As you know, we often see a vision for the future and chase it relentlessly. That’s how we developed SpeedFusion, SpeedFusion Cloud, and FusionSIM: we experimented, improving rapidly from mistakes until we developed game-changing technologies.
Now imagine a forum that’s more than a forum: a place that offers solutions, resources, and easy access to like-minded individuals. That’s the vision we’re going after. To break past the previous platform’s limitations, we took the plunge and moved away from off-the-shelf forum solutions. Looking back, it’s clear we’ve underestimated the challenges this transition would bring.
With that being said, from your honest feedback, we’ve gained important knowledge on what makes the forum tick. Also, this project has given our developers the opportunity to find their passion. And as you know, passion is what drives us all forward. For Peplink, we always see opportunity in risk. We embrace change and take on new challenges.
We’re doing everything we can to alleviate issues where possible. Below is our schedule for addressing the most important concerns and reaching feature parity:
Resolved and tested issues will be pushed out continuously as and when they are ready (update below).
Ultimate completion of all high priority issues est 2-3 months
Alongside this, the team are working on phase 2 of the site and will launch with changes and new integrations shortly after.
We are confident that the forum will improve very quickly, after all, “WE MAKE IT ALWAYS WORK!”. We hope this explains the reasoning behind the transition and how we’ll move forward.
Thanks again for everyone’s patience and support. Please follow this post for the latest updates on forum fixes etc, and keep hitting that feedback button!
Using the Page Up key cause a popup window to appear.
You need to select cancel or do a double page up to remove.
All the previous forum activities (like badges) have gone; these were great ways to encourage and measure forum engagement.
Gone is the modified profile photos for all Peplink team members; this was a great visual reference to show Peplink staff members.
When creating a post or a reply, the previous platform would autosave and allow you to come back and pick up where you were.
The previous platform, hosted by www.discourse.org, was an open-source solution available at https://github.com/discourse/discourse so why could Peplink not be a contributor to that opensource rather than developing a proprietary platform? Another suitable option would have been to take the hosting back from www.discourse.org and then, as it is open-source, evolve it from there, which would have been a lot smoother and given Peplink a better experience for all of the forum members.
I am an advocate of Peplink, though the marketing decisions (which this appears to be driven by) put the Peplink branding and reputation at risk.
Does the Peplink marketing and management team realise they are putting all of the partners & community at risk that supports the forum through the current decisions?
Several members have voiced their concerns, and only a couple have expressed their support (one of them I support with everything they do, though I respectfully will disagree with them here with the new platform); these are just some of the running threads we have found https://forum.peplink.com/search?term=forum:
I encourage Peplink to roll back to the Discourse platform, host it yourself if you must, and then develop your enhancements from there as it is open source. Peplink would be well advised to roll back sooner than later and focus Peplink’s resources back into the evolving hardware, firmware & services that had been going so well (as previously coved by @dajian888 on 01 August 2021 and @Madcodger on 13 September 2021 in some of the other threads above).
I have found this new platform less intuitive to use and somewhat clumsy. All of our other throughs have got sent previously via the feedback option and in emails. As emails and Feeback have not been acknowledged or responded to, we now have to join others in voicing our concerns publicly.
Fellow Peplink Forum Community members, if you disagree with me, that is OK; you are free to say so. If you do agree with me, then please let Peplink know.
I would absolutely love to see the old forum hosted by discourse returned. I honestly have not seen any progress lately and it is quite aggravating. People have asked for the return of previous functionality that was used daily and if any reply was received it was along the lines of “please be patient, blah, blah, blah”. This new mish-mash has no cohesiveness, no theme, no help functionality, no nothing that recommends it be kept.
Please, please take @mldowling & others advice on going back to Discourse. Like he said, it’s open-source and a damn fine product.
Peplink supplies extraordinary hardware, firmware, software and support. A good forum? Not anymore.
This is exactly what I expected to happen. A lot of frustration from existing users, including some power users.
However, at this point, I don’t think Peplink can revert back to the old forum now. It is already too late to do that. All they can do is to work very hard to implement more features.
Of course, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this. No beta-testing (I know it is hard to beta-test a new forum, but there are ways for doing this); no thorough checklist to compare all the features between two platforms; late notice (we don’t know they are migrating to new forum until a week before it happens).
That being said, I think there are still many benefits in this new forum. My guess is many new users may actually prefer the new forum because of the modern UI and better graphics. It is easier for future extensions because it is developed in house. More importantly, it integrates with SpeedFusion.com marketplace.
Trust me, comparing to Ubiquiti Networks’ forum migration, Peplink’s team actually did a better job on responding to feedbacks, although I agree it may still not be fast enough.
On the other hand, Peplink team should realize that the potential damage is huge. In Ubiquiti’s case, some power users stopped using their new forum (although many came back after a year), and many existing users switched to Discord and even Reddit to do their discussions.
IMHO, all the complaints are justified, although I am more on the optimistic side and I believe over time this new forum will get better and even be a lot better than the old one.
This has been included in our phase 2 launch for Peplink Forum. For now, our focus lies on fixing immediate critical issues. Added features, will come in due time.
Following, multiple requests for this feature. Our developers have implemented this and will be pushed out early next week.
Drafted posts will be auto-saved in the profile draft folder. User icon> Personal > draft. As for auto-saving replies, we are working to resolve this.
Please note: we understand, some features like the above are available but difficult to find for users. We are working with our UI/UX developers to push out the new design in the coming week or so. Please bear with us.
This is possible, so long as users’ profile has set up their location. We will implement a drop-down bar of listed countries and push this feature out.
Last activity time on post does not correspond to activity
Iterations used to create thumbnails of external links
Format of quoted text
Carrage returns, new lines not spaced correctly
Removal of “message me” button when users are not loged in
Whisper posts removed
Post timer button removed
Pending:
Default ‘sort by’ for each post
Unresponsive reply button at the top each post
Clicking outside of text box when drafting a direct message will delete message
Reply draft area
It would be insightful for our team to hear from our users what cool, useful or interesting features you would like to see appear on Forum/Community? Please share
what does the eye symbol with a diagonal line through it mean? In the post box it says “whisper”? What is that? I am seeing a lot of posts with this symbol all of the sudden.
These are hidden comments left by external members. However, we have since removed this feature. Once testing has been done, you should see this symbol removed from the forum in the coming days.
gh doesn’t do anything
gu takes me to “LATEST” which includes Read & Unread
gl doesn’t do anything
gc goes to the compose window (same as just typing “c”)
gb doesn’t do anything
gp doesn’t do anything
gm doesn’t do anything
gd doesn’t do anything
b doesn’t do anything
= doesn’t do anything - don’t even see a hamburger menu
/ search works fine
? opens the keyboard help menu fine
shift z logs me out
c creates a new topic
shift p nothing happens
shift s brings up a share menu
shift a brings up flag menu
