- Product Ideas. Take a look at our updated product ideas area. The team will be working hard over the next few years to get everything existing tagged with appropriate statuses, but we are looking forward to streamlining our ideas process with you all!
Yay!
Awesome! Thanks @Jordan_Scott1! Excited to dig in.
Awesome! The new forum looks great!!
- New and improved search functionality. Find the right answer to your question, faster, and in one place. The new Airtable Community search will provide results against the community, Airtable Help Center, and Developer Documentation at the same time.
Love it 🤩🔎
Thanks @Jordan_Scott1 👍
There is a lot of white space on the new community platform. Is there a Noddy's Guide as to where everything is? Perhaps a 'mark all as read' so that I only see new posts on each visit?
regards
This one looks shiny 🙂 but discourse was way better when it comes to speed, usability and also what we are used too.
@Jordan_Scott1The year is almost 2023; thirty years after the advent of the interwebs and more than forty years after the first electronic bulletin boards appeared. Who would ever conceive of designing a collaborative community in 2023 without the ability to correct a typo in a post?
Editable post features have been around for most of your life and then some.
- USENet ... 1981
- Compuserve supported editable posts in 1986
- AOL forum supported editable posts in 1988
- Ashton-Tate community supported editable posts in 1989
- FidoNet ... 1990's
- Lotus Notes ... 1991
- Prodigy ... 1992
- Google Groups ... 2001
The very first public bulletin board system was Community Memory, which started in August 1973 in Berkeley, California. It did not support editable posts, but - that was 50 years ago. How does it feel to roll the clock back 50 years with the new Airtable Community?
If I have somehow missed this feature, please enlighten me.
@Bill_French The ability to edit is enabled, but is being buggy for some reason, the Khoros team is investigating and it should be resolved tomorrow.
In the meantime, if you have any other feedback regarding the platform and what you'd like to see as we continue to make improvements over the next few months, please submit them here so we can easily share them with the Khoros team! We are committed to iterating on this experience with all your input to make this the best solution possible. Thank you for your flexibility during the transition period!
@Jordan_Scott1some bugs I've spotted listed below.
In general the huge amount of white space makes it lots hard to grok the latest posts/ activity. The discourse felt much better in this regard, so would love to hear the reasons why you switched. You mention a 'A few things to explore' - perhaps adding instructions/ links to all these things would help use see the benefit of the new platform?
Bugs:
Major one - when I signed in for first time I got like 20 emails saying I'd achieved a loads of badges that I acheived ages ago
This button on file upload looks disabled but it's not.
One I just noticed writing this post - if there's an image at the end of my post I can't type after it!
Lol, another one after clicking 'Post your comment'. I definitely do not have any invalid HTML in there.
UI one - points outside of container on RHS.
Another one I noticed after sending that - the image attachments didn't load for a couple of minutes of me clicking refresh, so it looked like they failed. If they're uploading in the background somewhere I think you need to add a loading placeholder.
we can't wait to…
but obviously you can or else you wouldn't !
how about we're impatient to
😀
I may be suffering from resistance to change, but this new community platform doesn’t seem to match Discord’s ease of use and friendliness, and any possible benefits of the new platform, which I have not yet discovered, seem to be obscured by a more difficult approach to do the more common things, such as reading, keeping tack and writing posts.
> I may be suffering from resistance to change ...
@Pedro_Pais, you aren't. I have similar trepidations. I believe community users mistakenly (but naturally) assume this platform is suited for bilateral conversational exchanges, but as you can see in the UI - "posts" are "blogs", and we get to comment on them. It's a unilateral publishing model that attempts to feel like the more familiar Discourse model that Airtable used for almost a decade.
In addition to the general "blog" flavour of the underlying architecture, ease-of-use, or as I like to say, "friction-free conversation" features, this platform tries to be a whole lot more at the expense of disoptimizing the efficient and productive conversational exchange of insights and knowledge.
In my opinion, this is worse than a swing and a miss; it's a strike-out with bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. But we have to give them some time to polish and address these concerns; it's still early.
"but as you can see in the UI - "posts" are "blogs", and we get to comment on them."
Well shoot, that ends the 2 way conversation.
>>> Well shoot, that ends the 2 way conversation.
It certainly creates a more frictioned engagement. Blogs + comments have struggled since the early 2000's. It was a fine Web 2.0 advancement, but the model never produced the engagement that everyone thought it would. Discourse and a few other platforms have discovered that they need to establish a conversation as equal parts of a common messaging format orbiting a single topic - i.e., the initial "message". In contrast, blogs subtly create an imbalance and the UX (here at least) seems to lock in comments to the original post. Ergo - no "quote" feature that allows users to identify or refer to specific passages in the comment threads. Lacking this, it rules out direct banter about the topic.
This comment, for instance, is not directed at @Jordan_Scott1; rather, it is directed at @Furst_Name. However, there are no productive ways to shape a comment to do that easily.
Pervasive terms such as "blog", "permalink", and "comment" are throwbacks to the advent of Web 2.0 in 2003. It's almost as if Khoros took a "blogging platform", added a number of outbound marketing features and decided to compete with Discourse. I don't think it's serving Airtable well.
I'm feeling a bit grumpy today because I learned that the "permalink" feature is neither permanent nor a discrete link. I learned that despite a permalink option for every post, no single post is discretely addressable. I wanted to share this post with a colleague, but no luck. It appears that permalinks are not backwards compatible with the historical posts in the community. The current ones work it seems.
Having worked in software design and been involved with product launches, I try to be very aware of my own resistance to change about updates and remember that change takes time and things that seemed uncomfortable and awful become normal and comfortable. Maybe that will still happen for me here, but if anything it's been trending in the opposite direction.
I loved the Discourse-based community. I had used it many times over the years to find information and in the past few months had begun to visit to contribute solutions when I had some spare time during the workday. It seemed to me like the Airtable community was a thriving place where people were getting tons of helpful answers quickly. It gave me confidence that Airtable was a great platform to use for my projects by letting me hear from other people who had chosen to use it too. It would help to understand from the product team why they made this change. What metrics were they hoping to move? Has that happened?
Unfortunately, even though I still navigate here from force of habit, I tend to close the page as soon as I've opened it.
- Information density is a problem. In a couple seconds of landing on the homepage in Discourse I could have a sense of all the activity since my last visit and quickly skim through topics to see what was of interest and where I might be able to lend a hand with answers. On the new site I can see zero posts when the page loads. After I scroll down a full browser-height (desktop; or 2-3 browser heights on mobile), I can see one or two posts. If those are not of interest I can keep scrolling one by one until I get bored or tired. It might take me a couple minutes before finding a post I'm interested in. This took *seconds* in Discourse. My time is valuable! The old community was a place where I could visit between tasks and quickly find a problem of interest to work before my next meeting or task. I can't do that here, which is why I have contributed barely anything since the changeover.
- This new community feels unpolished. There are obvious fit and finish issues right on the front page (as @Bill_French has shown. Even trying to @-mention Bill was an unpleasant experience as other "Bill" names popped in after the initial pop-up loaded making it difficult to select Bill's name from the dropdown). My username (which was automatically created the first time I clicked "login" on the Discourse site") is truncated in this new app. There is a lot of white space that diminished information density, but also is irregular so things don't feel balanced and beautiful, just chaotic and random. The numbers in the paging buttons are off-center and when you click on one the outline that appears is misshapen. Etc. These little things don't matter so much individually but as a whole they make the community less usable and less pleasant to spend time in.
Discourse does a large number of things very well. From the editing experience to searching, browsing, notifications, settings, badges, etc. I'm struggling to identify a *single* feature area where this new platform is better for my experience as a user.
I know it is unlikely that the team would consider reverting back to the old platform, but I truly believe that would be the best thing for the community (and for the product).
>>> Even trying to @-mention Bill was an unpleasant experience ...
LOL! This is a sentiment that has often popped up even outside the Interwebs. Another story for another time.
>>> Discourse does a large number of things very well.
And as we will learn in the future, the Discourse architecture plays a role in the advancement of GPT-3 and zero-shot inferencing. Yet another story for another time.
Great assessment @Nathaniel_Grano!
Hi @Bill_French, @Nathaniel_Grano, @Furst_Name, @Pedro_Pais, thank you all for your feedback regarding the new Community platform. The team and I are diligently reviewing your experiences and feedback while we are working towards resolving many of these bugs/UI issues.
In the meantime, please continue to share your thoughts and recommendation regarding the platform and your experiences. To better help us prioritize improvements, we encourage you to submit them through our feedback form:
We are committed to improving your experience and fostering a world class community.
Thank you for again your flexibility during this platform transition period 🙏!
Thanks Chris! And thanks for popping in!
>>> We are committed to improving your experience and fostering a world class community.
This is great news, but I share the concerns of many who have concluded that the underlying architecture seems to represent a blog + comments which is very different from a Discourse-like model where all comments are first class citizens. Thoughts?
>>> ... we encourage you to submit them through our feedback form:
Yep. Not gonna' do it. 😉 Here's why...
- If we [each] quietly submit issues through this form, the community has no sense about that has been called to your attention. They will most certainly call out the same issues repeatedly, thus wasting more valuable time.
- Capturing in this manner rules out the possibility that an experienced Khoros user may be able to show us what we're missing, or expose valuable workarounds.
>>> The team and I are diligently reviewing your experiences and feedback while we are working towards resolving many of these bugs/UI issues.
This is great to hear, but it means you are already capturing these issues in a bug-tracking database. I assume it's Airtable, so why not host that list so we don't waste energy reporting the same issue repeatedly?
Thank you Chris,
Bill French is way more articulate than I am and has succinctly highlighted the issues with this 'exciting' new community space. After looking at Khoros web site my point is simply this: Khoros is a marketing tool pushing out a sales message whereas Disourse is (essentially) a free form, multi-way communications platform. The capabilities of each could not be more different.
I shall not use the feedback form; the decision as to the future of customer engagement by AT has already been made at levels above my pay grade and seem laser focused at the enterprise level.
/checks notes. Oh yeah, anyone seen Elon around here lately?
Regards
Hi @Bill_French and @Furst_Name, we absolutely hear yours and other members feedback on the new community experience.
@Jordan_Scott1 shared further details and insight into the decision of the migration in her recent response here. I hope this addresses your questions and concerns, but please let us know if you have additional feedback.
Thank you for your patience in our responses as we are navigating these changes together.
Many thanks,
Chris Shernaman
