What have you done to this forum :(

Toad Data Modeler
1

Hi all after some time of my absence.

What have you done to this forum?

Current layout is completely unreadable. Does it exists in previous (graphical) form?

2

Hi Michal,

in past every product has its own forum and there were various limitations. The team responsible for ToadWorld has been working on improvements and optimization of the forums as well as other parts (movies, blogs etc.) If you find few minutes in your schedule, please feel free to send us your more detailed comments.

Have a great day,

Vaclav

3

Thanx Vaclav for quick response.

Maybe it’s question of being used to. But in first try I even wasn’t able to find TDM forum. Google helped me to drop here.

I have had problem to switch between forums (regular forum and beta related one). How to quickly switch between them?

  • There is no navigator (link) making possible to jump outside a thread to thread index or to subforums index. I really don’t know how to switch to for example “scripting subforum” just after writing this post. Hitting “back” button multiple times is not good idea.

  • beta forum is not subforum of TDM forum any more.

  • Page layout is strange. It looks more like comments under some article rather than forum. Very small space is dedicated for forum itself. Half of vertical size of my monitor is taken by page header and huge navigation buttons not related to forum. The third horizontal space is taken by tags, related product articles etc… completely irrelevant to discussion. I’m not talking about fixed horizontal size which waste about half of horizontal size while using HD resolution

  • post styles makes thread also harder to read. All single elements like (author, “did you answer question” are arranged in vertical manner with big vertical spacing. It makes feeling of chaos. It’s personal taste related but most forums offer compact view which I like more.

  • editor for new thread is set to have huge spacing between lines of the same paragraph. Looks like it’s set to the twice of what should be set.

I have feeling that this layout has been designed to follow some current trends, to makes things bigger than must be. Maybe for mobile phones or tablets. Unfortunately it makes less ergonomic while using it. At least for me.

Hope those few notes will help making it better.

with regards

4

Hi Michal,

Thanks for the feedback. I will definitely look into updating the website to work better based on your feedback!

To quickly switch between beta and commercial forum, you would use the group navigation at the top to click on “Beta” and then “Forum”. I’m currently working on a better way to navigate between different forums.

Here are some of the things that I’m currently working on to make the forum, and the entire website, better:

  • Widening the entire website (depending on resolution) so content is more visible

  • Redesigning the header. The new one is 75% smaller than what is currently there.

  • Redesigning many smaller elements like buttons to be consistent throughout the website

These changes (and more) will be rolled out as soon as they are ready and tested, hopefully in the next month or two.

5

I agree fully with Micheal - the current forum’s usability is worse than the previous one’s. Especially in the thread overview I have trouble finding the thread’s caption - which is the most important thing to me.

Unfortunately it looks like this is the new standard. Even Microsoft’s forums look similar to this one, e.g. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/home. Nevertheless you should have a look at one of these. Although using a similar layout for me they are much more clearly laid out, especially when looking at the thread captions.

Personally I prefer the style of “classical” forums, e.g. like forums managed by phpBB or vBulletin.

Best regards,
Gerald