Announcing the NI Idea Exchange!

[Intaris]

Indeed Jack,

I spent quite a while wondering where my response went to before realising there was a second page of comments.

Same thing applies to more than one page of Ideas themselves, the "next" and "previous" are not very prominent....

Shane.

[tst]

I ran into this in the same thread. I figured there was probably just a glitch in the system and that there were no newer comments. This is really bad.

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The green circled "page navigators" need to be at both the top and bottom of the responses on the pages.

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And they should be more prominent. I already complained about the overly minimalistic look, but here's a chance to do it again.

A couple of unrelated points:

• The spell checker opens in the middle of the page. Because the editor window is part of the thread, this means that in long threads the checker appears somewhere far above the editor.
• I've seen a couple of cases where the formatting of the page was lost and where all text was basically squished together. I think this happened when I followed a link from an email which also required logging in (since I wasn't logged in at the time), but I'm not sure.

[altenbach]

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Intaris wrote:

I spent quite a while wondering where my response went to before realising there was a second page of comments.

Same thing applies to more than one page of Ideas themselves, the "next" and "previous" are not very prominent....

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Yes, I had to do a "triple take" to find it, because it is neither on top or the bottom of the page, but somewhere after the idea post.

It would also be important that the "add new comment" form be only on the last page. Right now it is too easy to add a comment without actually seeing the last comment, because the last comment might be on the next page. In place of the comment field on "filled" pages, we need a prominent link to the next page.

[altenbach]

Nobody seems to be able to find the second page, how else would you explain the same answer three times on the second comment page here.

This needs to be changed ASAP:

The comment form must only show on the last comment page. We should not be able to add a comment until we've seen the last comment.

Additional links to the next/previous page must be at the bottom and all the way at the top.

[Laura F.]

Sorry for my delay in response, I was away last week.  I will compile these comments and send them along as suggestions to Lithium.

Thanks,

Laura

[tst]

Laura, can you ping Lithium on the time table for the next version of the idea exchange?

Personally, I find it to be significantly inferior to the standard forums GUI (what were Lithium thinking when they designed it?) and it would be nice if they at least had a mode where the exchange display could be the same as the forums display. I believe the only real difference is that in the exchange you have to add a label to the original post. I'm sure they could do the very hard work of showing the label field in the editor page when someone creates a new idea.

P.S. What brought this on was this this thread where Jim posted the same reply 8(!) times, presumably because he didn't see that there are additional pages, but you know we have multiple other complaints.

[Jim_Kring]

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tst wrote:

P.S. What brought this on was this this thread where Jim posted the same reply 8(!) times, presumably because he didn't see that there are additional pages, but you know we have multiple other complaints.

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Oops... I hope AQ doesn't think that I was just trying to beat him silly with my response 🙂

[JackDunaway]

Another usability note: often, when you reply to a thread, there is no option to insert links, bold, or italicize. I continually have to go back and edit my posts to format them correctly. Furter, perdiodically it strips my posts of carriage returns. I must edit them to properly add back in the returns.

[altenbach]

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mechelecengr wrote:
Furter, perdiodically it strips my posts of carriage returns. I must edit them to properly add back in the returns.

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In particluar, the auto-inserted line telling us that the post was edited needs to be seperated from the post body by an empty line. Right now it just gets tacked to the end of the last paragraph. (This only happens in the idea exchange, it works fine for the regular forums.)

[RavensFan]

I've found it is hard to find the new comments in the board.  I think Tst or someone else may have already commented on this.

After it was up a few weeks was when I really started following the board.  It was only a hundred or so messages and I quickly caught up.  Now from the main forum board, I can see how many new items there are.  But there is no easy way to tell which idea threads are new, or which ones have had new comments added.  I noticed on the right hand side there is a section for new ideas, and also a section for new comments.  So by going down that list from top to bottom, I should be able to see all the newest comments.  Right?  Wrong.  Perhaps after a few of those links, I open a thread that has no new comments to me.  Yet, my discussion board still shows some new items.  I go through the Ideas board page by page (which is really long) until I find new items.  I find something new, however it doesn't show up on the latest comments board at all.

If it is a new comment for a fairly old idea, or to an idea that hasn't been kudoed much, it could be buried in the 5th, 6th , 7th page no matter which of the Idea board sorting options you use.

If needed, next time I see this, I can post a couple screenshots along with the dates of new, old, and "missing" comments.

Overall, I agree with tst that the Ideas board would be easier to follow if it was laid out like the other discussion boards.

EDIT:

What do each of the 3 choices exactly mean?

3rd choice.  New Ideas.  Okay. That makes sense.  Chronological order of the ideas posted (newest on top.)

2nd choice. Top Ideas.  Ideas sorted by the ones with the most kudoes.  Okay, that's logical.

1st choice (default)  Hot Ideas.  What exactly is a hot idea?  Ones with latest comments?  No, because I'll find newer comments many pages later.  New Ideas.  They seem to get put at the top of this list.  However, I'll find relatively new ideas fall off the first page, but ones that don't seem to get much traction after being up a few days.  But what rules determine this, I don't know.  And new comments to a somewhat old, or not very popular idea, don't always bring it back to the first page.

Message Edited by Ravens Fan on 07-28-2009 04:35 PM