Welcome to the New and Improved Airtable Community

I noticed I have all my solutions/replies ported over from the previous community versions, but no points or badges. Will these be updated to match previous contributions or is the leaderboard starting from 0?

Actually nevermind, it looks like badges are loading in on their own. Perhaps it just needed me to login/make the first reply to register.

Hey ​@Kamille_Parks11 welcome to the new community experience! So glad you’re here.

All of your badges will be re-added to your profile soon, let me update this blog post to make that clear.

As the point system is new to this platform, everyone is starting at 0 and the leaderboard on the home page will reset each week so anyone can have the chance to be featured! While it would be awesome to have points from your past activity, the badges you’ve earned will help reflect your expertise. 

Have fun exploring! 

Yeah to be transparent, this is something we’re doing today and didn’t want to delay the community relaunch until these badges were re-added :) 

Thanks ​@MaddieJ and welcome back.  

Welcome back to you too, ​@BillH! Happy relaunch day! 

Hi ​@MaddieJ ,

Will there be a way for us to edit our old posts? I like to update my older posts with newly-updated information as it becomes available, but it doesn’t seem like I can edit my older posts right now.

Also, is there a way to get markdown formatting to work in the new forums?

Thank you!
Scott

Thank you for bringing the community back. I look forward to exploring the features it provides. 
 

My initial impression is that I can at least see more lines of text on my phone than under Khoros. However, I do not see a way to type code on my phone. I suppose I should fill out the form to report that.

Is there a way to see what has already been submitted to the community feedback form? That would make it easier to remember and track what has and has not yet been reported.

I also have a question about search. I currently only see a single search bar for typing in a search. If I go to community.airtable.com/search, I see a search page with a few options, but not as many options as I expect. For example, I would like to search on who posted, time frame of the post, etc. Am I missing something or should this be something to submit to the community feedback form?

Edit to add: A few things I like about the new platform.​​​

• I can see who has “liked” a post/reply.
• There is a list of “recent activity” that show how recent the activity is.
• The text size feels reasonable.
• I can edit my content.

I’m sure I’ll find more things to like (and more things that I find puzzling) in the days and weeks to come.

I know that you asked people to fill out the Airtable form to report community issues, but that feels too much like sending a message out into the void.

Is there a tutorial or something for users to get to know the features of Gainsight? I find that there are several little things that I'd like to figure out. How to get to search, personal messages, quoting just a portion of a post, multi-quoting, formatting code without using a mouse, what the “inspiring” tag by user names means, what the blue bar and numbers under people's icons mean, links in signatures, etc.

How can users tell which posters are Airtable staff, versus regular community members, versus community members who are also moderators of groups, etc.?

​@MaddieJ 

One of the biggest and most gigantic problems with the new community is that it does not function properly on the iPad — in neither the Safari web browser for iPad nor the Chrome web browser for iPad:

1. The toolbar in the message composition box does not work at all on the iPad web browsers. For example, you cannot apply any formatting to the text that you are writing, because you can’t tap on the bold/italic/underline buttons; you can’t upload a photo to the message that you are composing because you can’t tap on the image upload button; etc. None of the toolbar options work on the iPad.
    

   

    

2. None of the dropdown menus throughout the entire community will allow the user to select any of the options from any of the dropdown menus. You can VISUALLY SEE the options in the dropdown menus, but you can’t actually tap on any of the options in any of those dropdown menus. Please see 2 example screenshots below of different dropdown menus in the community. None of the options that you see in these dropdown menus can be selected on the iPad, and this same problem applies to all other dropdown menus in the community as well.
    

   

   

    

​@MaddieJ

Without the ability to use the toolbar on the iPad, it’s not even possible to add a hyperlink to text. There is basically nothing that can be accomplished on the iPad in the new community.

Also, since the new community doesn’t allow editing of our own posts after a very short amount of time, it prevents us from being able to fix mistakes or a post. It’s even worse in private messages… there is ZERO editing allowed at all of private messages.

​@MaddieJ 

Okay, I figured out how to workaround the iPad problem, but it is still a technical problem with the community.

The iPad web browsers (both Chrome and Safari) are automatically set as desktop web browsers. This is built into iPadOS as the default behavior for the iPad.

It seems like the community can’t handle a desktop web browser being set on the iPad.

So the workaround is that the user has to manually switch the browser to mobile web browser. This can be saved as a setting within Safari per website, but Chrome does not allow this to be saved per website. Chrome requires the user to manually change the setting upon each website visit.

So that is the manual workaround to make it work properly upon each visit to the community, but it would be great if the community automatically worked natively with the iPad web browsers.

Another thing that is missing from this new community is the ability for our drafts to be saved — either manually or automatically. If you’re typing up a long post but not ready to post it yet, it will be completely lost if you leave the community and come back again later.

​@MaddieJ 

One other question/issue:

When I return to the “Active Since Last Visit” page at this link, it is always showing me the same exact posts… even if none of those posts had new activity since my last visit.

What does the community consider a “visit”? Do I need to log out and log in again to get the community to realize that it is a “new visit”?

Or do I need to wait for a specific amount of time before re-visiting?

Thank you!

Scott 

​@MaddieJ 

It seems like spam controls have not yet been implemented in the community.

I woke up this morning to 10 nearly-identical spam messages in a row that flooded the community.

Can you please implement spam controls?

Thank you!
Scott 

Also, it seems like we are no longer subscribed to any of the old posts that we were once subscribed to.

For example, in this thread, this person thanked me for solving the problem for her, but I was never alerted to her reply.

In many cases, people have more questions in a thread, but if we’re no longer subscribed to those threads, we might never see their additional questions.

Is there a way to resubscribe us to our old threads?

Additionally, as I mentioned above, it is very challenging to not have a “drafts” feature in the community. It requires us to complete our posts in one sitting, instead of beginning now and finishing later.

Another issue is that it says in the right margin that I have received many “likes” this week, but I did not receive any notifications of these likes. All the old forums gave us notifications of our likes. Do we not have the ability to be notified of our likes in the new forum?

More importantly, ​@MaddieJ, I just spent valuable time typing a multi-paragraph response to the author in this thread.

I gave the user an explanation of the problem they’re having, along with a few different ways of accomplishing what they are trying to do.

The new community software blocked me from posting my response and said that it would need to be reviewed by a moderator.

If the new community software is blocking the #1 most active & most helpful contributor to the community for the last 6 years, then it seems like there is some sort of a problem with the new community software.

Thank you!
Scott 

​@MaddieJ 

Here’s a great example of a very old post from many years ago that has outdated information in it, and I would like to update my answers to reflect today’s technology.

However, all old posts are locked off from editing.

The reason that I found this old post — and the reason that this is a much bigger problem than it might seem — is because the new community software shows “Related Topics” in the right margin of every single post, and it always shows the oldest posts first! 

So, what this means is that people who are visiting the community are getting referred to incredibly outdated posts from 4+ years ago. Almost all of these posts have much better & much easier solutions today.

Can you please re-enable the ability for us to edit old posts?

Alternatively, can you please have the “related posts” show newest posts first instead of oldest posts?

Thank you!
Scott

Hey ​@ScottWorld and ​@kuovonne, thanks for being here to check out the new Community experience!

Please keep in mind that it really is important that your feedback come in through this form so I can triage tackle feedback, and organize my responses accordingly. The form has been updated so you can have the option to receive a copy of your responses. Also rest assured that I’m going to share release notes like I’ve done in the past so you can see updates as we go through this process together.

Will everything be perfect? Nothing is perfect 😊 but I’m working hard to make this the best experience possible for everyone. Leveraging the form so I can take full advantage of Airtable to process feedback will really go a long way for me!

Thanks all!

Your “like I’ve done in the past” link takes me to the form, not to previously shared release notes.

While I can see how having users enter feedback through the form makes it easier for you, it adds a lot of friction for community users. I just wrote about this in the thread about product feedback.

Using the community itself as a way of providing feedback on the community is much easier than entering data in the form. We can intersperse text and screen captures. We can post follow-ups. We can go back and fix typos. We can reply to each other and like each others posts. We can follow the natural course of our thoughts without stopping to categorize if the issue is a bug versus a feature request or something else entirely. We can type related issues as they come to us without having to break our chain of thought to start a new submission. Our names are automatically attached to our posts.

We are not asking for perfection. We are asking you to work with us to find a method of communication that will work for us as well as for you.

If you are having trouble processing the unstructured feedback that you are receiving, what do you think of my suggestion in the product feedback thread to use AI to take our unstructured discussions and turn them into the Airtable format that you want?

​@MaddieJ ​@kuovonne 

Personally, I am finding it very challenging to navigate the new community. There is no easy way for me to distinguish which posts I have previously read vs. posts that are brand new, since it always intermingles the brand new posts with the most recently-active posts.

Would you guys consider switching back to Discourse as your community software? Discourse solved all the problems that I mentioned in my previous posts above, and Discourse also clearly distinguishes between new posts vs. previously-read posts.

Thank you!
Scott 

It seems that Subscriptions are not working, at least after I clicked in “Subscribe” in this Announcements board it still doesn’t show up in my Subscriptions menu.

Edit: just to add that subscribing to a single topic (such as this one) seems to work, but not to the full board.