As you probably noticed, the forums are either:
- not available at all or
- taking a lot of time to load or
- if they ever load, they are not working properly and showing errors if you try to create or update a posting.
If you manage to load those pages, you will notice that there are some new featueres implemented. Some of them are usefull. Like the new text editor (I realy like that one). Some of them are however questionable:
- the new reward system where you can get some points if you provide a helpfull or even a correct answer. The funniest thing is that the asker is supposed to say the answer someone provided is "correct".
- the fonts were changed to 11px which is not readable at all,
- the visited property they implemented are i.m.h.o. unneccessary because of the image showing if the posting was opened before or updated since. It is anoying too. Hard to read because of the grey color on a grey background.
I already asked the people who set it up if they are realy sure this makes sense. They didn't answer. Well, I am probably not the only one who asked.
Despite of the changes made, features I like or those I don't like, the most important thing though is the availability of the forum. And the fact is - it is not available since almost a week. Have they done a test before they upgraded? How did they test it? Did they ask the comunity about the changes? Maybe they should roll it back once again and consider a redisign using ApEx.
5 comments:
OTN its going thru 2nd upgrade per this link comment: http://amardeepsidhu.com/blog/2008/08/28/otn-forums-2nd-upgrade-attempt/
I don't know what they were thinking. There are lots of free forum software out there that have more features, are better tested, and have better support than this piece of junk that they are trying to make work. Heck, they should have just developed it in Apex.
Have they ever heard of load testing I wonder?
I am so annoyed.
The font issue was a pain. I looked at the CSS (so I could use Stylish to override it) and was amazed at how many styles they had defined that specified it. They seem to have missed the 'Cascading' concept in CSS. Even so, it should be fixable in 5 minutes.
Similar with the visited 'grey'ness. Should also take about 5 minutes to switch to a darker colour.
I see the availability as the main issue. Given they'd already had one failure/rollback, they should have had a read only version of it as a contingency (and maybe even a temporary 'all questions in one forum'/no registration etc forum for really urgent questions/answers.
But the real killer has been to have a forum for issues relating to the forum. If people have, worst case, a problem posting to the forum, they can't report it anywhere. At the least there should have been an email address for raising problems.
congrats for being the first journeyman
:)
Laurent,
Thanks.
Denes
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