I find the use of tags to browse categories, looking for a topic of interest, to be counterintuitive. Do you have any tips to offer to make forum browsing more friendly?
Steve, do you have any numbers on forum participation/activity before and after the change?
Thanks for offering to look at my issue. This is the link:
And yes, you are correct that I could start a support ticket for it. It is comforting, though, to report here first, and get a confirmation regarding whether the issue is shared with others or merely specific to my setup.
I accept the reasons you state for the forum change: I wasn’t aware of that. Also, I wasn’t aware that moderators are not Steinberg connected. Sorry for that.
I still think that the new format is confusing and counterintuitive. A help section would be more than useful. I have been active in a multitude of forums and groups on the internet since the mid-1990s, so the features and functionality of this forum feels a little bit too much as a parallel universe…
What worked for me is I stopped trying to use tags to find the things I want to see and instead use them to filter out stuff I don’t want to see. On the old forum I’d read/catch-up a bunch of sub-forums every day, going from one to the next until I’d looked at them all - which now seems pretty clunky to me. On here I go to the “Unread” tab to see the threads I’m already active in. Then I go to the “Latest” tab, scroll down to find the Red Line marking my last visit & scroll through the posts bottom up.
Everything I might be interested in is shown on the “Latest” tab & anything new that I’m already engaged in is in the “Unread” tab.
The “New” tab is a subset of the “Latest” tab so I could ignore that if I didn’t have an overwhelming urge to zero out the new message count.
Hi @GlennO – What I’ve done for this is to configure preferences>categories and mute all categories I’m not interested in, and then make the default in preferences>interface Default Home Page
No, but it’s clear that some people have not been posting as much as they used to, and on the other hand some people are posting more than they used to. I’m of the opinion that once people understand how to use it it will meet or exceed previous usage statistics.
I think part of any change like this is that folks tend to really notice things we find annoying even if only slightly. While we tend to not notice new improvements - partially because new things haven’t been available long enough for folks to recognize the usefulness of the new thing.
Yesterday I realized how beneficial the ease of inserting pics here is. I was replying to a basic configuration question. On the old forum I’d have gone something like:
Go to Studio>Blah>BlahBlah and blah blah blah
And this would take a few minutes to write. But yesterday I just took a screenshot & highlighted the key things to look at - no words at all. Under 30 seconds total for response that is clearer and way more useful than the old way.
On the flipside, when I changed how I looked at the forum (as described above) it caused me to go from reading each sub-forums posts all together to having all of them jumbled together in one list. Initially this really bothered me. But after a couple of days I realized it didn’t matter if they were jumbled together and the only reason I’d wanted them grouped together is because that’s what I was used to, nothing more than that.
I’m sure my experience is irrelevant here, but I’ll share it anyway. I visited the old forum on a daily basis. I became so frustrated just trying to find anything on this new one that for a long time I just stopped visiting. Today I had a topic that I remembered was part of a discussion on the old forum, so I searched on it and found… well, just one post alluding to the issue. No thread. No clue about how to proceed.
I learned from the old forum. Today I am reminded of why I stopped visiting. RIP.
@rtorstrick
I have whined enough about it, since last december… Nearly a year after, I can say that I more or less got used to it, this, despite all these :
There is no indication that a given user X has answered to a post immediataly above him from Y, contrarily to what’s happening if the post from Y is separated from the X one by, at least, one post. Result : a lot of time lost, trying to decipher if given answers are replies to the ones immediatly above them or not.
If X try, as a workaround to make things more comprehensible, to quote the Y post, the said quote won’t appear and worse : it actually marks X post as ‘Edited’ (the pencil appears with 1 or 2, it depends, on the top right of it). This, as there is no numbering of the posts in a given thread, which would help us to, at least, precise at which one we are actually answering…
The tags mess. Still not fixed : why is there in it Issue and Issues ? This with a non alphabetical order of it. In addition, a lot of threads are started with partial/erroneous tags or even no tag at all : how to make tag filtered researches in these cases ?
The Vote system : for several months, as I have used all the votes I had, I couldn’t place one on any feature request. This until recently, when I accidentaly hovered my mouse over the vote area in a thread. I then saw that I have again… 2 votes. Thanks a lot for these…
The endless window for the thread list which forbid the use of CTrl+F (quick search). I know, there is a dedicated search function, but still…
Overall, saying that there is room for improvements is an euphemism…
I have used Cubase products in one form or another for 30 years. I used to be a regular visitor, reader and contributor on these forums, but this latest type of forum leaves me cold, so I hardly ever visit now.
Perhaps this was what they intended.
Steinberg have never cried out to provide good support, if any, so why would they want a forum format where it is easy for people to follow all the problems with their products.
I find the new forums a screen real-estate-wasting mess.
At first glance it looks pretty, then you realise how much less actual information you get on each screenful you view.
Oh and this completely condescending voting system.
30 years a user and I am allowed TWO ******* votes!!!
I just assume they don’t value my presence and move on.
I’ll probably spend another 10 minutes in the forums after the next release, whenever that is, just to see if they actually made the product itself stable again?
If you refuse to use this forum the way it is designed and instead try to shoehorn it into how the old forum worked, then yeah your experience will probably suck.
I initially hated this forum, but after a few weeks realized it is orders of magnitude better than the old one
Much easier to effectively search. I’ve yet to run into something like “The term ‘track’ has been omitted from your search results because it is too common” which happened all the time on the old forum
Much easier to post screenshots. On the old forum you either had to 1) post an image as a link or 2) host the image on your own to post the image inline. In all cases a file had to be created. Now no file is needed and posting is as easy as ctrl+C & ctrl+V for an inline image. Because of this way more images are being posted. Which means that problems folks are having are easier to debug when others can see the actual settings instead of just having them described. And on the answering side it is great to visually indicate Controls, Settings, Menus and the like. Overall this makes sharing information both faster and more accurate.
Much easier to scan new messages & responses. On the old forum you had to repeatedly navigate over an arbitrary hierarchy to locate messages that might be of interest. On here after an initial 10 minutes of configuring things to match my interests, everything I want to see is presented to me. The old forum was like staying in a business motel where you had to go down to the lobby for a breakfast buffet with a do-it-yourself waffle maker while the new forum is like hotel room service.
I have heard when the automobile was introduce, many were angry that their buggy whips no longer worked on them.
Touché, @steve . I can almost hear you snickering.
What are you looking to achieve here? Truly?
With this kind of a wise ass reply from a moderator, I have to assume Steinberg is not interested in listening to it’s users, but instead ridicule them.
You do realize that Steve like most of the Mods here does not work for Steinberg and is a fellow Cubase user like you or me volunteering their time to do the mod work.