.

Yes it is a bit subtle in its colour - even being yellow, it's a bit of a faded shade. Might be nice if it was a bit more stand-out and brighter. Even then of course 90 percent of people still won't notice it or read it - but I'm all for trying to get as many people as possible to know what's going on when the upgrade takes place.

Exodi said:

Bridlington1 said:

I just hope we don't end up with that ghastly text editor we had the other month.

Judging from the negative replies in this thread already

Not so much negative - but last time something new got rolled out - lots of things broke - to the extent that it was rolled-back (thankfully). Although change isn't always welcome by everyone, if it really does improve things for the better, then no doubt those that don't like it will soon get used to it. As long as we don't get a change that results in things being broken (and I mean broken - not different) - then I'm sure it'll all go very well.

Humdinger1

What changes will there be to boards and categories? What's not working on those at the moment? Will existing bookmarks all be moved across? Thanks for all your work and please keep listening...there is some inevitable resistance to change but sometimes it's for excellent reasons.   Humdinger 

Newcad

Money saving - it applies to (forum) software as well.

Sometimes that means the software in use is not the best, but is acceptable.

I'm sure that if MSE used top of the range, more expensive, forum software questions would be asked about making savings.

(Or maybe not - how many forum users know how much the underlying software costs the forum owner to run?)