The forum is a point of exchange of experience, knowledge and advice . It also gives me a sense of belonging to a community. Therefore, a well functioning and user friendly forum is important to me. I check in almost daily. To you, as a company, I would assume the forum is even more important. It also reflects on your product (which, thankfully, is a lot better than the forum experience).

Whether you need to start over or not is not the question. Rather, what do you need to do to remedy the shortcomings of this forum interface. And, to my knowledge, it isn't a great burden or strain anymore to provide a good forum user experience in this day and age.

Please see this post as a friendly feedback from a concerned user and not as some kind of unqualified bickering.

-- Chris.

Why not instruct your forum developers to revert to the previous forum interface?

George E A Reid

Ipad Mini 5,  IOS 14.4,  SD 3.15.0.288
PC(Win 10, Version 19041.804)  SD 3.15.0.0

I would like to second Chris's and George's comments.

Mike
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+1

I agree with everything said, but none of it actually helps us, I'm afraid. At the moment the developer/hoster of this forum is AWOL.

This forum was created in the very early days of SkyDemon before we had a proper support department. It is unlikely it would be created if we were starting again; it bypasses our normal support process which isn't actually great for us as an organisation.

I understand exactly where you're coming from Tim, but I hope you're not softening us up for possible closure of this forum. It's such a useful space for users to share their experiences and help each other out. Without the forum, I suspect that your support department would be a lot busier than it is at present.

Mike
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The forum is so much more than just a support tool. You get great feedback on the forum, it's your finger on the pulse of an important group of customers.

I bet you could give an IT student a couple of hundred pounds and tell him to turn this into a forum that he would like to use.

-- Chris.

Hi All,

I hope everyone is well. My name is Ryan. I'm the developer for the forum software used here at SD.

I just wanted to jump in to personally apologize for the frustration the recent update has caused.

Tim from SD has emailed me a few times to try and draw my attention to this topic but unfortunately due to some issues on my end (sorry Tim) I never saw these emails. Tim called me a couple of hours ago and pointed me towards this topic.

I'm quickly going through to address the issues identified here within this topic. The following items should already be resolved...

1. Unread topics not appearing as bold

This was due to the use of the Open Sans Light font not having a very clear difference between it's normal font weight and it's bold font weight. The read tracking was still working but the CSS did not help to make it clear which topics had new posts. We've reverted this back to regular Arial or Sans Serif which should be much easier to identify between normal and bold font weights. Also to help I've added the unread icon back to the left alongside each topic.

2. Post text overflowing reported by Shifu

This was not a CSS issue although using overflow hidden or scroll may offer a solution the problem here is with text overflowing the. This was due to post 19465 by pgroell. This post contained a very long link and as the link didn't have any spaces it was not able to wrap within the browser causing the parent element to expand to try and fit the contents of the long link. This would cause other normal posts to then scroll off the screen as the parent element now had a width matching the long link.

To ensure this never happens we automatically shrink all links above a certain character length within posts and populate the title attribute for the shortened link so you can still see the full URL this link will take you to before clicking the link. You will now see this working correctly here http://forums.skydemon.aero/FindPost19465.aspx

3. No Replies & Views column

I don't see this behaviour. I can see replies & views both from the latest, popular & unred views on the homepage and when within a specific forum. Sky Painter if you can point me in the right page to locate or identify where these should be added I'd be delighted to take a look.

4. Jump to first unread post within a topic

If a topic contains new posts since you last read the topic you can already jump to the first unread post within the topic. This is shown below...



I'll post further news once I've gone through every comment here in this topic. Please be assured now I'm aware of this I'll be reading this topic often so please don't hesitate to post any additional problems or issues you may be experiencing with the updated forum. I'll do my best to address each of these as quickly as possible. It's certainly not my intention to make things worse and hopefully I can quickly turn this around for you all. I'll post further very soon,

Regards,

Ryan

Hi Ryan

I generally run my browser window at something less than full screen, so dragging out the edge of my browser window slightly, restored the Replies and Views columns. What threw me was that I hadn't changed the size of my browser window from one version of the forum software to the next, so when the columns disappeared in the new version, I naturally assumed that the software was at fault.

Notwithstanding the above, where are the Likes and Stars columns?

I have definitely experienced problems with the UNREAD button returning posts that have already been read and failing to return posts that haven't been read.

Posting a quoted reply is not working as it previously did. For instance, as I'm typing this "quoted reply" the full text of your post appears above mine in a shaded box, as it should for a quoted reply, but it does NOT appear in the preview box below or in the actual reply when posted. This means that if I want to refer to a particular point made by the quoted poster, I have copy and paste it, at which point it looks like part of my text, because it doesn't appear in a shaded box. I hope this makes sense.

Whilst typing this reply, I have discovered another bug, which appears to be new, as it hasn't happened to me previously. When hitting the Return key twice to start a new paragraph, the cursor disappears off the bottom of the page, because it appears that no line feed is generated. To get back to the cursor so that I can continue typing, I have to click on the bottom scroll arrow. Hitting the down arrow on the keyboard doesn't work. This is a nuisance to say the least. Once again, I hope this makes sense.

The real "biggie" for me is – why fix something when it ain't broke? The original forum software worked fine, with no complaints, so why change it? It seems to me that it is "change for change's sake."

Edited to add:- By the way, I am NOT seeing the "jump to first unread post" arrow either.

Mike
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It didn't work fine, at all. There were a few issued I had complained about and one of the things we pay for is software maintenance.

An issue I have noticed myself with this new upgrade is that on the front page, where it lists all the forums, it often says "undefined" instead of the thread name on the right where I think it's trying to tell me the last post that was made in that forum.