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We Are Live - Community Feedback

4K views 50 replies 12 participants last post by  Wildrat 
#1 ·
Dear Community Members,

We are excited to announce that we are live on our new forum platform! We’ve worked hard over the last several months with a leading design and product firm to deliver a cleaner, faster and more engaging experience for you. Our goal is to provide modern design and technology to make the site run faster, smoother and more reliably. All of the valuable content within the community is still here, even though the layout may look different.

A Consistent Experience Across All Devices
The site is optimized for all screen sizes, including mobile. All features are available and ready to use on all devices.

Speed and Reliability Are Key
No one should have to wait for information. This site has been built to be much faster and more reliable, period.

New Homepage Experience
Your home page now features the most active forums, trending discussions, featured showcases, and top contributing members. This will help keep you up to date on what’s happening in your community and eventually become a very personalized experience for our members with all the great content you love surfaced effortlessly for you.

Search
We have introduced new search algorithms, powered by an industry-leading AI platform, that will help you find information faster. We plan to roll out new features to continue improving search, and to power many additional areas of the forum.

Due to the volume of content, our search platform may take some time to complete indexing. During this process, you may see a limited number of posts until indexing has been completed. We appreciate your patience.

Easy to Use and Navigate
We have made the design clean and simple to use. Near the upper right-hand corner of the community, you will see navigation icons.

The first icon is for what’s new on the site.

Clicking on it, by default, will take you to new unread posts. On that page, you can click on additional tabs as well, such as Popular, if you prefer to view active topics.

Clicking the list icon next to “NEW” will bring you to the full forum listing.

You can also navigate by clicking the 3 vertical dots.

Clicking on your avatar will give you a drop-down menu for all things related to your account.

Dark Mode
We have introduced Dark Mode. One of our favorite features allows you to access the site with a power-saving, and easier on the eyes dark mode. You can access it in the drop-down menu under the 3 vertical dots.

Save Bookmarks
Now you can save your favorite discussion threads and posts! Bookmarks are a handy way to remember and easily find great content or stuff you want to read later.

We also wanted to make it easier for new users to understand the lingo of forums. We have cleaned up various language to more commonly recognized phrases including:
  • Following - Thread subscriptions, and Watched are now known as Following
  • Conversations – Private Messages or PMs are now conversations and can be accessed from the user avatar drop-down in the main navigation
  • Showcase – Showcase is designed for users to "showcase" items/projects through the use of uploaded images, text descriptions and custom content categories. It’s a way to visually and textually provide detailed information on the content you wish to share. The showcase would be similar to a catalog, whereas the gallery would be like a photo album. It can be accessed from the drop-down menu with the 3 dots.
These are just a few of the great new functions and features to try on the site. Take a tour and look around! If you have any questions, please check out the HELP section for some quick FAQs about the new platform - Help Section

Please let us know what you think about the new experience. Your feedback is important to us.

Thank you all for your support during this amazing journey!
 
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#2 ·
I will be here during your transition to the new platform, to help with any questions, help with navigation or how to do things, and to listen to your feedback so please don't hesitate to holler at me. I want to help.

I do want to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Cricket. When I was born, my father told his friends I was the ugliest baby he had ever seen, and that I sounded just like a cricket (I was born with the hiccups.) so yes, I have been Cricket for 58 years now. I live just outside of San Antonio, Texas. I spend most of my time off out in nature and exploring the back roads. During late autumn when it starts to finally cool down, I disappear from the world for a bit for camping trips and hiking.

Please don't be afraid to explore and test out things to see how they work on the site.

Although you can certainly use the "insert image" icon to upload an image to your post, you can also just drag and drop it to the text editor or even copy/paste it into there!
73903

You can easily share videos just by adding the URL directly into the text editor!



Gif links from sites like giphy.com will display automatically just by adding the gif URL directly in the text editor. Try it!



I am also a huge fan of the dark mode for the community. What is your favorite feature?

We will be seeing weekly updates (approximately) to the site which are largely based on community feedback so we absolutely want to hear your feedback!

I have worked with VerticalScope for 5 years but I have worked with forum communities for closer to two decades.I won't always know the answers to your questions, but I can find someone who does, as needed. ;)

- Cricket
 
#6 ·
Hi Cricket - we're on a ranch in the Hill Country so we're sort of neighbors. I'm glad vBulletin is gone - as an Admin finding my way around that was a nightmare.

The site is slow, maybe that will improve.
 
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#13 ·
Are you using Internet Explorer to access the site?

Currently, the site is optimized for modern browsers that support display on devices ranging from desktop to tablet to mobile.Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge have some limitations across devices but we are working on finding ways to improve compatibility while maintaining as much of the function and design as possible. Are you able to try Google Chrome or Firefox as an alternative? I think you will find a much nicer experience on the site from one of the alternative browsers available.

- Cricket
 
#20 ·
The dots really irritate me. It also seems to lock up and not respond. I do have country internet though.
I have to use Explorer for work and don't have the energy to switch browsers.
 
#21 ·
Yeah, it's still slow for me. I notice also that I am not seeing anything from regular members. I wonder if it's because it's a pita to find stuff. I am pretty sure I preferred the old forum at this point.
 
#22 ·
I'm not really digging the new format. I am trying to be patient to see if I can get used to it...
 
#25 ·
I access ROF and a couple other forums almost exclusively from my phone using Tapatalk. Aside from a couple spam adds early on there has been no noticeable change for me. The app puts all my forums in one common interface. Each is separate of course within that interface, but all navigation is consistent among them.
 
#34 ·
How To Mark Forums Read

If you want to mark a specific forum as read, navigate to that forum. At the top you will see a button to “Mark All Read.

If you want to mark all threads in the community as read, click on NEW near the upper right-hand corners of the site.

Click on Mark All Read.

You will then see a popup confirming that this is what you want to do. Click “Mark All Read”.

- Cricket
 
#33 ·
It seems as though this new format only works well on selected browsers. I don't like that the solution for anyone having issues is to change their browser...it is essentially telling the customer "you are wrong...you fix it"
 
#35 ·
Change to chrome, still have white dots and now some lightning bolts. I assume this is the test forum before implementing to more popular ones.
 
#37 ·
Yeah, this is about as trashed up a UI as I have ever seen put on Xenforo. Somebody had to put some effort into making it this bad.

Among other things - sets off my spamware alarms like crazy. This site is so loaded with data gathering and advertising/monetization schemes it's unreal.

It's faster if you don't log in. I presume because after login every click is being tracked for possible "personalized" advertising opportunities.

All that said... The site actually works. Which is more than I can say for the old one. Half the time I couldn't even read or post on the old one.

But, ownership doesn't see this as a community. Just a cost/benefit, profit/loss scenario. Everything they do is about monetizing what little traffic this site still gets. And nothing else.

- DAA
 
#38 ·
We will continue to see weekly updates (approximately) that are largely fueled by community feedback. While that doesn't mean we can action every request, it does mean we are actively listening to the feedback and sharing it with the developers.

- Cricket
 
#39 ·
If you want to restore ROF to some modicum of a usable user interface, a good XenForo model is Heavy Equipment Forums (but ignore the colors.) It is simple and effective, maybe they will let you borrow the code. This user interface is a complete disaster and a tweak here and there is just putting lipstick on a pig. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
 
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