WTF go back to old community

[MM..1]

This new disaster put to trash, an drevert back old version

[Andrew Neil]

@Vahid Ajallooeian​ "I like the style that LVGL forum has made"

Always helpful to give a link - so we know for sure what you're talking about. Do you mean this: https://forum.lvgl.io/ ?

Do you know what forum platform they're using?

It looks rather like https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/ and https://discourse.nodered.org/ and https://forum.sierrawireless.com/ and several others I've seen & used.

I must say it does seem to be the best forum platform I've seen, and does address (almost?) all of the issues which affect so many forums - not just this one.

One of its key features, I think, is that it does walk new users through how to properly use the forum - which has already come up (at least) twice in this thread alone.

From the Node Red forum URL, it looks like it may be this: https://www.discourse.org/ ?

(not convinced by the whole "badges" thing, though - as if we're a pack of 10-year-old boy scouts)

[Andrew Neil]

I'm here via an email notification of your reply!

[Andrew Neil]

"will free me some time"

:face_with_tears_of_joy:

tbh, I've never understood wanting to use a technical forum from a phone

[waclawek.jan]

Yes forum.lvgl.io is Discourse, and it's just another javascriptoid facebook-ish disaster.

Have you actually used it?

Things like large fonts, large whitespace, excessive avatars use with automatic avatar creation ("big letter in colored circle"), pushing signup, "suggested topics" automagic etc. all should raise flags.

Problem is, that ST folks who run this place are not technicians but "media experts", thus they don't understand how vital is KISS and usability for us, and how the "modern" fluff gets into our way. They also systematically build themselves an internal myth about how it's them who "create communities", that's why they consistently ignore rants of the mere users.

JW

[Vahid Ajallooeian]

Yes, I meant the link you mentioned.

[TDK]

I'd just like to agree with the rest of the folks here saying there is entirely too much clutter on the page. In addition to that, it really is sad that you can only see 8 topics in the span of a single page. That's a lot of scrolling required just to scan topics.

I don't know if it's coincidence, but the last week of questions has been particularly awful and low-effort. I wonder if this is coming from the audience the new look is targeted towards. There should be some sort of page which describes how to ask a good question that we can point these low-effort posts to. There's only so much one can say when the question is simply "why doesn't my thing work?" with little to no supporting information.

The presence by ST over the last ~year has been good as far as documentation issues go, but mostly poor in terms of actually answering questions. Maybe that is the intention. The forum does stress that this is a user community. The answers that ST members do provide are generally high-quality, however. With the occasional and unfortunate answers with misinformation thrown in.

The Knowledgebase is good, but it's so hidden and hard to navigate that I wonder how many users actually know about it.

The current state of the "About this Community" page is absurd with 90% of the questions being technical questions that have been closed. I am generally not for censorship, but in this case it makes no sense to show these questions on that forum just because the user submitted them there. Just hide them. Or delete them. Or move them to the correct forum.

It's also weird that the posts that show up on the "STM32 MCU's" page is done by tag, not by where the user submitted the question. Usually forums have subfolders and such to categorize posts. Here it's just an odd grab bag.

Anyhow, end of rambling. I try to ignore the annoying and frustrating parts of the forum and focus on the questions instead, and so I shall.

Edit: I am happy to see that STM32CubeIDE is steadily improving and is currently MUCH better than previous Eclipse-based IDEs. It still suffers from Eclipse-isms, but there is nothing that can be done there.

[waclawek.jan · Accepted solution]

> Edit: I am happy to see that STM32CubeIDE is steadily improving

I am not.

It's the result of the same lazy and incompetent thinking that resulted in Salesforce being forced upon us instead of working towards real forum. This thinking, which prefers glitter to real gold, suckıng resources out of the real work, see https://community.st.com/s/idea/0873W000000KyjfQAC/detail. Remember, at the end of the day, it's us who are paying the price of all this in cost of chips. I am selfish and prefer paying for solid support rather than "clicky for the masses".

Ultimately, this results in:

> I don't know if it's coincidence, but the last week of questions has been particularly awful and low-effort.

JW

[waclawek.jan]

I believe ST ticked this already off as done, but it's not.

• the clutter is still there - just remove it and learn the lesson
• frontpage still nags me with "onboarding" even if I ticked "don't nag me again"
• the "personal feed", while brought back and put on the front, is still in the unusable "threaded" view, it needs to be list
• and I've just discovered another one - the comments list in Ideas shows only 6 comments and there's no way to see more

I'm not talking about the years old bugs which are still mostly here, but what you've brought in with the latest "update". As MM aptly said, just revert - it was bad but not this bad.

JW\

@Camilo LEMOS​ 

[Camilo LEMOS]

Hi @TDK​ @Community member​ and all participants in this thread.

Let me start by saying that your voices are not being ignored - far from it. Both the feedback on the new design of the community and on the general performance of the current forum platform is being heard - and actioned - daily. We hear loud and clear that you are dissatisfied with the new look of the forums and that you would prefer the forums to be hosted on a different platform more suited to your needs. This feedback is being heard and transmitted across all necessary teams in the company. Unfortunately, not all fixes - and specially major changes - can be done as quickly as we would like them to. Also, please keep in mind that nobody in the Community Team is interested in providing you with an experience which values "pretty" or "trendy" over useful - our commitment is to bring you the community you want to have; the situation is, however, that we have to address the low-hanging-fruit while working on broader and more complex structural solutions and changes.

To the points you raised, let me address them as clearly and transparently as I can:

@TDK​ :

• clutter on pages: some of it can be removed, some of it can be reduced (banner size, for example),. Some of what @Andrew Neil​ highlighted cannot be taken away from the page (such as the filtering and sorting options). These have been logged with our IT team, but are not quick fixes.
• limit of 8 topics per page: I'm not sure I understand this one. The homepage and all topic microsites (such as STM32 MCUs, for example) have pagination components which allow you to view up to 100 threads per page. Did I misunderstand?
• Low-effort questions: I cannot categorically say this isn't due to the new design, but we have not promoted the new look of the community through external channels so I'm skeptical as to this being due to the redesign. With that said, we are working on ways to educate new members of the community on how to post good questions. These efforts have been hindered by technicalities related to the implementation of the new look and features of the community, but are now back on track.
• About The Community: this seems to be due to some unfortunate design and nomenclature choices on our side when we launched the new community. The main culprit is the "Get Help" button available on the home page banner. We are working to have it removed, not as simple to do as it looks.
• Knowledgebase: good point! We'll work to make it more visible. How do you find it hard to navigate?

@Community member​ 

• the clutter is still there: please see my comment to TDK above.
• frontpage still nags me with "onboarding" even if I ticked "don't nag me again": I've logged this as a bug.
• the "personal feed", while brought back and put on the front, is still in the unusable "threaded" view, it needs to be list: I've changed the settings to collapse comments just now. Looking with our IT team into the possibility of changing the display to a simple list.
• and I've just discovered another one - the comments list in Ideas shows only 6 comments and there's no way to see more: I've logged this as a bug.

Aside from the points you've raised, there are 8 other items being worked on.

Thank you for your patience while we work on this. And please, keep sharing your thoughts and feedback - we will absolutely work on all the items you list here on this thread.

[waclawek.jan]

Hi @Camilo LEMOS​ ,

Thanks for chiming in.

This last update brought

• unnecessary aesthetical changes (the clutter on top, in trendy blocks and colors)
• a push for some unneeded "social" functionality ("onboarding")
• no (= zero) functional improvement

And you never attempted to discuss those changes here.

All we need is a working forum and ST's active participation. Everything else are perks which are nice, but optional, and should never get into way. Your convenience (aka integration to internal systems, e.g. the password system and others) is secondary, and again, should be entirely invisible and never get into way.

My example is https://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php (probably based on simplemachines.org, which itself has probably phpbb heritage). Sure, it has its shortcomings, as everything does, but this is as close to pure, technical, simple, fast, functional as it gets. It incorporates probably three decades of forum creation wisdom; that simply cant' be overcome, no matter how much ajaxo-javascriptoids do the script kiddies throw at their creations.

My 2 eurocents. Arguable, as usually.

JW

PS. I highly recommend to make a static snapshot of the whole forum, there are multiple reasons to do so regularly.