Forum Discussion

Araxia's avatar
Araxia
Occasional Contributor
2 months ago
Solved

new community forums sorely lacking

I am dismayed at the new Community forums here. Absolutely terrible for browsing or frequent interaction. It shows a mere 5-10 topics at a time, with no option for a more compact view that presents more. And then you have to click "Show More" and wait seconds for only 5-10 more topics, but there are currently more than 19,000 topics for Password Manager! If you refresh the page, it does not save your place; if you had been trying to survey recent discussions or browse recent topics to learn something new, you're going to have to "dig" with multiple "Show More" clicks to get back to where you were. There are no filters for conversations of interest or for hiding topics you have already read (and that have no new responses). This is a major step back from the previous forums, and a serious departure from their more collaborative character. This new system seems actively _hostile_ to community conversation.

community feedback
  • 1P_Blake's avatar
    1P_Blake
    2 months ago

    Hey Araxia!

    I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I hear you — adjusting to a new forum setup can be frustrating, especially when it impacts how you browse and engage.

    While the layout is different from the previous system, I wanted to highlight a couple of ways to help navigate more efficiently:

    • You can filter conversations by keyword using search or sort by platform or interest using tags to surface relevant discussions faster.
    • If you’re looking to track new replies to discussions, or even new post themselves, following threads or categories can help.

    That said, I completely understand the pain points you’ve raised, especially around having to click “Show More” repeatedly and losing your place upon refresh. Not being able to seamlessly pick up where you left off isn’t ideal, and I’ll make sure this feedback is shared with the team.

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  • robert1p's avatar
    robert1p
    Super Contributor
    28 days ago

    I too find this new forum frustrating.  It's too bad so much effort went into the transition without asking the community for input/feedback first.  Not only is there a cost in the development time and effort, but now there's the lingering cost of moderators' and users' time trying to utilize the system; (as well as the cost in user satisfaction). 

    The sad thing is that we'll likely have to live with this for years.  The cost to reimplement it again, is a loss of time that is better spent on other feature and fixes.

    You have a whole community of talent and experience to tap into here.  I'd recommend you utilize it.

    (Best regards to the moderators here that have to deal with this.)

  • 1P_Blake's avatar
    1P_Blake
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    2 months ago

    Hey Araxia!

    I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I hear you — adjusting to a new forum setup can be frustrating, especially when it impacts how you browse and engage.

    While the layout is different from the previous system, I wanted to highlight a couple of ways to help navigate more efficiently:

    • You can filter conversations by keyword using search or sort by platform or interest using tags to surface relevant discussions faster.
    • If you’re looking to track new replies to discussions, or even new post themselves, following threads or categories can help.

    That said, I completely understand the pain points you’ve raised, especially around having to click “Show More” repeatedly and losing your place upon refresh. Not being able to seamlessly pick up where you left off isn’t ideal, and I’ll make sure this feedback is shared with the team.

    • Araxia's avatar
      Araxia
      Occasional Contributor
      2 months ago

      "adjusting to a new forum setup can be frustrating"

      Counterpoint: Community forum software has existed for over thirty years (arguably decades more if you count email-based ones, but I digress), and now has an extremely well-explored set of tools, features, functionality, and expectations. There are a multitude of different platforms available for providing different permutations of these capabilities, each of which comes with an inherent ideology of operation and interaction. A company choosing to implement any particular platform is also choosing the biases, limitations, strengths, and weaknesses of that platform. The very design of the Khoros platform is antithetical to community participation and serendipitous learning. AgileBits made a deliberate choice to go with a platform that was an extraordinarily poor fit for their established user community.

      This is not simply a matter of adjusting to something new. This new forum platform represents a significant (and disappointing) philosophical departure from the way that AgileBits has historically interacted with its customers and has facilitated customer interactions with each other. That is what is taking some adjusting to.

      • 1P_Blake's avatar
        1P_Blake
        Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
        2 months ago

        There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community platforms, and every option comes with trade-offs. We made the move to Khoros because it best supports the long-term needs of our community—not because we’re changing how we interact with customers or how users engage with each other.

        If there are specific improvements you’d like to see (as you’ve mentioned earlier), we’re always open to feedback. That said, broad critiques about platform ideology don’t really help us make meaningful improvements—if there’s something else tangible that would improve your experience, we’d love to hear it.

  • Araxia's avatar
    Araxia
    Occasional Contributor
    2 months ago

    It looks like this post sums up a lot of my criticisms. The fact that I did not easily find that existing topic before giving up and creating a new topic of my own is exactly the sort of thing that we are complaining about here.