general forum feedback

[ultiarjan 1,223]

small thing>

notifications on messages : "You have 1 unread message ...." leave out the "unread" as it will not change after reading the message... for that we have the blue indicator dot.

[ultiarjan 1,223]

Not sure if reported already but;

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When using the "share" button on android the wrong link is placed in the clipboard, it's always referring to "http://oldforum.ultimaker.com" i.s.o the correct link

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selecting a "best answer" on a question I posted results in a "page 403 forbidden" for me (on win7 & android)

[SandervG 1,521]

They sound new to me, thanks for sharing!

Did the 403 happen only once or structural?

[ultiarjan 1,223]

I had seen it before, and thought is was an android only issue, but it's not, also on win7

[nallath 1,120]

403 error should not have anything to do with platform. Its a server issue.

[skint 61]

This is what I get at the top of my forum page now:

Edited June 26, 2015 by Guest

[jens 9]

Can anybody please tell me where the jump-to-first-unread-posting-button is? Seriously, I'm too stupid ...

Other than that, did somebody already tell them that the new forum design is just ... crap?

(Among the words that crossed my mind, this was one of the nicer ones)

It uses huge(!) amounts of space for huge white areas (white and other fluffy light colours) with nearly zero information. The general forum overview isn't exactly very ... overviewy; so is the overview page of each subforum. My screen is well in the mid range, size-wise, I think, and with that very screen of mine, I manage to see a little more then 10 threads before I would need to scroll ...

Why is everything arranged in lines now? When man invented the table (must have been somewhere between fire and wheel) man did something good! Do not just abandon a well-proven and working concept ... and so on. I do understand that a table is bit harder to scale down for mobile devices with tiny screens, but then again, the new design is even crap on phones (at least with my phone it doesn't work; any click leads back to the main page; the clicky-sensitive areas do not match the text/buttons).

Honestly, this sucks.

Edited June 28, 2015 by Guest

[cloakfiend 995]

Lol, we've had this argument already....

[Anders Olsson 136]

Honestly, this sucks.

 

Yeah

And as a result of that, the number of posts on the new forum seems to be stuck at about 30/day (EDIT:not correct) , compared to the 170/day the old forum had.

Not surprisingly, you can now see how ultimaker.com is dropping in the Alexa-ranking: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.ultimaker.com

I just wish the old forum would have been reopened long time ago: http://oldforum.ultimaker.com

Even if the old forum was not perfect, it at least offered decent basic forum functionality and had a readable layout.

This new thing simply fails to attract me... and I keep missing the old forum...  sorry to say Ultimaker (I know you spent a lot of time and money on this, but I can only be honest)

The old forum chat is still working btw :-)

Edited July 1, 2015 by Guest

[tinkergnome 927]

And as a result of that, the number of posts on the new forum seems to be stuck at about 30/day, compared to the 170/day the old forum had.

 

Just some personal thoughts...

To make a new forum - and to make it this way - was a lonesome decision of the Ultimaker heads. Ultimaker did not asked the community and there was obviously no interest to consult the community prior to that.

But hey... Ultimaker is a business concern and not our playground...

The company in question made all decisions for the new forum, they pay for it and it runs on their servers. They made a change because they wanted to - nothing else. It's their forum and not (longer) ours... :(

We - the community members - just have to learn to accept these facts.

(finally - the Ultimaker company is the appropriate authority for support, but not the community...)

On the other hand:

As far as i can see - the community members are making their own decisions. I see much less activity, much less contribution and a lot of knowledge has even leaved the forum completely.

I think, these are facts that Ultimaker just has to learn to accept (and to live with...).

I assume, the intention was a bit different.. It's just a "lose-lose situation" for everyone at the moment.

Stuff it, my life doesn't depend on this, i don't make a living from this forum.

It's a pity, but it is like it is..

Like i said: just some personal thoughts - and now: hurt me...

Edited June 29, 2015 by Guest

[jens 9]

One of my thoughts - a naive one, I guess - is that some UM staff might (if loosely) follow certain topics here ...

As for intention, I'd like to guess:

Unknown UM staff member: "Have you had a look at the internet lately? What they used to call Metro in windows and what kinda evolved into material design is all the hype now! Super flat, man! It looks so flat and borderless and shit, you can't even tell it's there! All the cool guys have it now. Can we have that too, please? Pretty pretty pleaaase?!"

Edited June 29, 2015 by Guest

[ultiarjan 1,223]

I'm sure UM staff looks at this thread.... @SanderVG @TheDeugd .. but a little more frequent updates on whats going on would be nice.

I have the feeling things are getting worse again the last couple of days... I have to login all the time again, the number of nonsense notifications seems to increase ....

And @tinkergnome I can't imagine anyone wanting to hurt you... I mostly agree with you..

[Titus 170]

From an email conversation with Sander things should be moving again mid-end July. And beta before that.

Personally I think that's too much of a radio silence again. While the improvements are really nice, there's still stuff missing. And though they are working on it, I still see only a few posts per day compared to what it used to be. Every day that the forum is performing less than the old some old members are becoming less active. But I trust UM is doing their best to work as fast as possible while maintaining quality.

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi anders-olsson , good to hear from you again.

There is absolutely no problem with being honest, that is what we appreciate most!

Not sure where you get the post-rate from that we are currently stuck at 30 posts per day?

If it is based on the community page; it switched to stacking the replied per thread. So one block may represent 1 or 10 replies. But it shows now a higher variety of active threads.

Like @Titus says, we are preparing some new improvements. With beta testing they should see the light of day around the end of July. Beta-testing should start around 20th of July.

Most of the previous beta-testers, who did an excellent job, wanted to help with our next launch too.

There has been an increase in activity from our previous improvement, and we foresee more increase with our upcoming launches.

@Tinkergnome, on the old forum their was a thread about plans on making a new forum, we discussed some features like gamification, maybe you remember. Obviously, we expected it to be received differently, but I hope you can tell we put in serious efforts to meet your expectations. We had personal conversations with several community members to go through the improvements. The first were implemented a few weeks ago, the second will be shown near the end of July and the third (final) a few weeks later.

If you want to get a better feel of where we are heading, please read this post. If you feel like we are missing something, make sure to reply there so we can look into your suggestion.

We all have the same goal here, is making this forum the best home for you guys. So make sure to share your thoughts so you can also contribute. Thanks!

@Jens, thank you for your input. This is the direction we are heading. Let me know what you think!

Edited June 30, 2015 by Guest

[Anders Olsson 136]

Not sure where you get the post-rate from that we are currently stuck at 30 posts per day?

 

Nope, that was not correct for precisely the reason that you explain, sorry for that.

I guess we are looking at around 100 posts per day or so (?), but there seems to be no easy way to find out.

Is the post counter on this forum is probably only tracking new threads? (the numbers are quite low)

For what I do, the main issue, apart from the forum layout/functionality, is that many of the key users from the old forum seems to more or less have disappeared with the forum upgrade.

I would really have needed quick response from those users in order to give input on and test new products. I have difficulties reaching this group now, but I am trying through the 3DSolex distributors network, which might work but is much more limiting and time consuming than the forum was.

I guess the issue here is that Ultimaker is kind of "making a Makerbot move" by deciding for the users what they want rather than listening to the users.

As an example, my instant reaction when you upgraded the web page to the new style long time ago was "My god, are they our of their mind, this is completely unreadable, impossible to navigate and all the important information is gone".. and a few seconds later "Ohh, luckily, they did not touch the forum at least".

You can probably imagine my horror when, the forum first went offline unannounced for a week and then, came back unusable and with the new web page look (which you now have managed to improve a bit now though)

The thing is that, by deciding what the users want rather than focusing on what the users say they want, you make an important statement.

This statement will automatically shift focus to the basic (new) users, with an additional group of really devoted Ultimaker fans hopefully hanging on.

A large share of the advanced users who used to like Ultimaker for its openness and willingness to listen and be flexible though, will now no longer have any particular reason to stick here or stick to Ultimaker.

I think this is what I am seeing when when browsing through the new forum.

The broad variety of rather advanced and very different new projects that I saw on the old forum seems missing and most of the replies are either on advanced topics created before the forum change or on simple questions buy new user.

It is one way to move on of course, but unless the forum gets back this group of advanced users it provides very little for me really.

New products that I am working on will appear for sure, but I am focusing on platform independent solutions now days and the development process will not be available here since there is no particular reason for me to spend time here if the group of people I want to reach has diminished.

That is the hard truth from my perspective.

The situation might change by time though, but in my mind touching the forum was a really bad move by Ultimaker, the worst to far, even worse than the premature announcement of the UM2 dual extrusion. (Remember that, we saw very little demand from the users for a new forum)

Whether things recover or not, no one can tell I guess. I would have moved back to the old forum long time ago though, not to have to find out..

Sorry for almost writing an article, I just happened to be in the mood of writing

[SandervG 1,521]

Thank you for your detailed reply and taking the time to write it.

Who is it you seem to miss?

I can understand your motivation to think we didn't listen by implementing a new forum, but there were a few reasons why we had to. For example, it is part of a community platform which is now designed for growth, where our old forum was just that.. the forum. Also, it was hosted outside of our website so that was very inconvenient too.

You are very right that it wasn't good to take it offline for a week. The intention was to do it 'just' 2 days, but that got, unforseeingly, delayed. (is that a word?..)

But before we did, we hosted a thread on the old forum to find out what our users did and especially did not want to see happen. We took that at heart, but all that feedback was just a fragment of the entire picture. We launched the forum and found out it did not met our users expectations. From that moment on we gathered more feedback and went out of our ways to meet and talk to our dedicated users, you being one of them. We collected all the feedback and divided our findings in 3 parts. The first part, which you acknowledged improved some things was the beginning, next month will be the next launch, part 2.

I was hoping that by doing so, we would at least show our good intentions and our attitude to listen and implement your wishes.

Our focus is definitely not solely on new users, however we also can not deny that new users generally need more help getting in the saddle. But we highly value our advanced users too, without a doubt they are a huge part of our company. If you can tell me how you think we could give them the desired tools to work with, please let me know! Maybe it is just reaching out to them, in that case, let me know who you are missing.

Looking forward hearing from you, and thank you for being one of the advanced users who is still hanging on

[tinkergnome 927]

A large share of the advanced users who used to like Ultimaker for its openness and willingness to listen and be flexible though, will now no longer have any particular reason to stick here or stick to Ultimaker.

[...]

New products that I am working on will appear for sure, but I am focusing on platform independent solutions now days and the development process will not be available here since there is no particular reason for me to spend time here if the group of people I want to reach has diminished.

 

While reading this, a feature request crosses my mind...

Can we have a "Follow this user" function?

That means: get a notification for every new post of hand selected users (or "friends" - if you like)

I apologize in advance if this is announced already and i missed it...

[SandervG 1,521]

..

Can we have a "Follow this user" function?

That means: get a notification for every new post of hand selected users (or "friends" - if you like)

I apologize in advance if this is announced already and i missed it...

 

It hasn't been mentioned yet, thanks.

Usually interesting community members are also very active community members.

This would result in a lotttt of notifications, don't you think?

For example, we are also going to expand a users post history.

Currently it is just the page, we will open up the entire history so you can look into someones posts. Would that serve your need to?

Or how would you implement such a feature otherwise?

[Titus 170]

Or how would you implement such a feature otherwise?

 

Exactly like it says, get an update when a selected user posts something. I'd advise to stack notifications per user, redirect the page to the profile page with (full) post history, and perhaps some kind of read/unread indicator, or a bar above which was after the last time you visited his profile page.

I like the idea, not sure how many people would use it though.

[SandervG 1,521]

Isn't it more interesting to know what a certain users says in regard to a certain topic then just the fact a comment was made?

Just trying to figure out what the desire is so we can respond with the best possible solution.

From my perspective, I care more about what is being said then by whom.

And if I care about a certain users activity in a topic, for example the magnetic toolhead changer, I follow that thread and I will get a notification if he/she or another users posts something.

I think I personally wouldn't use that feature, doesn't mean it is not a good idea of course.

What I am after is well.. what I said earlier: 'what the desire is so we can respond with the best possible solution.'

[Titus 170]

Just another thing that keeps getting me FRUSTRATED :angry:

When I want to download Cura, I always have a hard time finding it, under products.

I tend to click on applications instead. It used to say software :(

[SandervG 1,521]

Just another thing that keeps getting me FRUSTRATED :angry:

When I want to download Cura, I always have a hard time finding it, under products.

I tend to click on applications instead. It used to say software :(

 

How often do you download Cura that it keeps getting you frustrated?

It has a better place under product, it belongs there. Hopefully you get used to it soon

[nallath 1,120]

Yeah, applications is a confusing term.

[jonnybischof 60]

[...]

While reading this, a feature request crosses my mind...

Can we have a "Follow this user" function?

That means: get a notification for every new post of hand selected users (or "friends" - if you like)

I apologize in advance if this is announced already and i missed it...

 

I'd like to have something like this as well!

Maybe, instead of following particular users, it would be better to have a "friends" function like in the old forum. You could use this as a shortcut to that user's profile, where you can see his/her latest activity. That would spare you the notifications...

[SandervG 1,521]

Maybe, instead of following particular users, it would be better to have a "friends" function like in the old forum. You could use this as a shortcut to that user's profile, where you can see his/her latest activity. That would spare you the notifications...

 

That is a good idea, thanks! Could we agree this would serve the same purpose and functionality?