HOLY MOLY, it’s been a wild ride getting up and running on the new TuDiabetes website. I don’t know about you guys, but my seatbelt was not tight enough…
The site officially launched just a few days ago, but you can probably see that even after months of planning and preparation there were still some pretty important things that weren’t working quite right for everyone. Like signing in, for example. That’s a pretty important one…
Our volunteers in the community have been working heroically to try to get up to speed with the new platform so they can help others figure it out, and we staff have been madly testing features, reading your posts and messages, and taking note of everything that still needs work or explanation.
Here’s some of what we’ve heard so far (just a snippet of the full list):
The chat feature is too slow and has too much empty space.
We hate badges and “trust levels”.
Creating a forum post requires a degree in computer science.
Stuff I write is disappearing.
Stuff is appearing that I didn’t write.
An unwelcome number has taken up residence at the end of my name.
I didn’t/did get a message to log in, which didn’t/did contain a password that didn’t/did work, but now I can’t change it.
So… There’s still a way to go before this is the website of our dreams. However you and I and the rest of our friends are still here, which means that the the most important thing about this site remains intact: we’re a community.
So let’s take a Friday evening to celebrate that we survived this harrowing transition, and it will only improve from here. I promise, y’all, better stuff is to come
7 hit home for me! I almost emailed you Em, when it didn’t work when I tried to log in yesterday. I did the password reset and *just now got the reset email. Nevertheless, I love your message! We are a community, and we are all here, working through it together! Really glad to see the new site! It looks slick!
It’ll eventually fall into place , I have faith in y’all, but right now I"m like not a huge fan yet. Such a huge transition from the old site which was a lot easier to use.
Well, I’m here. And like Sensorium, I have faith in you all…I’m roaming as a Stranger in a Strange Land. Baby steps—just like caring for our common scourge…As to comments here—I, too, find badges offensive and would very much like to disengage from all such competitive-seeming garbage. It actually makes me want to NOT participate in anything…I don’t understand a lot of the lingo. I have no idea what a “pinned” thing is. Chats on the home page are lost on me—I don’t recognize anyone participating or see a subject that interests me and, as always, they go by too fast for me to have a clue. But that’s okay—I’ve only ever lurked on them before, anyway…At the moment, understanding how to personalize my own page is much too overwhelming, so, I will ignore that until the weather changes, or something----NOT to say the info you provide is useless at all----I’m sure it will be very helpful. Just not yet…I would like to find some of my old friends like Trudy and Mee and Kathy and Zoe, and Lots, etc—haven’t figured out how so far…Perseverance Furthers. I’ll keep plugging away…Blessings, as ever…
I’ve used Discourse on a site for bloggers and writers. The team has done an excellent job – despite the set backs – of getting things off the ground. Kudos to you all.
What I love about Discourse is the minimalism. I can see the streams of post, jump in and post a reply or create my own post. NING’s design was very 1999/2000. Discourse supports Markdown for posting. For a long time blogger and netizen like myself this is a like manna from heaven.
I agree on the badges. I found them a bit off putting.
Hi Judith. I’m here (someone changed my name to Trudy2), but I don’t think we can carry conversations here. Talking on our Profile Pages on the old TuD was a great feature.
Thanks Khurt—One of the things that keeps me plugging away is knowing that members like you are there to help—See–I managed my first “reply”!..More soon…Blessings
@Trudy2 the reason for the name change is everyone has to have a unique name, and there probably are 2 other Trudys here. If you want to make sure someone sees that you’ve mentioned them, try the @ - click it and you’ll see a list of members - let’s say you want Judith, but can’t remember her unique name - start typing @Ju and you should see her - just click on her name and it will autofill the rest of @Judith_in_Portland
if you want to gather together in the community category - start a topic there or let me know and I’ll start another one - I’ve already started one for friends of Reed - I actually think you’ll like it, as everyone can see what’s going on in one place, and not on multiple profile pages.
please try things out - we’re all learning and making mistakes and asking for help - you know our values here are grounded in helping each other- we’re not going to let that go! blessings my friends.
@MarieB, thanks for your reply–your tips are appreciated. I think I’ve learned to navigate this site pretty well, all things considered. Later on when things have settled down, I think it would be a good idea for us to start a topic to get our friends together now and again. The loss of the Friends feature and change in Profile Pages is a bit disconcerting to me, but I’m sure we’ll all find ways to compensate. Again, thanks for all your help.
I see you found the “like” - it’s the little heart under a comment. I never much cared for the “likes” but here they serve more of a purpose - if a topic gets a lot of replies, i think > 50, there will be a “summarize” button added on the topic. here you can get a shorter summary of the topic taken from the replies that receive the most likes (I think somehow it adds more weight to members who are the most trusted too).
so, you are encouraged to do LOTS of liking here! conversely, if you see something you DON’T like, please FLAG it.
Oops again. I tried to delete the configuration of my online name-----didn’t like the dashes in it. Looks like it didn’t work. Will I ever have to use it and remember where the dashes go? Believe it or not, If it is a Fibrofog day, that will be difficult…
@Judith_in_Portland Judith the dashes are the spaces that were in your Ning name. I didn’t like that on mine either. You can change your name here, if you’d like me to do it, let me know how you’d like it to look. It has a be a name that’s not already taken.
Interesting, Dearheart. I’ve gotten fond of Judith in Portland—maybe from ye olde Ambassador days. Maybe I should consider one of our more out-there kitty names like Leko or Scuzzybutt-----Hehe…xx000
How about going with “CamelCase” and using JudithInPortland or some other variation?
Unfortunately, including spaces in a user name makes implementing things like the @ operator a LOT harder.
Rather than write all the code required to do that … and then to keep fixing it over & over & over again because there will be parsing bugs you didn’t anticipate … it’s easier to just not allow spaces in the usernames.
Yes. In my opinion this is much easier in Discourse than it was in Ning since
I am not aware of any time limit. I believe you can go back and either edit or choose to delete one of your posts at any time after it has been submitted.
Discourse keeps track of your edits. You can go back & review a previous version of your post. If you wish, you should also be able to revert to an older version.
If you are logged in then the buttons at the bottom of one of posts should be, from left to right,
The “link” button to share the post. This pops up a text window containing a link to view that post directly.
The “flag” button. This allows you to privately flag the post for attention or to contact the admin team about it for some other reason.
The “pencil” button. This how you would open up the editor to make changes to your post. Most often I use this to correct typos or other silly mistakes I made.
The “midlevel ellipsis” button aka “show more”. Clicking on this icon currently changes this button into the delete button. (I think another confirmation pop-up window is displayed prior to actually deleting the post, but I didn’t want to test it out to find out.)
The “reply” button.
By the way, as long as I’m here, a note about the two kinds of “reply” buttons.
Each comment in a disussion has a reply button. Clicking the comment’s reply button will link your comment back to the comment your are replying to. This will also automagically send a notification to the person who wrote that comment.
For those folks who can see it, hovering the mouse cursor over that reply to comment button displays “begin composing a reply to this post”.
There is also a reply button at the very bottom of the page. This reply button does not link your comment to any of the existing comments. It is intended to be used when you are not responding to any other comment already posted.
Hovering over this reply button displays the help text “begin composing a reply to this topic”.
Using the reply button in a comment to reply to that comment helps make it easier to follow the discussion since it makes it clearer to whom you are talking. If you instead always use the reply to topic button at the bottom of the page, then you get the unorganized linear list of posts some folks have said they really hate.
Well, yes. But it ain’t so much the site as how it is used.
… it’s easier to just not allow spaces in the usernames.