News Author:
Ken Gracey
Work-in-progress approach not well-received by our forum community
If you use our support forums you’re aware that we launched a new system this week which was quickly deployed and poorly received. While we expected some trouble since the plan called for some tool settings being improved on live data in front of our users, the calls for “heads rolling” and comparisons to My Little Pony discussion forums were a surprise. The forum members are a passionate community and provide the best support in the industry. They don’t like to see Parallax stumble in the way we did.
Parallax forums have moved several times in the past - from PICList, eGroups, YahooGroups, vBulletin and now to Vanilla Forums. Each change was difficult for everybody, but necessary as a result of software obsolescence, corporate mergers, operating system incompatibility and changes in how information is provided and communicated by forum members. Today’s migration started nearly a year ago. A key goal was to be able to fully import our data and keep the informative posts in tact, with pictures, code and comments retaining their original formatting. When we finally achieved this goal I asked our web developers to simply “make it live” because the current vBulletin version was losing traffic and only accepted uploads with workarounds. Summer forum traffic is low, so we needed to get this done before the Fall.
The new forums are live at http://forums.parallax.com. We’re reading every comment and met yesterday as a team (Bump, Jim, Courtney, Jen, Stephanie) to develop a plan to handle the feedback.
This is the plan for forum revisions:
Post your bug, comments and preferences in the General Discussion forum, limiting it to one report per thread.
Courtney locates the issues and tracks them on this thread: http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/161405/new-parallax-forums-issue-report-list. She’ll work with Bump and Jim to report our progress back to the same post so you can see where we are with our progress.
The new system also requires a little bit of adaptation and learning on everyone’s part. For example, right now as a default, posts are sorted by votes instead of by date. In the near future we’ll be implementing a sorting style where the best answer (most votes) will rise to the top - right under the original poster’s question. The rest will then be sorted by date to maintain the discussion flow. Mobile users now represent over 35% of our viewers, making this compromise useful since it reduces scrolling.
I apologize for the disruption with our approach and look forward to getting the forums up to your standard. I accept responsibility for the lack of testing as I asked that it be done this way. Our IT staff works very hard, and I fully support and appreciate all the work they do to maintain and improve our many websites and web services.
Independence Day Free Shipping
Spend $50 or more through Wednesday, 07/08/15, and you’ll qualify to choose free USPS Priority shipping at checkout (U.S. addresses only; online orders only). Happy Independence Day holiday from all of us at Parallax!
What’s a Multicore Microcontroller?
We’re just about ready to release the new What’s a Multicore Microcontroller? tutorial. This important tutorial warrants our full attention so we decided to wait a week while we manage the forum improvements.
Sincerely, Ken Gracey