Forum

[TomGutman]

You have got to be kidding! This thing is supposed to replace the collaboratory?

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.

Plus the pages are extremely busy, with all kinds of extraneous nonsense. Not a business like, nor useful structure.

I don't think this is going to work.

[pwyndham]

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.

[RichardJ]

-

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:

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

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"!).

[DanMarotta]

Paul,

From the Actions tool box, located at the top right, there's an option to "Stop email notifications"

To view threads sequentially, navigate to your profile, from the Actions tool box, select Edit Preferences>General Preferences>Discussion View Style>Flat

Whle you're there, you may want to update how you want to receive your email notifications. This is the second tab on that same Edit Preferences page.

-Dan

[RichardJ]

To view threads sequentially, navigate to your profile, from the Actions tool box, select Edit Preferences>General Preferences>Discussion View Style>Flat

That does mean the new posts are always at the end, but then it is very difficult to figure out what was posted in reponse to what. The Collaboratory structure solves this by using threading, but with obvious tags for new posts. The separate browser pane on the left is also very useful in this regard. As I said, it is in fact the best structure of any forum I know of. It is both clear what is new, and it is clear what was posted in response to what, both without having to scroll down a very long page. I don't know if something like that structure is possible for these forums, but if it is I highly recommend it.

[IRstuff]

Is there no way to see all the new posts from all the forums? Looks like we have to navigate to each individual forum to see if there are any new postings.

TTFN,

Eden

[RichardJ]

They are supposed to be working on it. Meanwhile, you can either follow Mona's advice (somewhere way beck up this very long thread), or go to the top of the page and next to the word "Browse", in very small letters, there are some very small icons that helpful in this regard.

But we really really really need the "New" tags!

[IRstuff]

Thanks, I recall stumbling across that once, but could remember how I got there...

TTFN,

Eden

[IRstuff]

Is there a way to filter for only Mathcad?

TTFN,

Eden

[Guest2]

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

[RichardJ]

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.

[jhardy1]

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]

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

[TomGutman]

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.

[RichardJ]

tom_gutman wrote:

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.

It does, but I don't know if it's a better choice. This is the Akiva site:

http://www.akiva.com/Default.asp?id=1&l=1

Not exactly overwhelming. I looked though all the screen shots and saw nothing that looks like the Collaboratory. Everything has the PHP look. So maybe the new software could be used to produce a new version of the Collaboratory, but maybe not. As you are well aware, there is no guarantee that a newer version of software can do everything an older version could (Mathcad 12 vs Mathcad 11 being an excellent example!).

These forums are based on the Jive software:

http://www.jivesoftware.com/products

Their web site has more content than the Akiva site, but it's mostly drivel written by someone that obviously had a very bad attack of marketingitis. It's full of phrases like "We're laser-focused on innovating, refining and optimizing a social business solution to transform enterprise communication and collaboration", and words like "ideation", which I bet you won't find in any dictionary! There is nothing there to indicate the Jive software could do what the Collaboratory did either.

So I don't see that the current Akiva sofware is necessarily any better than the current Jive software. And I don't really care which software package is used. I just want to see a much, much more usable forum than this one. If the Jive software can do that, fine. If not, then we have a big problem.

[IRstuff]

Bzzzz.

ideation c.1818:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ideation

[RichardJ]

Eden Mei wrote:

Bzzzz.

ideation c.1818:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ideation

I guess I should have taken the two minutes required to check!

(and since this software does not seem to support animated gifs, which even the 10 year old Akiva software and the free PHP software do, you will need to click on the Smiley)

[DanMarotta]

Richard, was able to insert an animated GIF. Here's my balancing act

[RichardJ]

Excellent!

I'll try the same gif. When I do it it's animated when I compose, but not after it's posted. Is there some trick? How did you embed the gif?

[DanMarotta]

I used the insert image icon > chose "From the Web" > pasted in the URL of the GIF

[RichardJ]

I think we're posting at the same time! I wonder why the behavior is different when you insert it as a link to a web page or as a link to a file.

[DanMarotta]

Also, you can now view all recent content within Mathcad and it's sub-communities at a high-level. So if there's activity in Mathcad Usage, Calculus & Des, Other Subjects, etc, it will appear in the ALL RECENT MATHCAD CONTENT widget.

You're still not able to filter between all NEW posts since your last visit, but we're working towards a solution.

-Dan

[RichardJ]

BostonDan wrote:

Also, you can now view all recent content within Mathcad and it's sub-communities at a high-level. So if there's activity in Mathcad Usage, Calculus & Des, Other Subjects, etc, it will appear in the ALL RECENT MATHCAD CONTENT widget.

You're still not able to filter between all NEW posts since your last visit, but we're working towards a solution.

-Dan

Thanks! This feature is a major plus for the Mathcad community and we (well. me, but I am confident that if I asked I would be speaking for most people) appreciate the time taken to implement it. If it's not already planned could you add this to the widget list so that I can add it to my home page. I just looked, and it's not there right now.

[IRstuff]

Is there something that needs to be done to make that happen? I can't even see this thread in either listings now. The only reason I can even respond is because of the email notification.

It's not here:

https://communities.ptc.com/threads/

or here:

https://communities.ptc.com/community/mathcad?view=discussions

TTFN

[RichardJ]

Eden Mei wrote:

Is there something that needs to be done to make that happen? I can't even see this thread in either listings now.

There's three places to look, and they all show different things. On the top level discussions page I see this thread (4th one, authored by Tom):

If I look at the Mathcad discussions tab it's not there though:

But I do see a new post to the Eddy Currents thread, which does not show up on the top level discussions page (not in the first three pages, which is all searched). I have no idea what is going on, but something certainly doesn't seem right.

On the Mathcad overview page I see both threads under "recent activity" (this is what Dan was talking about), but now new threads are not shown in bold:

[RichardJ]

Jeez, these two inch wide text boxes get annoying with long posts!

[IRstuff]

It appears to me that the "Other Subjects" subcommunity is now nearly fully stealthy, and only appears in the Overview display on the Mathcad main page, and nowhere else. So, we seem to be taking a step backwards.

TTFN

[RichardJ]

Eden Mei wrote:

It appears to me that the "Other Subjects" subcommunity is now nearly fully stealthy, and only appears in the Overview display on the Mathcad main page, and nowhere else.

Yes, whereas the top level Mathcad community is only semi-stealthy. The "Eddy Currents" thread appears on the Mathcad Overview and Discussion pages, but not on the top level Discussions page, which should show everything.

Hopefully this is an iterative procedure that converges at some point

That's strange. There's a smiley in this post, directly above this text, and although I see it when I compose, I don't see it in the post.

[IRstuff]

The emoticon insertion appears to be broken. Yet another thing to add to the punch list.

[RichardJ]

BostonDan wrote:

Also, you can now view all recent content within Mathcad and it's sub-communities at a high-level. So if there's activity in Mathcad Usage, Calculus & Des, Other Subjects, etc, it will appear in the ALL RECENT MATHCAD CONTENT widget.

You're still not able to filter between all NEW posts since your last visit, but we're working towards a solution.

-Dan

This is not turning out to be as useful as I first thought. The problem is that it only shows the last post in any particular thread. So if several people have responded, you can't tell. If you go to the thread you still can't tell, because new posts are not marked in any way. So I'm back to the hunt-and-peck approach of sifting through everything, including dozens of Pro/E, Arbortext, etc, posts, on the recent activity widget on my customized home page.

[RichardJ]

BostonDan wrote:

Also, you can now view all recent content within Mathcad and it's sub-communities at a high-level. So if there's activity in Mathcad Usage, Calculus & Des, Other Subjects, etc, it will appear in the ALL RECENT MATHCAD CONTENT widget.

Something is not quite right with that widget. This is what it shows at the time I posted this:

Note the time on the top entry!