Menu changes

Quazzie

Usually I don't pay too much attention to the headers or menu set up, but with this newest version it makes seeing the "New Posts" link an absolute PITA. Please please make this function available under the drop under your name.

Apologies if this is being covered somewhere else but it wasn't obvious and there was no link to anywhere in the announcement.

intheclouds

+1

StaticNoise

I have to say, I agree with the poster.

I believe that Boards is getting very mish-mashed. I agree with 'Talk to' forums, and I see why they bring financial stability (in a sense) to the website, and for this we are given a service we all enjoy. However, the fact that these forums are being stuck under the main menu is crazy.

Advertising and promotion of brands is OK, but making the focus of the website to be heavily commercial like this is mental.
What was wrong with the previous layout?
Surely the 'Talk to' drop-down for the business elements of the sites was enough?
What happens if more companies sign up to the site, will we get a new menu for the overflow due to the extended menu?


Careful, Boards, you seem to be getting a bit misguided with this commercial activities.

Mars Bar

The Regional dropdown has loads of white space to the right and just looks weird.

dudara

The new menu format isn't showing correctly on Safari on my iPhone

Dav

Hello all,

Why did we change it? Well all you need to do is see the number of strange threads that have cropped up here in Feedback since moving things around - having a big Boards.ie logo, then Talk To, then Boards.ie, etc on the menu is confusing.

The New Posts/Post of the Day etc are going to be moved somewhere more accessible, I'm just trying to find the right spot for them.

Regional menu: it does look a bit strange alright, will see what we can do about that.

iPhone/Safari - is quickly becoming the Internet Explorer 6 of web site issues :P We'll see what we can do about it dudara, thanks.

Spear

Criticism of the change aside, it's only showing in the forum listing one the old skin on one of the servers it seems, and thus randomly coming and going.

I mentioned this in a separate thread, but it would make sense (to me) to give Help & Feedback a more prominent position to the right of Talk to... (I understand that this would need to be the most prominent) and outside of Boards.ie. There's a lot of useful information there and it seems.. hidden.. by requiring you to click through so many menus (three in total -> Talk to... -> Boards.ie -> Help & Feedback).

hullaballoo

Having boards.ie under Talk to... makes sense but having What's New under boards.ie under Talk to... makes no sense at all. There's plenty of space along the top level of the menu for a "New" and "Trending" dropdown.

sentient_6

Having Boards.ie under the talk to makes zero sense to me. Not sure why I'm bothering to say this because ye never seem to respond to feedback about site changes and just plow on regardless.

Dav

Spear wrote: »

Criticism of the change aside, it's only showing in the forum listing one the old skin on one of the servers it seems, and thus randomly coming and going.

Old skins - don't care We stopped supporting them years ago, they're never getting updated again. They'll probably be completely gone when the new site launches next week.

Deleted User wrote: »

I mentioned this in a separate thread, but it would make sense (to me) to give Help & Feedback a more prominent position to the right of Talk to... (I understand that this would need to be the most prominent) and outside of Boards.ie. There's a lot of useful information there and it seems.. hidden.. by requiring you to click through so many menus (three in total -> Talk to... -> Boards.ie -> Help & Feedback).

I agree, the new site's got a Help link on the menu, so we'll direct it there I think. Not confirmed though, we'll have to have a longer discussion about it internally.

hullaballoo wrote: »

Having boards.ie under Talk to... makes sense but having What's New under boards.ie under Talk to... makes no sense at all. There's plenty of space along the top level of the menu for a "New" and "Trending" dropdown.

Agreed, I think it needs to be moved somewhere better - we just haven't figured out where yet.

sentient_6 wrote: »

Having Boards.ie under the talk to makes zero sense to me. Not sure why I'm bothering to say this because ye never seem to respond to feedback about site changes and just plow on regardless.

Well I can explain our reasoning for it if it helps. Talk To forums are customer service channels for all the companies listed. Feedback/Helpdesk/Site Dev are the equivalent member service areas for us (cause you're not our customers, you're our members) so they fulfil the same sort of need. I think you're being not only unfair but untrue about our response to feedback. We've been working with the community on these changes for almost a year, I don't know of any other website that involves its membership the way we do in its decision making process.

_Kaiser_

Dav wrote: »

Old skins - don't care We stopped supporting them years ago, they're never getting updated again. They'll probably be completely gone when the new site launches next week.

Wait.. what??

I hope there's still a dark theme/skin. All the wasted space and oversized text/icons on the current Beta site is bad enough, but would unbearable in florescent white.

I'm assuming that people using "old fashioned" monitors with keyboards and mice are no longer relevant. This whole thing reminds me of when MS introduced Windows 8 to be honest, and we know how well that turned out.

sentient_6

Dav wrote: »

Well I can explain our reasoning for it if it helps. Talk To forums are customer service channels for all the companies listed. Feedback/Helpdesk/Site Dev are the equivalent member service areas for us (cause you're not our customers, you're our members) so they fulfil the same sort of need. I think you're being not only unfair but untrue about our response to feedback. We've been working with the community on these changes for almost a year, I don't know of any other website that involves its membership the way we do in its decision making process.

My post is borne out of the frustration of the touch site getting messed with, your right almost a year ago, I checked through my posts earlier and its 11 months since the menu change. I presume at this stage the touch site is never going to be fixed, in favour of the full introduction of what's now in beta?

Dav

Dav wrote: »

Why did we change it? Well all you need to do is see the number of strange threads that have cropped up here in Feedback since moving things around - having a big Boards.ie logo, then Talk To, then Boards.ie, etc on the menu is confusing.

As I said in the "what's wrong with the site" thread, if this change helps to reduce or eliminate these threads I'm all for it. The menu could do with a tidy up, the Hosted forums are now appearing under Talk To for example, but that's not a big issue by any means.

I guess my bigger question is, will the new site have a dark theme? I know you said there was one planned.

28064212

Dav wrote: »

They'll probably be completely gone when the new site launches next week.

Do you mean the beta site?

Oh ****, please tell me you don't mean the beta site that hasn't had 87% of the user-reported bugs fixed (rough estimate, based on my deleted posts in the old feedback forum)? The beta site who's feedback forum has had no official response in 5 months, 3 weeks? The beta site who's feedback forum had a huge pile of legitimate bugs deleted, with no fixes in place, and no response on whether they should be resubmitted despite multiple direct queries? The beta site that has no way to go directly to the latest post in a thread? The beta site...

I actually can't go on. You can't seriously be considering launching it this week, in its current incarnation? You have a hugely improved version ready to launch to replace the current beta, right?

EDIT: No visual way of identifying whether there's a new post in a thread from a forum view?! Holy ****, if the plan is to seriously launch the beta site "as-is" next week, that will be boards' shark-jump moment. As a subscriber, long-time member and third-party developer, I really hope that's not the current plan, but if it is, you're going to absolutely haemorrhage current users

_Kaiser_

Dav wrote: »

I think you're being not only unfair but untrue about our response to feedback. We've been working with the community on these changes for almost a year, I don't know of any other website that involves its membership the way we do in its decision making process.

I think the poster's point may be that while you may hear the feedback, you don't listen to it, unless it's calling out an obvious bug, or maybe a minor cosmetic change. Anything beyond that doesn't seem to matter if it doesn't fit with "the plan".

Take the whole menu thing. The general consensus from your users was that it was a retrograde step and made using the site more difficult, but the response was that this is the way it was and only temporary on the road to the new site we've been told about for about 2 years.

Instead we've had this "temporary" menu for what must be almost a year now, and a beta site that is (IMO) another significant step backwards about to be foisted on us, regardless of the feedback you've received.

I've read the whole "we need to get away from VBB" argument and that's fine. I'm no developer so I won't pretend to understand the challenges/issues it causes, but such a move surely shouldn't come at the expense of usability and indeed functionality? I mentioned above about desktop users seemingly being irrelevant in the new design, but even the current touch site is better than the public beta.

I'm forced to agree with the above.. if indeed ye plough on regardless again, not only will this forum be flooded with negative feedback, if the responses follow form, the current users will get pisssed off and go elsewhere - and Talk To forums/commercial considerations aside, Boards as a community site is nothing without its users.

titan18

Dav wrote: »

Well I can explain our reasoning for it if it helps. Talk To forums are customer service channels for all the companies listed. Feedback/Helpdesk/Site Dev are the equivalent member service areas for us (cause you're not our customers, you're our members) so they fulfil the same sort of need. I think you're being not only unfair but untrue about our response to feedback. We've been working with the community on these changes for almost a year, I don't know of any other website that involves its membership the way we do in its decision making process.

If you're so big on feedback, why are burying the forum under a bunch of menus. Doesn't seem very sensible if you do want feedback to bury the forum imo.

mossie

I just switched over to the beta site took a quick look and switched right back. I had been through my forums under the old layout and marked each read but when I switched to the beta all were unread and there appears no way to mark a forum as read. Now I see that boards is changing over to the new layout next week?? If it does I think you should be prepared for a lot of negative feedback. It reminds me of the android boards app which is totally useless.

sentient_6

You where able to turn off beta? I had to give up looking for a way out and clear cache and cookies.

mossie

sentient_6 wrote: »

You where able to turn off beta? I had to give up looking for a way out and clear cache and cookies.

Click on legacy site at the top of the page.

J.pilkington

I remember when the large menu change happened last year that the workaround was the search function would lead you to the sub forum(eg type in after hours into the search and the sub forum was at the top of the search results) and this worked fine

However this no longer works with latest update, am I missing something? It's impossible to find sub forums now

Just to add when I clicked "back to legacy site" all is fine again so maybe this should be in feedback for upgrade site

Just found the feedback forum this morning when I realised boards.ie was missing from the drop down. Didn't register with me to look under talk to so I scrolled through a-z instead.

Is the prison forum in there too?

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

intheclouds

Dav wrote: »

Old skins - don't care We stopped supporting them years ago, they're never getting updated again. They'll probably be completely gone when the new site launches next week.

So there's a new site launching the week? When?

Shlippery

So is this regarded as an unsupported skin?! I've been using this forever, so hadn't noticed anything different, but the "Talk To:" forums there and a few others aren't entirely accurate, e.g. Virgin Media isn't there.

Dav

Yea, that's years out of date.

As for the launch date of the site - it's looking like a couple of weeks from now (we're working on a more specific when). We had some serious testing on Monday and have found quite a few show-stoppers in that.