It’s been a while since the new forum was established. I didn’t like it initially, but I decided to give myself a good long time to get used to it.
I still don’t like it!
What really bugs me is that by default everything is all mixed up in a jumble. In the old forums, I never saw anything related to old versions of Cubase, for example, because they were in separate subforums. And the posting list is somehow MUCH harder to read than it was in the old version. I know I can use tags, and I’ve tried to use them, but I still feel it’s not as friendly as the neat hierarchical structure we used to have. Not everything is tagged correctly, or at all, for one thing.
IMO, the extra facilities the new forum gives us are quite nice but not life-changing, and they are massively outweighed by the added confusion of the list view.
Is there any way forum moderators would consider somehow increasing the clarity of the list view?
You should be able to set your filters in the forum to not show posts tagged for Cubase11, 10, etc.
When VST Live came out I started seeing all those posts and then realized I wasn’t interested, so a few minutes later they were filtered from my feed. Waaaay easier than jumping around a handful of sub-forums every day.
I get your opinion here and felt the same initially, even though I had used Disourse a little before on Github (the forum on Github, as you might expect for a software developer forum, has been highly customized) and use it on BFD and a couple other forums. The BFD forum is fairly similar to here on Steinberg, but I suspect you would like the way it’s been set up better, with only 3 high level categories with clearly defined sub-catagories:
This would be a little more difficult to implement neatly hear since there are so many more product categories, not to mention the German language sections, but I think it is a good model to look at as a starting discussion point to maybe tweaking the forum to make it a little more user friendly to those who are still uncomfortable with navigating the current forum. Personally, I’ve gotten used to the new forum, but would still welcome any improvements designed to make it easier to navigate and find topics of interest without having to try to make the tag system work (the main problem of which is it’s OPTIONAL). Forcing people to choose appropriate tags for their post (OS, SW version and level, language or just general) would certainly be helpful in effectively filtering the content of the forum.
Also, it’s easy to like the new forum for one feature that has made discussing issues and techniques infinitely easier, and that’s the ease of posting screen caps in the new forum. No having to upload an image to third party hosting sites and using BB Code to link to the picture which HOPEFULLY works. Now it’s just copy, paste, done and it works. A major improvement to troubleshooting problems especially. Plus being able to load dump files! This alone is worth whatever growing pain there is with the new forum, in my opinion of course.
Well yes & no. Every post has to have at least one tag - the one that specifies the main topic area (e.g. Wavelab, Cubase, Steinberg Forum, etc.). Those are the only tags I’m basing any filtering on. You’re right the optional tags are hit & miss - the only time I use them for reading posts is during searches and even then only rarely.
This, a thousand times. They not only make answers more understandable, the pics often make it easy to spot the causes of issues when, for example, you can see the Inspector’s actual settings.
Must admit I like just hitting on the “latest” view and randomly dipping in to topics that look interesting. And use the “unread” view if not got much time and catching up on replies.
Being able to copy and paste an image, embed a video etc. are just brilliant compared to the old forum.
I like the cool down periods that mods can apply to topics if they’re starting to get a little spicy, too.
There’s a lot of positive features that help the community in fact, such as a notice if you’re replying to the same person in a single thread too much - many times that’s lead me to delete a post instead of needlessly replying.
They get locked for a period of time and system automatically unlocks. Plus slow mode that can be applied which limits the number of posts going into that topic.
I have memories of many locked posts on the old forum, Having these options in a more dynamic form perhaps reduces the necessity for posts to be blanket locked as they once were.
