Forum

19-Tanzanite

tom_gutman wrote:

For starters, how does one fine new (unread) messages? It seems one needs to click on all of the individual areas, with no prior indication as to which might contain new information. And I see nothing indicating anything keeping track of what has been read or not.

I already pointed this out to them. Unfortunately I posted it in a thread that was in a part of the forum that only existed in the beta version, so it's now gone. I never got a reply before it was deleted.

I don't think this is going to work.

As far as new posts go, that is exactly what I told them. People are just not going to bother to go through every sub-community to see if there is a new post. To exacerbate the problem these communities also allow people to post documents, blogs, and videos separate to the discussions. There is one area for each of these, for each of the sub-communities, and there is no way to know if there is anything new there either.

And, as you say, there is no way to keep track of what has been read.

If they don't fix this soon, I think the Mathcad forums will die.

M

mzeftel

1-Visitor

I just spoke with the Communities manager. It is a high priority to add highlighting to the forums that have new postings in them. It will take about two weeks to have that implemented.

For now, you can go to the main community page and click on Your View (Personalize) and add Recent Activity and Discussions to it. Then the most recent postings will show.

From there, you can click on a post you want to respond to, and answer it, as I just did.

We'll work out the kinks as this is implemented. Give it a try and post as you've done in the past to the Mathcad Collab User Forums.

Mona

PhilipOakley

1-Visitor

Mona,

I just tried to do that and failed. It isn't clear what is to be done one you get to the 'recent discussion' line. It almost looks likeyou have to desgign your own layout.

And, by the way the log-in time-out sucks. (at least thats what I think is happening)

Plus I had a personal log-in on the collab, and a corporate log-in on the old PTC support site - how's that to work?

PhilipOakley

1-Visitor

Unauthorized

It appears you're not allowed to view what you requested. You might contact your administrator if you think this is a mistake.

What does this mean when I try to post!

Philip

D

DanMarotta

12-Amethyst

Philip, where did you experience this message? It seems you replied to this thread with no issue...

-Dan

PhilipOakley

1-Visitor

BostonDan wrote:
Philip, where did you experience this message? It seems you replied to this thread with no issue...
-Dan

I was replying to another message originally (in another window) and up it popped when I pressed the "post message" button. I gave up on that one, then had a go here.

I founf the "Quote button next to the emotiocons and font selection stuff. Unfortunately you can only quote the one you are replying to, rather than gather multiple bits together.

There does appera to be an "HTML" button top right of the edit window that allows something....

Philip

1-Visitor

The thing I want most is to have a filter to completely filter out all communities I do not want to see. Eventhough this is in the Mathcad community I do not want to see anything about MathCAD.

Seems like on my home page a lot of the new post are for MathCAD. I don't want to see any of those post. Just post for communities I am following. If I am looking for an anwser to my Pro/E question and see something that looks like it will answer my question I click on it. Then I find out it is for MathCAD. Very frustrating.

Please make absolute filters.

Thanks

Paul

1-Visitor

How do you keep track of everything people are posting to this thread. That is totally beyond me. It needs to go sequentially. I cannot spend all day reading the whole thread over and over again to see if someone happened to post some were in it.

Also I can only imagine how fast my inbox is going to fill up when PlanetPTC gets more activity over time.

http://collab.mathsoft.com/~Mathcad2000/login

19-Tanzanite

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How do you keep track of everything people are posting to this thread. That is totally beyond me. It needs to go sequentially. I cannot spend all day reading the whole thread over and over again to see if someone happened to post some were in it.

I agree. The Mathcad Collaboratory structure is far superior in this respect:

In fact, it's the best of any forum I am aware of. Newer is not always better.

Also I can only imagine how fast my inbox is going to fill up when PlanetPTC gets more activity over time.

You can change this in your profile, under "Edit Preferences" (NOT, rather non-intuitively, under "Manage email notifications"!).

G

Guest2

1-Visitor

I agree that we are in urgent need for some kind of new-flag along with the ability to view new-messages only.

The new forum is nearly as horrible to navigate as the PTC-website. You may find something of interest once in a while but you never will find it again if you are in need for it.

I additionally miss a tree view of the the messages in one thread

I miss the information in a quick glance whow many replies there are for a given thread before(!) I open it

Searching is horrible, especially if you are not interested at other PTC products but Mathcad - no posibility to filter or simply stay within Mathcad.

Splitting the forum and distinguishing between discussions, showcase, videos and files is not really a good idea in my opinion.

The renaming of Educational Applications to Homework Help is misleading - either make a second conference or rerename back.

If you enter a conference the "recent activities" sometimes show the threads in an somewhat arbitrary order with postings from 2007 on top (without a recent reply there) immedeately followed by really recent ones.

Is omitting Bug Reports and the Feature Suggustions kind of PTC self defence? Could be a boomerang when people crosspost that kind of things in a variety of conferences.

Is is normal for that site to be so extremely slow with awful reaction time? Seems to be overloaded with all kind of not realyy useful (to me) stuff.

Especially after login it takes a long time to show the conferences.

Reg

19-Tanzanite

Guest wrote:

Interesting user name! Did you log in as a guest (I thought that was not possible) or actually put that in your profile?

I additionally miss a tree view of the the messages in one thread

Agreed.

Searching is horrible, especially if you are not interested at other PTC products but Mathcad - no posibility to filter or simply stay within Mathcad.

That's not quite true, although the way it works now makes it all but useless. If you type something in the search box, say "Weibull", and click on the magnifying glass you get a results page. You can then select "More options" and filter to only Mathcad. The problem is, it then does not seem to find all the posts. Something is broken. I can find no way to get directly to the more advanced search options.

Splitting the forum and distinguishing between discussions, showcase, videos and files is not really a good idea in my opinion.

There I have to disagree with you, because it has not really been split. There is nothing to stop someone from attaching a file to a post. The ability to post files separate to the discussions is an additional feature. Back on the Collab we would frequently hyperlink to a thread with an important file over and over again. Sometimes I couldn't even find the right thread, and would just post the same worksheet a second or third time. Now those documents can be posted where it's easy to find them, and easy to hyperlink to them.

The renaming of Educational Applications to Homework Help is misleading - either make a second conference or rerename back.

Agreed

If you enter a conference the "recent activities" sometimes show the threads in an somewhat arbitrary order with postings from 2007 on top (without a recent reply there) immedeately followed by really recent ones.

I think that is because the threads are ordered by date of last post, rather than by creation date. I haven't decided whether I think that's a good or bad thing.

I have not been able to figure out what "Trending Topics" on the home page is supposed to show though. Some of the topics are really old threads that nobody has replied to in over 3 years (for example "Kalman filter").

Is omitting Bug Reports and the Feature Suggustions kind of PTC self defence? Could be a boomerang when people crosspost that kind of things in a variety of conferences.

As far as feature request goo, I agree this is pointless. It will not stop people from posting feature requests, it just means they will be sprayed all over the forums rather than being neatly organized in one place. I am not so sure about the bug reports. The Collab did not always have a bug reports forum, and so bug reports were randomly sprayed everywhere. The addition of the forum helped some, but only some. People often do not know their problem is due to a bug, and so post in another forum anyway. Also, a good percentage of the "bugs" that are posted to the bug reports forum are not actually bugs. So the bug reports are now slightly more concentrated than they used to be, but they are still not all in one place.

J

jhardy1

1-Visitor

Sheesh! This new arrangement is a nightmare compared to the old Collaboratory.

So how exactly is it that a company like PTC which is all about "product development excellence" (their words, not mine - check out the header at the top of the screen!) can get something which should be so simple, so wrong?!

rnislick

6-Contributor

Thanks for the input on this discussion. I want to point out a few things. First, we tested PlanetPTC Community in the UX lab last week at the PTC/USER World event in Orlando and a lot of this feedback surfaced there as well. We will be implementing these changes in phases, but as Dan said, it won't happen overnight.

I never expected the transition from the Collab to be easy for Mathcad customers. Not sure if folks are aware but the Collab was running on software that was from 1998. And the hardware was just as old. PTC inherited the Collab when Mathsoft was acquired and it became important to bring the Collab into the mainstream fold of a universal, current, 2010, web 2.0 community platform that encompasses all of PTC products and customers, not just Mathcad. So while I know it's been a somewhat frustrating transition, I hope you will stay on PlanetPTC Community. And what might be even better, is if we form a group whereby you can provide feedback to Dan and me. Diamond Members are representatives you can voice concerns to as well. I am open to ideas on how we can streamline the feedback process.

Thanks

Rachel

T

TomGutman

Author

1-Visitor

SO Akiva doesn't have any updated software? The collaboratory software is rather old, and far from perfect. But it is still much better than this. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason why all of the PTC communities, not just Mathcad, could not be using such software.

1-Visitor

I had last week off. So, today I was looking at the 15 or so emails I had from this thread. It is nice to get the emails, but the thread has multiple conversations going on at the same time at different places. This makes it hard to tell which emails go together and which do not. At least the "View the full discussion" link takes you to that post in the thread. I still think the threads should be linear and not multi-threaded.

edit: When I submit a post it should return me to my post and not to the top of the thread.

19-Tanzanite

Paul Wyndham wrote:
I still think the threads should be linear and not multi-threaded.

As I mentioned before, you can change that if you go to your profile and "Edit Preferences". However, then it is impossible to tell who replied to who unless the replier quoted the the person they were replying to, so I think it's even harder to follow.

D

DanMarotta

12-Amethyst

You can also click the "in response to: community member" link and that will bring you up to the original post you responded to

1-Visitor

When you create a new thread or document why can you only put in one picture? You can put multiple in replies.

19-Tanzanite

Eden mentioned that you could only insert one picture, but when I tried it I could insert several.

Now I understand why!

1-Visitor

It appears that after some period of time or after you mess around with other stuff for a while it allows you to add more pictures.