I am a new user. I know people here already got used to this forum, but it is important to improve it in such ways that new users would like it too. Otherwise, this community will grow much slower.
I missed the top buttons on the top of the page, such as “latest”, “categories” and “Top”. I missed them because they don’t look like buttons, but more like regular texts. For existing users who “live” on this forum every day, that is of course not an issue, but for new users, it is a big problem. These should have boxes round the text, or give them a different background color to make them look like buttons.
When scrolling to the bottom of the page, it would load additional posts on-demand. I have once seen this in Ubiquiti forums too and its users really hated it. I hate this too, because you have no easy way to get to a previous post you read before! And no easy way to jump to later posts.
The posts should be separated to pages, with 50 posts each page.
For example, I may have read a post I like and remember it was on page 11, so next time I can go to page 11 to find it. Or another example, if I want to see posts in year 2017, I may jump to page #90 or around that to find a post roughly in that time range.
Loading posts dynamically makes all these actions impossible and very hard to go through posts in this forum. IMO, load posts on-demand is only good for forums with transient and causal style or small forums, not like this one.
These two items are very important. How easy a forum can be used will determine how fast a community can grow.
I’ve been on this forum since it was started (in this format) and have never used those links / buttons so agree they could do with an improved UX implementation.
I think this is fairly subjective. Personally I find the idea of a paginated approach very old fashioned. I do take your point that you can’t read the forum like a book remembering which page number you were last on but I doubt many users have the time to do that (I look forward to being corrected - the forum users here aren’t shy at coming forwards on stuff like this).
If you spot a post you think you might want to come back to you can hit the bookmark button ( ) at the end of the post and that is available under your profile picture in the top right:
If you click into your profile picture you can see all the topics you have posted on and search though just those, and of course there is the main search button top right. Which has quite an advanced set of options to help you find the topic that you kind of remember but not quite…
Thanks for the reply. Since you mentioned “advanced search options”, now I have the 3rd suggestion because I missed that feature again.
It says “options”, while it should say “advanced search”, just to be clear.
Regarding to paged posts vs. loading posts dynamically. I think ultimately a survey or some stats on the feedback will work better, and this should include new users and existing users. Being able to jump through “time” is very useful to me.
) at the end of the post and that is available under your profile picture in the top right:
