If I Seem to be Getting Smaller...

Bill_French · ‎Dec 06, 2022

... it's because I'm walking away.

I have honestly and with open-mindedness tried to use the new "community" in a productive and supportive manner, but it's just not working for me. There's something about this new Khoros platform that makes it difficult to engage and produce responses at a quick pace with smartly formatted information.

The hallmark of a great community is pervasive and free-flowing conversation, but to have that, it needs to eliminate composition friction. This is not the case in the new and improved Airtable community. Rapidly responding to questions requires a lot of effort. Pasting images used to be a breeze. Rapidly composing with your silent but powerful Markdown friend was a pleasure.

Composition simplicity is achieved through a minimalistic design. Khoros tries to be cool and hip at the expense of function and flow. Discourse has studied the art of simplistic content composition. Why Airtable rejected it, is a mystery.

kuovonne · ‎Dec 23, 2022

I missed the last two pages of comments on this topic despite checking these forums almost daily. Being able to tell when there is new content on a topic of interest is important to regular users. And please don’t tell me to subscribe to the topic. I don’t want notifications. I get too many notifications as is.

The other thing that makes me very sad is that the majority of the “Community Change Makers” who have been featured cite the community as an important resource in learning about Airtable. Yet every one of them is referring to the old community format.

Bill_French · ‎Dec 23, 2022

At the risk of making it look like I'm really into this new community, I'll leave this additional comment. But trust me, I'm not here to help anyone; it's too **bleep** difficult.

>>> “Community Change Makers”

I read about these change-makers with great interest because I fully expected to see names that I equate with people who have made a real difference in the Airtable community. But I guess that wasn't what they meant - it's more about people who have impacted their own business and personal communities with Airtable. This is fine story-telling, but it's really in the interest of furthering Airtable marketing and shaping new user sentiment. It's not really about helping existing users, which, while not my key issue with Khoros, it's certainly a core issue with many who have chimed in with disfavored sentiment.

I think Airtable would be wise to look inward to the people who have religiously assisted hundreds and even thousands of Airtable users to overcome the many dysfunctional and disconnects in new releases, bugs, documentation, and how-to's. These are the people who stay up late and stay on a question until the customer says, "IT'S WORKING! Thank you so much!". These are the real change makers.

I recently saw this on LinkedIn.

I'm sure they probably earned every ounce of the free iPad Airtable comped them. But, when I search for this person to follow them on this fancy-pants new community, it returns zero hits.

I have no free iPad. No free socks. Not even an Airtable pen. But like you, @kuovonne, I gave it my all for many years with one purpose - to help users do amazing things with Airtable. I assume that many of them took our collective wisdom and truly changed the world around them in vastly powerful ways.

Fond memories.

kuovonne · ‎Dec 23, 2022

Hey, @Bill_French congrats on getting off U***** and making it to Neptune! You have definitely been a change maker, both on the Airtable community forums and beyond. You have done amazing things with Airtable and inspired many, many people to do amazing things with Airtable.

Per the first change maker spotlight, the series is about "inspirational creators across the Airtable Community". I suspect that "across the Airtable Community" is referring to a much broader community than the forums, and it takes time for regular users of the old Airtable Community forums to learn, accept, and remember that Airtable is now using that term with a much broader definition.

Bill_French · ‎Dec 25, 2022

>>> Hey, @Bill_French congrats on getting off U***** and making it to Neptune!

Slyly clever humour right there.

I'm tempted to ask GPT-3 to write a short futuristic story about an old coder who, while on a journey (literally) to Neptune, makes a stop at Uranus to visit a gaggle of exiled crypto-freaks who've discovered that Neptune itself is a matrix-like hologram created in the blockchain. Mesmerised by this discovery, the old coder languishes there for a while, sucking down huge quantities of Rancor’s Toothpick in an attempt to numb the realization that his life was wasted on visions of a no-code world. His boss eventually sends him a Mastodon missive to get off Uranus.

Merry Christmas to anyone who might use this as a GPT prompt and then make a fortune selling it.

Olpy_Acaflo · ‎Dec 29, 2022

Thank you @Jordan_Scott1 to have take time to answer us / myself so ,

but fire is still growing and I'm afraid we will need another Fire(Wo)Man to try to refrain our Airtable Discourse's best eyes, brains, hands to leave us.
Who would better write it than what follows ?
I would add than more than Airtable free Consultants for thousands of new comers, they learned us how to think wider about data models and technologies before start to play with another airtable base, fields, views, scripts, automations....
They learned us to know what had been built by themselves beside airtable to report automatically (Google Apps Script) , to use a real CDN outside of airtable but with automated processes between airtable and CDN, and mostly what is Searching my tables and how to do it the fastest way !

Re: Add a timeout before the execution of a script

by Bill_French Dec 28, 2022 in Automations

Dec 28, 2022

So simple... (this could be my final Airtable post) so enjoy. 😉

@Nathaniel_Grano wrote:

"Having an active, civil, useful discussion forum where users can get tailored help from experts in near real time for free is an absolutely massive asset to Airtable. A lot of software ecosystems would LOVE to have a community like that."

"Discourse's advantages in this space at present are not a matter of bug-fixes or UX polish. They are deep conceptual differences in what a discussion space is meant to be"

@Bill_French wrote:
"I really enjoyed the depth and details, but I'm still sceptical that @ChrisShernaman can transform what seems to be a marketing and support outreach platform into a conversational tool where each contributor's information is treated as a first-class information object."

"I think Airtable would be wise to look inward to the people who have religiously assisted hundreds and even thousands of Airtable users to overcome the many dysfunctional and disconnects in new releases, bugs, documentation, and how-to's. These are the people who stay up late and stay on a question until the customer says, "IT'S WORKING! Thank you so much!". These are the real change makers."

"I have no free iPad. No free socks. Not even an Airtable pen. But like you, @kuovonne, I gave it my all for many years with one purpose - to help users do amazing things with Airtable. I assume that many of them took our collective wisdom and truly changed the world around them in vastly powerful ways."

I was thinking all of it was the worse way to end 2022 among my airtables and scripts learned from these amazing but leaving people but I'm hearing now about 20% Layoffs , not Community's Expert Members but Airtable Leaders and Employees... nowhere neither commented nor explained in this Community so I couldn't do anything else than fearing for the future of small businesses and startup'ers here !

Greg_F · ‎Dec 30, 2022

@Jordan_Scott1 I wanted to add that every time I open the community, I wonder how come nobody can figure out CSS for component on the top of front page in basic desktop view...

Khoros at quick glance seems to be one of those companies that is heavily enterprise sales driven - first we sign contract and then we quickly build all thing we promised (did they use "unified CX" on slides during the meeting? 😉 ). Quite contrary to a product driven company, like Airtable (in my view).

I have got so many customers to use Airtable(from burger joints to VCs), purely because you have built such an amazing product, one level above any competition. I will talk about Airtable to anyone who will listen. I doubt anyone will do the same about a glorified blog camouflaging as a discussion forum 😂

Wishing strong engagement and successful releases in 2023!!!

Karlstens · ‎Jan 02, 2023

@Jordan_Scott1- also worth noting that there's way too much whitespace taken up by a kudos and reply button. Example screenshot highlighting the zones;

Karlstens · ‎Jan 05, 2023

Also note our inability to Edit our previous posts. Further to this, I wanted to add a new bug I've found. If a user changes their Avatar, it seems that the forum has their old avatar thumbnail cached and keeps on using it?

Note how when Bill replied to me in another older thread, it hasn't swapped out to my correct new avatar.

Greg_F · ‎Jan 09, 2023

@Jordan_Scott1 😁

I was about to say that I have had a made a real impact:

Only to realize that:

As soon as you reduce window size or some people might have zoomed in screens (half the C-suite enterprise users 😉) it breaks.

This is totally minor, but it shows to the quality of software, when a dev cannot make a responsive design and review doesn't do a basic test. Never ever seen layout issues like that Airtable own pages.

Also 1️⃣ more 👉 looks like some of the 😀 are 🙅‍♂️ ⚒

Jordan_Violet · ‎Feb 03, 2023

I must say, I used to love coming to the Airtable Community but this new platform is undeniably clunky. It feels cold and like you're on a marketing site versus an actual community of users.

While I'm privately an avid user of Airtable, we at one time began by modeling the community that my team manages for our business after the great things Airtable was doing with Discourse. We've seen how terrible the Khoros platform works in practice elsewhere, and it's both disappointing to see Airtable move away from Discourse and onto Khoros, but also a breath of fresh air to read these comments myself and know that my team made the right choice in building our community in the inverse direction.

I hope to just add to the voice of the users here that this platform is horrendous and absolutely deters me from wanting to participate in this community now or in the future.

As far as my explicit usage goes, while I am not like some of the power users here, I do use Airtable when I need to manage a large project. I used to have such an easy time finding exactly what I needed here previously, and it's unfortunate that I have no idea how to find what I'm looking for anymore. This new platform reminds me more of a clunky chatroom from the early 2000s.