[DocNo]

Ugh - I tried to play nice and comment in the new box at the bottom of a story - and half way through mobile Safari on my up to date 4s locked up.

Grrrr! I get the web designers have a new toy. Bully for them. Please throw us old timers a bone and put the $!@#% direct link to the story's thread in the forum back! Bury it at the end of the page if you have to, but enough already!!!

[icerabbit]

Seconded.
I also asked this weeks/months ago when they started mucking with the theme again.
There should be a post in this section about the simplicity going out the window.
Nobody from MW acknowledged

[Chris Breen]

DocNo, on 13 April 2012 - 07:41 AM, said:

Ugh - I tried to play nice and comment in the new box at the bottom of a story - and half way through mobile Safari on my up to date 4s locked up.

Grrrr! I get the web designers have a new toy. Bully for them. Please throw us old timers a bone and put the $!@#% direct link to the story's thread in the forum back! Bury it at the end of the page if you have to, but enough already!!!

Regrettably we editorial types have no control over how the forums are configured. What I do is access the forums through the Recent Activity link. Click on it and you'll see the last 24-hours of active threads, ordered by most recently posted. Hot topics invariably find their way into this list.

[DocNo]

Chris Breen, on 18 April 2012 - 07:47 AM, said:

Regrettably we editorial types have no control over how the forums are configured. .

Who does?

Then after that, who's their boss and what's their bosses snail mail address?

I'm serious - its beyond frustrating and I know I'm not alone. What's sad is the forum/comment system incongruities are just going to drive away the very activity the changes were no doubt intended to foster

[icerabbit]

- safari on ipad ate my comment when I jumped to another tab and back - sigh -

So who do we ask to get the link back?
Is feedback ignored these days?
That link should never have been removed and literally takes minutes to put back ... but we've been waiting months with less and less efficiency ... see my comment from February.

[Chris Breen]

icerabbit, on 22 April 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

So who do we ask to get the link back?

First, the hard slap of reality:

Maintaining and expanding a site like this one is a big job and you have to prioritize your tasks. This is a very low priority. Long time regulars may care about it but the vast majority of people who use the site just don't care (note the lack of participation in these threads). I'm honestly quite sympathetic to the complaint, but I also understand the realities of resources.

Now, the healing balm:

Sites evolve over time.

[icerabbit]

Thank you Chris.

I agree 100% that sites evolve (it is something I am involved in part time) - just like most things in life - but when you take an extremely little simple handy thing away that didn't need to be taken away, it is missed. Most of the readership may not care or even know (how many percent of people are registered and comment out of the number of unique views), but that doesn't mean every change is a positive thing, or that an inadvertent change couldn't be reversed, that the old little forum link couldn't be re-instituted.

I'd wager that the forums have seen less and less participation since the implementation of the last revision of the website, which took the links away. But, maybe that was an intended consequence as the website has more ads than the forum does?? And more ads = more income for the MW enterprise.

Anyhow, that's just conspiracy theory. But, as a long term MW reader it saddens me that valuable usability and readability feedback such as this and for instance my comment from http://forums.macwor...ntent-comments/ seems to be talking to the wall.

It is just a tiny detail. Takes a few minutes to bring back. It could just be commented out in the code or should otherwise be right there for copy/paste in the old template set. If I had the keys to the code, that link would have never been taken out, or been missed for more than a week if somebody else took it out. There is so much overhead, overlap and overload on so many pages that waste so many resources and development on an ongoing basis, that it isn't even funny ... Anyway.

Love your work & writing, Chris, thank you so much for listening

This post has been edited by icerabbit: 22 April 2012 - 04:42 PM

[Chris Breen]

Understood. Stay tuned.

[icerabbit]

Still hoping to see the link return and/or some improvement to the commenting system, whereby readers and set a preference to read comments by order they were posted in.

In trying to catch up with various of the big news articles today, several "favored" comments are quotes that are displayed completely out of order, and that's not a nice way of displaying things. Whatever happened to the logic of displaying something oldest first and threaded indentation?

[DocNo]

I've just resigned myself to the fact that the corporate website overlords are more worried about keeping the back end systems consistent (I have noticed PC Magazine has the same brain dead comment system now too) than addressing usability issues like this.

I understand that the maintenance of large sites like these are complicated, but I also understand that - hopefully - these forums and comment threads are recognized as a significant driver of traffic and would be a higher priority.

If it happens, great. If not, I'll just continue to use my Reply hack to get back into the forums here. It's pain and not convenient, but it works.

This post has been edited by DocNo: 12 June 2012 - 08:00 PM

[icerabbit]

DocNo, on 12 June 2012 - 08:00 PM, said:

I've just resigned myself to the fact that the corporate website overlords are more worried about keeping the back end systems consistent (I have noticed PC Magazine has the same brain dead comment system now too) than addressing usability issues like this.

I understand that the maintenance of large sites like these are complicated, but I also understand that - hopefully - these forums and comment threads are recognized as a significant driver of traffic and would be a higher priority.

If it happens, great. If not, I'll just continue to use my Reply hack to get back into the forums here. It's pain and not convenient, but it works.

We share the same sentiment and I've pretty much resigned myself to it as well that it will probably never change. Shame. They have so much tracking overload and what not on their sites that they could be several times faster to load and use, but they won't add a link back.

The funny / odd thing was, the other day, that the comment sorting options under the article was missing but the articles were there, completely out of whack. Yesterday those sort options were back.

I typically open whatever I want to read in tabs and if I feel compelled just go to an extra tab for the forum or use the reply comment then cancel hack.

This post has been edited by icerabbit: 15 June 2012 - 02:53 AM

[leicaman]

Chris Breen, on 22 April 2012 - 11:15 AM, said:

icerabbit, on 22 April 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

So who do we ask to get the link back?

First, the hard slap of reality:

Maintaining and expanding a site like this one is a big job and you have to prioritize your tasks. This is a very low priority. Long time regulars may care about it but the vast majority of people who use the site just don't care (note the lack of participation in these threads). I'm honestly quite sympathetic to the complaint, but I also understand the realities of resources.

Now, the healing balm:

Sites evolve over time.

Time? That's what RIM said. That's what Nokia said. The fact that basic functionality is ignored is simply stunning. Sure new users don't care, they never had a chance to try it, because it doesn't work right.

But what about the review section? I just took a look at the one about checklists (such as OmniFocus). I tried to sort by user reviews. Nothing happened. I punched all sorts of buttons. Nothing happened.

How long before such nonsense that we just stop coming here?

I know you care, and I know the editorial staff cares. But you know who else cares too, right? Yep. Users. And I find myself coming here less and less often. Why? Because basic things do not work. I can't post a comment at all if there are not comments already there. What is up with that? Are the overlords secretly hoping to kill off Macworld? Because they're doing a crackerjack job of it.

[Chris Breen]

leicaman, on 19 July 2012 - 07:41 AM, said:

Are the overlords secretly hoping to kill off Macworld? Because they're doing a crackerjack job of it.

To what purpose? Unemployment?

Perspective please.

[leicaman]

Chris Breen, on 19 July 2012 - 07:48 AM, said:

leicaman, on 19 July 2012 - 07:41 AM, said:

Are the overlords secretly hoping to kill off Macworld? Because they're doing a crackerjack job of it.

To what purpose? Unemployment?

Perspective please.

My perspective is that they can't bother to fix some basic functionality in forums after months and months. A simple fact that one time in the past month I have been able to post the first comment in a forum is a good example. Not that I care I'm first, but I can't comment until someone else does, then I have to hit reply to their message, and then I have to navigate back to the regular comment page, and then I can comment. I know what I said was hyperbolic, but come on. Really? Comments are broken and never fixed? That's not a low priority, that FEELS more lit it's spindled, ready for the dustbin.

This was a very popular place back when Macworld was on it own. Then when the big corporation took over, things went downhill. Dalrymple and Cohen were laid off. Forums lost their "patina" with a more politically correct model. And that was fine. I'm not all for a Wild West place where anything goes, but it was a bit heavy-handed. And after all these years I have been staying and hanging out, though many of my favorite people have gone elsewhere.

The same thing has been happening in the editorial world for a couple of decades. I got out of newspapers after 15 years because I could see the end coming. Wall Street saw news organizations back before the web, when owning a newspaper was like having a license to print money, as a great way to make a quick buck, squeeze the last drop of blood from the turnip, and then cast it off. Ben Bagdikan documented this in his book Media Monopoly back in the mid-80s. And it continues to this day on the web. So when it's told to us that they can't work up enough care about this site to at least buy some forum software that works, well, what are we suppose to think?

ArsTechnica.com is a good example. When something breaks, its fixed in days. Conde Naste has taken a hands-off approach for the most part there, and the place is thriving. They care about their "customers." The end users. In the world of Lean the golden phrase is "valued added." What is the value added here at Macworld? It's certainly not the low priority of fixing comments. The fact that it's difficult to accomplish means nothing to the customer. And the customer will go elsewhere if the valued added does not amount to something they can appreciate. I can't believe I'm writing this, when they say it at work, I roll my eyes. Maybe I just "got it" from a different perspective now.

Anyway, with ARS, the care is returned by their readers. And Macworld wants us to upgrade to the "Insider" version of the website to get special features, such as being able to read Macalope during the week, not just on weekends, etc. I've got a two year subscription to the print version of Macworld, so I'm no freeloader. I just don't see the value of subscribing to the web version as it stands now. I'm not saying that to pretend a subscription gives me the right to any kind of special consideration, simply to show I do like the content that is here. But when things don't work right, and the priority to make them work right is too low, then asking me to be an Insider is like selling me a house in Alaska that doesn't have running hot water.

So, there's my perspective. Take it for what it's worth.

I respect the heck out of a lot of people at Macworld, including you Chris. But sometimes it just gets so frustrating. It's like being a Mac user in the 90s.

This post has been edited by leicaman: 21 July 2012 - 10:48 AM