Hi all - a few days ago I wrote about several changes we made in response to feedback this community provided. Today, we're making several additional changes that I want to make you aware of.
One of the biggest concerns with Connect has been how to navigate to and post forum discussion threads. We created a very flexible architecture that allowed you to post a forum discussion in more than one product board. Unfortunately, this caused some confusion. So, starting today, we are making a few changes to the forums to make them behave more like a traditional forum. This will, of course, result in the loss of some of that fancy multi-tag functionality, but based on your feedback, ease of navigation is more important. You asked for it, you got it. Here's what we are doing:
FORUM LISTING PAGES: Previously we had one listing page of forum threads for each community. You would filter based on the product you were interested in. This was confusing for many of you. So, we are changing this to a traditional board-based navigation. You'll select the product you are interested in and ONLY see those products in the list. You will no longer be able to switch products using the drop-down selector
BREADCRUMBS: Several of you wanted to know how to get back to the list of forum posts you were viewing. We've added breadcrumb paths to the top of forum detail pages.
FORUM PRODUCT SELECTION: Selecting multiple products for a forum thread caused some confusion so in the forums area, you are now restricted to posting the thread to one product board. You can still tag with multiple topics and versions. This restriction to one product ONLY applies to forums. Articles, blogs, videos and other content types can be tagged with more than one product.
NOTIFICATIONS: Several of you wanted to get e-mail notifications for any new content on a particular product. We haven't had time to build it directly into the interface in a nice pretty way, but you can now go to the profile area, click the "notifications" button, select "tags." Then just select which products you'd like to receive e-mail notifications about. (I realize this is rather difficult, we're working on making it easier to get to, but wanted to get the functionality out before we took the time to style it).
TIME ZONE SELECTOR: In your profile area you can select which time zone you are in.
MY ACTIVITY: We've added a "my activity" area to the user menu at the top of the page where you can see all your content and how many new comments there are on each. You can also choose the "all activity" tab on this page and see the newest content across the entire site.
We are working on several additional features. Stay tuned for more details.