An explanation on Zazzle's activity in the community

[Windy]

As no one has arrived to give "many thanks" and to say they will be "passing along to the team", I am not sure the mods will see this excellent suggestion. Do the mods read all the forums? I sometimes think they only read certain ones. Not sure which.

Moderator edit: For context, I've split this comment into its own conversation so that I can expand on it without getting too off-topic. Moved the conversation to General for better visiblity. Previous conversation is here: https://community.zazzle.com/t5/ask-a-question/trying-to-create-a-tote-design-that-can-be-personaliz...

[PenguinPower]

Yeah - I was beginning to wonder about that myself....  but hey - I did some more poking around and found (quite buried) a more up to date page that shows how to create custom text fields.. (https://help.zazzle.com/hc/en-us/articles/219145288-Creating-a-Product-Template) but the Help Center definitely still needs some clean up and organization - the most prominent video that comes up has a version of the design tool that already wasn't being used when I joined back in 2017... and there's articles about how to make items that haven't been sold for ages too. 

[Scott]

Firstly, I'd like to thank @PenguinPower for taking the time to write up the how-to article in the other discussion. It's a very kind gesture to spend such effort to help others. I've passed along a note to the team about improving our offerings here.

We've always done our best to be active in the Community, but every member of our team has other obligations within the company. For me, I'm a member of the Software QA team. The advantages that this provides is that we have a solid head start on getting questions answered. The downsides are that we may not read through every post immediately. As time goes on we will continue to do our very best to be here and help out as best as we can, but it's also important to remember that communities are only as strong as their user base. If you see someone asking a question that you think you can answer then feel free to jump in and contribute.

[Windy]

@Scott I thought maybe that there were certain forum sections which are monitored because they specifically relate to technical questions or other matters that would clearly be for mods to answer. I thought maybe quite a few forum sections are NOT monitored  because anyone in the community would be able to answer questions or comments posted there.

I was not thinking mods should read every thread. But I do think it would be helpful if the forum instructions would spell out where to post if you want a moderator to read the post and act on it.

[shellifitz]

I am wondering if mods are finding this new forum as hard as I am to navigate and thereby missing posts that they might have responded to.  

I find this new forum so time consuming to find anything that I just don't have time to help like I used to in the old forums.  It's sad but true. 

[WittyBetty]

I thought it was just me so I never mentioned that. The new forum has such a strange structure, it's really difficult to follow threads, and it displays so few threads in each section, like 6 or so, and if you want to see a thread from yesterday and it is not in the first 6, you have to click Load More. I am not complaining, like, I've seen worse, just I am not sure why the design is so... for the lack of better word, time unfriendly. Like, the old-fashioned forum structure (which we had in the old forums) allowed to see all at once which section has new comments since your last visit. You could click right on the yellow arrow and be taken to the latest updated thread in that section. Then you could click the name of the section that was placed above, and see all updated threads in this section. It would took literally minutes to check all the forums and see what's new and participate in discussions. Only now I appreciate how easy and fast to navigate the old structure was. The news were never missed if posted in the News section. In this new Community design, News and Information are separated from the forums so I have to go there to see if something new was published, extra clicks every day 🙂 Well, not complaining, just literally no idea how that is an improvement structure-wise; again maybe it's just me. Of course formatting and posting pictures etc is much better now, but the structure makes browsing forums sort of difficult.

[waterart]

No it's not just you, I also find the new forum time consuming and difficult to follow threads. I much prefer the setup of the old forum where you can see everything at a glance in stead of constantly clicking to see what's happening on the forum here.

[shellifitz]

totally agree.  coming to the Z forum now is like last on my list because I know I will get stuck in a time suck when I get here. 

[shellifitz]

it is definitely not just you.  The old forums might have been old, but they were much better thought out layout wise.  I also don't mean to complain but sometimes new and "improved' isn't better. 

[LyricalSixties]

I totally agree.  The old forum might have looked old fashioned, but it was much more efficient to use. 

[Scott]

"and it displays so few threads in each section, like 6 or so," this should be fixed now. It was a bug. And now that it's fixed we'll be adding pagination soon.

[waterart]

Now there's a lot more scrolling down the page, are these shadow boxes really needed? They are a distraction and take up space.

[TabzJones]

I couldn't agree more. I rarely even come to the forum anymore. 
As others have said, I used to be able to pop in and at a glance know where new threads were, especially news, and be on with my day creating. 

The extra clicks and counter-intuitive design of the new forum has put me off of spending any time here. 

Time marches on, I guess I'm finally "getting old". I'll be yelling at my grandkids to get off my lawn next. 😂🤣😂

~Tabz

[Saints_Aplenty]

I couldn't agree more!

As far as I'm concerned, all Scott's suggestions above is add more layers of things we have to wade through and more hurdles we have to jump through. Checking in daily no longer gives the kind of comprehensive overview I used to have of what's going on on Zazzle.  I used to enjoy reading almost  all of the forum posts (except for Show Me).  Alas, that's no longer the case.  Nor do I care to participate overmuch.  

And, for the record, I am old!  🙂

[Scott]

This comment is getting off-topic, but I'll provide one response. There's several tools that can help here:

1. Subscribe to discussions that you're interested in. By default, when you post in a discussion you're added as a Subscriber. At that point you'll receive emails any time someone posts something. This means there's potentially a lot of emails, but your email client should have the ability to create "rules" that will put all emails from the community into their own folder.

2. Bookmark important or notable posts or conversations. I discussed this in my follow-up post here: https://community.zazzle.com/t5/general-zazzle-discussion/community-updates-march-31st/m-p/13127

[shellifitz]

I have email turned off on purpose.  I already have enough email to read and way too many folders but thanks for the suggestion.  

[Saints_Aplenty]

My impression is that threads sink very fast now, most moderators may catch a post when first posted but never go back to the thread, and at first posts get noticed but the rest of conversations and comments are largely ignored.

Without a simple index pages of the kind that appeared in the old forums this system is much less useful.

And, you're soooo very right, Shelli.  This new Community is much more time consuming and yields much less in the way of results for the effort required to keep abreast.

[WittyBetty]

I've heard, modern web developers' motto is that the website or app should be designed the way that makes visitors spend as much time on it as possible and make as many clicks as possible, because it is good for Google search (websites where visitors show more activity are ranked higher). I think this may be the reason behind this structure that really PREVENTS a visitor from seeing all updates at once (it's my speculation only).

As a result, I still visit the forums daily but I only visit two sections: General Discussion and Technical Issues. Same with some websites that adopted that practice of keeping a visitor busy clicking around - if I still need them, I bookmark pages I use the most and visit directly. It's just my way to save time that otherwise would have been simply wasted.

[Barbara]

Back in the days of the old forum, many of us commented on the need for an update, but I suspect we were imagining phpBB or something very similar. An upgrade to that would have been familiar and easy to navigate, but when our current software was implemented, we were like deer in headlights. I'm no longer a deer, but I still find the current setup awkward because we see little of the forum in its entirety. I suspect this may also be true for the moderators who are no less human than we are. The single section I no longer bother with very much is Feedback because there are three choices for viewing it, and we see different threads depending on which we choose. I now rarely visit it.

Some of the glitches will likely be smoothed out as time goes on, but I'm not sure the navigation, which is like wearing blinders, can be fixed. It's too deep within the structure.