I will adapt because that is what I do, but I do miss the format of being able to see an overview of all the topics on one page with the unread icons. I am hopeful that as soon as I get accustomed to this new format it won't be so time consuming.
The old forums were comfortable like an old shoe, . I really liked the "show me" section and all those affiliates that were looking for products for their website...I did appreciate the promotion.
I know change is good...and I will keep reading and learning more about this new community and will adapt...who knows in a few months when I am comfortable with everything...I will probably love it!
I have to agree with everyone above , I liked being able to see a list of topics per forum, (as well a a list of separate forums) when the topic was created, when the last comment was all before I opened it up.. this new forum while very pretty is very space hoggy (is that a word ?) and extremely difficult to navigate - the little icons for views, replies and thumbs up are cute but not clickable as I would expect, for instance if I see the comments icon and I want to click it - in my mind I should have a drop down to reply.. not have to open a whole new page for the topic .. if I hover over the thumbs up .. in my mind I should be able to click it and give a thumbs up.. but none of them are clickable.. this will take some getting used to for sure. it's very pretty .. but .. I'm all about usefulness as opposed to pretty, this doesn't seem to be as useful to me.. more for reading when you have time to 'play' instead of searching for info when you are in a hurry. . JMHO .. and I like many others I miss all the great posts that were in the old forum.. they (many MANY of them) were golden for great information .. I hope we will be getting all of those back very soon.
I wholeheartedly agree with Deb above and everyone else here. Sure, the new interface is pretty, but as someone who popped into the forums several times a day as a 10-minute break from designing and kept up with absolutely everything that way (except the 'Show Me' Forum), I know I won't be doing that anymore. After checking in a couple of times today, I find all the clicking and scrolling not worth the effort. Of course, I'll adapt. After all, what other choice is there? But, the other format was much more straightforward and geared toward being informative. I find this all touchy-feely and pseudo-social media. I wish Zazzle would have put their time and effort into fixing the platform's unintuitive workarounds, glitches, and instabilities that have made the last year so frustrating.
We understand that the change in visual appearance is significant. We’re still working on some of the details throughout the site, and over time we may experiment with some different navigational elements. The main objective for the community is to be a hub for information, news, help, and discussion, so that will be the focus on our work early on. Perhaps later on down the line we’ll have time to create a page that includes a flat display of the discussion forum.
Secondly, we need to shift gears with how we collect feedback. Traditionally, we've been able to allow our community to converse freely on a subject, and as long as it's reasonably on topic we were fine with it. This was in part because our only mechanism for monitoring the forum for feedback and bugs was to read every single post. This was quite time-consuming, and our turnaround time on notable comments could vary. But, most importantly, this strategy simply doesn’t scale, and if the community were to grow then it would quickly outstrip our capability to report feedback and bugs to our Product and Engineering teams. That would be a bad thing. So we’re changing the way that we collect feedback in this section to take advantage of a new ideation tool that’s available to us. This new tool puts significant emphasis on the original post, but then provides a simpler conversation experience beyond that. This is why you don’t see the ability to add kudos to a comment below the original post, same with threaded replies. The idea here is that the original suggestion will mostly stand on its own, and we’ll be able to forward it along very easily. Unfortunately, it’ll take some time before we collectively (Z and our community) arrive at an understanding of how to balance your desires to have lively conversations while providing us with the ability to capture the insightful comments. What good is feedback if Zazzle doesn’t read it?So, for now, let’s continue on with this new format for Feedback. If you have something to share that you feel will turn into a lengthy and worthwhile conversation then you’re welcome to post it in General Discussion. I’ve moved that board up to the top of the Creator dropdown. Posting feedback in the General Discussion will allow everyone to provide kudos to posts they support, and it will allow threaded responses, but it won’t allow us to automatically generate a report on the original idea. But maybe that’s ok, because if the discussion turns into 10 pages of conversation then we’ll likely be following along with it anyways. So let's give this some time to see how it works.
Also, I've disabled kudos for the original suggestion. We will not be returning back to our old forums, so this is a good time to show what this particular capability looks like in a real-world setting.
Navigation is rather difficult without the ability to see a great deal at a glance, but I think some of this could be alleviated if the boxes around individual posts weren't so huge. Maybe if the avatars were repositioned back to the left as they were in the old forum, thus not taking up so much space and if the boxes didn't include so much blank area, it would help.
I like the new forum, but agree it's time consuming to scroll through the topics. It'd be nice if there was an option for a compact view that just shows the thread titles & other essential info.
Just wanted to update this conversation to say that in the near future we'll be updating things like this:
1. Home page will be a place to view news, information, updates, and notable forum conversations.
2. We'll be modifying the Creators page. This is the page that you see when you click on the "Creators" link in the top navigation bar. We're going to try to structure/format this page for folks that visit the forums several times a week.
