Thank you Community

[Tmetcalf]

Good day everyone,

I know this has been quite a change.

I believe in the Lithium platform and what it can do for us.

I apologies again for the search frustration, but I am working on it.

With next week being a holiday, I will be away till later in the week, but I WILL be checking in.

I believe I have almost solved the Groups issue, but experienced an issue that I could not get past.

Have a great long weekend everyone.

Please feel free to messgage me here or -

Best,

Toby

[kjain-2]

Hi Sir,

As a suggestion, I think previous interface of our Community was more better, simpler and more user friendly. And rather then giving rank point system was more better and easy to identify any user..

But it's just my personel opinion and may be am not thinking on that angle on which you are.. 

So just my opinion about new interface...

Regards,

Kapil

[jeffreyrwalker]

It appears to me that comments are NOT being grouped - or indented - with the post to which they belong.  Is it just me, or is that problematic?  

Is that something Lithium does not do?

What I see is a post, several separate comments, then a reply to one of the comments.  It's extra work (I won't say confusing, but close) to figure out the context of the reply to the comment for the post.  See what I mean?  Again, is it just me?

[Werner_E]

> As a suggestion, I think previous interface of our Community was more better, simpler and more user friendly. And rather > then giving rank point system was more better and easy to identify any user..

> But it's just my personel opinion and may be am not thinking on that angle on which you are.. 

If you look around the postings and comments here and in "Community Issues" you sure will see that you are not alone.

I did not like the inbox with its filtered streams in the Jive version we used last and would have preferred the older Jive version we had before. But that may be personal preference (I'm really not into social network systems).

I also see some severe drawbacks here and while I have the impression that Toby is doing his best to sort out things I stil wonder about the overhauled migration which makes the impression of being bad planned and unprofessional. Some of the problems we experience now (missing groups, missing posts, wrong settings concerning permissions, ..) sure should have been fixed in a test phase and not now.

> It appears to me that comments are NOT being grouped - or indented - with the post to which they belong.

Its also not possible to quote the comment you are replying to as there is no way to reply/comment to a comment, you can only comment to the blog article itself. As far as we cannot comment another comment there is no such thing as an intented view.

Even worse we have no way to tunr on intented view in discussions/questions (or whatever they may be called in this forum software). We have the option to reply to a specific answer but unless we quote we have no clue later as to which answer the reply belongs. I am pretty sure that a forum software like Lithium offers intented views and that it simply was a mistake not to enable it or give us the option to do so.

I sincerely hope that there will be a quick and easy way to change the view from intented (it only makes sense up to a certain level of intentation) to flat und vice versa in the thread itself and not by changing a setting in the personal preferences.

Even

[Tmetcalf]

@jeffreyrwalker Yes - the lack of indent will take some getting used to.

It is a bit easier to follow in a dicussion rather than a blog.  I am try to see if we can flip the order of the reply and the post so it is easier to see who you are replying too.

Thanks for commenting.

Toby

[TomU]

Toby (@Tmetcalf), in your reply above, I had absolutely no idea what you were responding to.  I had to hunt down a post from this user to figure out what the original question was.  Not a huge deal for this short thread, but much more challening with multiple replies from the same person or multiple page threads.  We really need to either have indented posts or something indicating which response the reply is referring to.  This is crazy confusing.

[RichardJ]

Can't quote a comment . That's very annoying.

Werner_Exinger wrote: "I have the impression that Toby is doing his best to sort out things I stil wonder about the overhauled migration which makes the impression of being bad planned and unprofessional. Some of the problems we experience now (missing groups, missing posts, wrong settings concerning permissions, ..)".

There was a testing phase, but I do not think it was realistic to catch (and fix, where possible) all the problems during that phase. For some of the old Mathcad hands, think back to the Collaboratory migration, and be happy that it's not a repeat of that

---

[RichardJ]

OK. That's really weird. I posted a comment. Then I edited the comment, and clicked on "Post your comment", and "poof", my comment vanished! I can still get to it in the editor by using the browser back button though, so here it is again:

Can't quote a comment . That's very annoying.

Werner_Exinger wrote: "I have the impression that Toby is doing his best to sort out things I stil wonder about the overhauled migration which makes the impression of being bad planned and unprofessional. Some of the problems we experience now (missing groups, missing posts, wrong settings concerning permissions, ..)".

There was a testing phase, but I do not think it was realistic to catch (and fix, where possible) all the problems during that phase. For some of the old Mathcad hands, think back to the Collaboratory migration, and be happy that it's not a repeat of that

[Werner_E]

As you probably can see yourself - your comment did not vanish. But now we have it twice 😉

> For some of the old Mathcad hands, think back to the Collaboratory migration, and be happy that it's not a repeat of that

There was a migration? I thought it was a simple shutdown of the old collab.

I still miss it and its clear structure, But of course I got used to the benfits of the new software like being able to attach picture easily via cut and paste. But wait, this feature is gone ....  😞

[RichardJ]

Werner_Exinger wrote: As you probably can see yourself - your comment did not vanish. But now we have it twice

I was afraid that might happen.

Now I notice that the emoji do not render, and have disappeared from the editor. Strange stuff.

[Werner_E]

> There was a testing phase, but I do not think it was realistic to catch (and fix, where possible) all the problems during that phase.

I was pretty sure there was that phase and I guess the Champions were invited for a testdrive.

What we experience now simply looks like there wasn't a severe test phase.

Its hard to believe that

• the "suboptimal" theme, wasting much too much space and makes the layout unnecessary unclear
• the missing of an intented view
• the missing (or the problems with migration) of the groups
• the inability to insert pics via cut and paste (OK, this seems to be nothing which could be fixed so quickly and sure not by PTC)
• the inability to attach files from PTC products directly without having them to zip manually (they still are not rejected)

have not been seen immediatly in a test drive. And if those problems were seen, they sure should have to be fixed before turning off the old forum.

I can image that there were other quirks and problems which we don't experience thanks to the test phase, but some severe from the remaining ones should have been fixed before the full migration took place. Thats what I meant when I spoke about an overhauled migration. Furthermore the timing to do it quickly before a very long weekend is something I can't understand.

[RichardJ]

The issues with whitespace, indentation, and cut and paste of pictures were noticed, along with several other problems. The testing phase was not very long though, so while some things got fixed others didn't. The problem with file attachments was half fixed. You can't attach any file with an extension that is not known to the forums. So all the PTC file extensions were added to the list, but I guess the forum software tries to be clever, and that alone is not enough. 

[Werner_E]

> The issues with whitespace, indentation, and cut and paste of pictures were noticed,

> The problem with file attachments was half fixed.

and unless such severe and most obvious issues aren't fixed, the forum should not go online. That was the point. Going online nonetheless renders a testphase senseless. It was far too soon to put the forum online.

To be fair it has to ne said that possible the cut and paste of pictures is a feature simply not available in Lithium (it wasn't in eralier Jive versions, too) and all that can be done is that Toby puts a feature request at Lithum. But, given the right amount of time, the rest of the probs could have been fixed before making the forum public. Was there any need to do it that in a hurry and obverhasted?

A migration like this sure is not an easy task and holds a lot of pitfalls. So good planning would have given the job the time it deserves and it looks to me that this was not the case here. The credo rather being "let it ripe at the user" which means at our expense.

OK, but if we compare it with the "development" of Prime .... it was a fine migration - well done!

[tgudobba]

I like what I see so far. This new Lithium platform acts more like the PTC website & feels like it belongs. I'm always amazed of the complaints come in when we're faced with change. All issues, or perceived issues, have been resolved quickly. Give it a few weeks to get used to it.

Nice job on the roll out Toby!

[RichardJ]

tgudobba wrote: I'm always amazed of the complaints come in when we're faced with change.

I'm not. People generally don't like change. There are studies that show that people are about 10x as resistant to losing something they have, compared to not getting the exact same thing in the first place. Beyond that inherent bias though, there are genuinely significant features we have lost (at least for now), most notably decent threading and the ability to paste pictures into a post.