Now, regardless of the browser, you can't edit your own initial post. Instead a BLANK forum comes up instead of the post to edit!
In IE once you click away from the editor, you can longer click back and get focus. All formatting is stripped, etc. Guys... really get your heads out of your backsides and ditch this piece of crap for a real forum. It is jaw dropping how much work has gone into this and how bad it is (and continues to be). A lovingly spit shinned turd is still a turd that needs to be flushed, not given more attention and polish.
Great but when is the rest of it going to get fixed? Honestly, you guys have been talking about it for over 2 years. This forum is really really bad, easily the worst forum that I have ever used, and that is being kind. It was bad even when it was cross browser compatible, but now it barely works in any browser. Couple that with the useless search and it is no wonder that there is so little traffic here.
Can we at least get a post date be returned with search results? Is that not a simple enough request?
Just regarding a post date with search results – have you checked the issue tracker for ans issue regarding this? If it's not there, I highly suggest you create it and people (even yourself, if so inclined) will be able to add a pull-request with the improvement.
Most folks (in any project) don't want anything to do with the issue tracker. The majority of users are NOT backend developers and don't want anything to do with the actual process. In my opinion, one of the major flaws in this project is HQ assuming that all users WILL or WANT TO participate in the issue tracker and "vote up" bugs and features. Most folks assume that they can report in issue in the BUG FORUM or request a feature in a DEVELOPERS FORUM and that a member of the coding team will takeover from there.
In context to the comment above, why in the world should somebody have to go through the trouble of creating an issue for a search feature that should have been in place since day 1? There has been talk for over 2 years about improving this forum and much of that talk has been about the Search and the EDITOR and neither get better. In fact they are worse today then they were a year ago.
In my opinion, there are a whole lot of you with your heads buried deep in the sand. This forum is outright terrible, in fact it really can't get much worse. It is an albatross hanging around the neck of the entire Umbraco Project. At least a year ago several key members of HQ admitted how bad it was and promissed fixes... so much for that I suppose.
Lastly,
The email address I use here at our.umbraco is not visible here but coinciding with my complaints I have started to get OPTED IN to numerous SPAM offerings at that address. Clearly one of the site admins here needs to GTFU. The childishness is sad.
@William Dates added to the search. I STRONGLY resent the implication that any of us would give your email address to spammers just because you think we hate you for voicing your opinion.
I will take the tone and people on this forum (save for a select few posts) any day over what's on e.g. StackOverflow these days. The quality of the software just doesn't count for me, as much as the quality of the experience for someone with a real problem asking a question, and even if it's the 100th time that question's been asked, *no one* takes the "Oh come on, do a search before asking such a simple question..." path; instead, there will most likely be more than a couple useful answers. This makes the Our forums (and the community) very special.
That doesn't mean the software shouldn't be improved when something's wrong - but the likelihood of bugs getting fixed is vastly increased by having them reported on the tracker. Yes, someone could be monitoring the various forums for potential bug "reports" and log them, and maybe that's something someone will volunteer to do, who knows?
It has been discussed to try using the StackOverflow/-Exhange engine but there were some serious licensing issues with doing that, which made it impractical.
In my honest opinion the forum is not "good enough" as evidenced partly be the lack of participation and comments from numerous peers I have sent here in hopes they would adopt Umbraco. Yes, I like Umbraco so much that I have attempted to introduce it to numerous peers over the past 4 years. Not a single one has adopted the platform. Primary reason: The state of this forum and the scattered and disorganized documentation. Umbraco is a very (EXTREMELY) frustrating experience to those who are not comfortably nestled into the entire project and looking from the inside out.
Christian:
Yes, the folks here are extremely kind, and those that can help do. As for "search first" comments on other forums, they drive me insane as well. If you do a bit of digging, you will find that I have contributed well over 10,000 posts on a popular reef aquaria forum, almost ALL of them in the spirit of helping others in the hobby. I answer the same questions hundreds of times in the forum and via private message and email, all in the spirit of helping others.
I use Umbraco and like the product. I have no personal resentment or dislike for any member of this forum or the project. It is simply my opinion that regardless of the hard work, brilliant talent, and good (best) intentions, that the management of the project (and the "our" experience) needs some serious restructuring.
This site is extremely critical to the survival of Umbraco and (in my opinion) rolling our own "forum" is an enormous waste of time and resources that could be devoted to improving many aspects of the Umbraco experience. I get the spririt of wanting to build the site ON Umbraco but at some point we have to realize that the resources could be much better used elsewhere.
Would it really be heracy to use vBulletin as the backbone of the forum?
Think about the collossal wast of time it would be if we would have to set up a PHP server, learn and configure vBulletin, migrate everything over, integrate that somehow with the downloads / releases section, the event calendar, the wiki, the documentation section. No thank you.
Now, we're alway open to constructive criticism, but just harping on about how bad you this forum is for you is not very helpful.
We've discussed multiple times to use a different engine but always came to the conclusion that it would be "an enormous waste of time and resources". We're not building this site on Umbraco for the sake of building it on Umbraco. We're building it on Umbraco because we know Umbraco inside out and it is the least waste of time and resources.
Again, if you have constuctive suggestions for improvement that do not involve changing to different forum software, we're happy to listen and improve. One step at a time.
My goal here (as usual) is to get the attention of those who can make a difference. I have no interest in a personal fight, nor have I have staked my opinion on logical fallacy. Attempting to portray my comments as being fallacy based simply to dismiss the concerns I have articulated, is frustrating at best.
RE: You have been where I am, but less frustrated:
The difference between where we are looking from is key. You are somewhat "on the inside" now and therefore (likely) have a much different perspective for this project. From this side of the the fence the "issues" are starting to pile up and things like the broken editors here and in Umbraco are starting to fester. The inability to get expected search results and the ever broken U spell checker and fragmented documentation, mind numbingly painful upgrades, etc. are all starting to blur together into a very frustratintg experience. Yes, I was "where you were" a few years ago, but my frustration has continued to mount, as has that of many others.
I also find this forum to be very clunky to use. I think a lot of Umbraco users put up with it because we have to - there isn't an alternative, although I'm seeing lots more posts about Umbraco appearing on Stack Overflow these days. Considering that the friendly Umbraco community is a big selling point of Umbraco, then a full featured professional forum would be a good way to bring this community together even more. Don't get me wrong, I love Umbraco and I think the team are doing a great job, and I realise it would take a lot of time & resources to migrate to another platform. Just giving my 2 cents.
While this may be "open source" software, a reasonably large portion of the user-base likely wants nothing to do with the actual process of software development. They are likely to contribute help in the forum when they can and post bug reports to the FORUM, but avoid the issue tracker and other direct participation in the project. They do so with the assumption that their forum reported bugs will be prioritized and fixed by the "team" of folks tasked with doing so.
Giving the user-base access to the development tools (Issue tracker, source control, etc.) and encouraging participation is commendable, necessary and a wonderful aspect of this project. It gives those capable of and interested in direct participation the means to do just that. The serious error (fatal flaw) here is treating the entire user-base as participating developers and building the work flow and public interface to appeal to that mindset and declaring it "good enough". From a dedicated open source developers perspective, "our" is good enough. From the casual adopters perspective, it is an enormous and frustrating time sink. I can't stress this point enough so I will repeat it:
To those on the inside, those who enjoy software development and/or navigating the open source "rabbit hole" things are fine. To the rest of us, the documentation is incomplete and scattered, the forum is cumbersome, and installing and upgrading Umbraco is a nightmare.
Is the goal here to cater only to hardcore open source fans or is to build a product with widespread acceptance and appeal that is easy for any developer to adopt and use? If it is the later, then I suggest some serious paradigm shift with "our" and the basic way in which Umbraco development is manages and presented to the public..
As much as many of us love Umbraco, the warts just won't go away and are in fact spreading becuasbecause in control refuse to admit they are warts to begin with.
Charles:
I don't have the slightest desire, skill or time to devote to coding forum software. That fact does nothing to negate my right to offer feedback, request features or comment on the direction of the project. I participate by using the product, offering feedback to help better the product, attempting to encourage others to use the product and participating in the "community" with the time and skill that I can offer. Your comment is useles.
You are correct, I have done a lot of "complaining" and have a right to do so. The purpose of my posts is to drive improvement to the site and the project. The only purpose of your posts here has been to offer sarcasm and take personal swipes at me. You don't need to take my "valuable feedback", but the adult thing to do would be to ignore it if the only responses you are capable of are childish personal jabs that do nothing to further the converstion.
1. Christian mentioned stackoverflow me and Matt Braislford have a running joke about posting on there how we are scared to do it. Most of the time its been a very negative experience
3. I recently started working with EPIServer so have the privledge of being a newbie not had that in a long time. I have got a few posts on http://world.episerver.com/ still waiting for replies for basic queries. We are currently paying a third party agency for some hand holding. Have been very frustrated at lack of response currently trying to fix a simple search issue (its also lucene which i know like the back of my hand ;-} ) so I can understand where your coming from to a certain extent. Having spent some time with the Core and other MVPS and leading contributors on the project I can say they contribute becuase they love it. Its not about the money just passion of being involved in something awesome. There is only so many hours in the day and only so much the guys can do. At the retreat a study was made of our with suggested improvements see https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u7nz11yd3bmime/42084%20-%20Team%202%20-%20Umbraco%20analysis.pdf yes they have been talks about it etc etc but i have seen many improvements over the years
My other take on this is I am getting an awesome product and top notch support for free you may disagree but there is my five pence worth.
This forum is freaking terrible...
I see we now have "mark as spam" and what appears to be some work on the forum.
Now, regardless of the browser, you can't edit your own initial post. Instead a BLANK forum comes up instead of the post to edit!
In IE once you click away from the editor, you can longer click back and get focus. All formatting is stripped, etc. Guys... really get your heads out of your backsides and ditch this piece of crap for a real forum. It is jaw dropping how much work has gone into this and how bad it is (and continues to be). A lovingly spit shinned turd is still a turd that needs to be flushed, not given more attention and polish.
Oops, only admins were supposed to get that button, thanks for letting us know, fixed! :-)
Sebastiaan...
Great but when is the rest of it going to get fixed? Honestly, you guys have been talking about it for over 2 years. This forum is really really bad, easily the worst forum that I have ever used, and that is being kind. It was bad even when it was cross browser compatible, but now it barely works in any browser. Couple that with the useless search and it is no wonder that there is so little traffic here.
Can we at least get a post date be returned with search results? Is that not a simple enough request?
Hi William,
Just regarding a post date with search results – have you checked the issue tracker for ans issue regarding this? If it's not there, I highly suggest you create it and people (even yourself, if so inclined) will be able to add a pull-request with the improvement.
/Chriztian
Chriztian:
Most folks (in any project) don't want anything to do with the issue tracker. The majority of users are NOT backend developers and don't want anything to do with the actual process. In my opinion, one of the major flaws in this project is HQ assuming that all users WILL or WANT TO participate in the issue tracker and "vote up" bugs and features. Most folks assume that they can report in issue in the BUG FORUM or request a feature in a DEVELOPERS FORUM and that a member of the coding team will takeover from there.
In context to the comment above, why in the world should somebody have to go through the trouble of creating an issue for a search feature that should have been in place since day 1? There has been talk for over 2 years about improving this forum and much of that talk has been about the Search and the EDITOR and neither get better. In fact they are worse today then they were a year ago.
In my opinion, there are a whole lot of you with your heads buried deep in the sand. This forum is outright terrible, in fact it really can't get much worse. It is an albatross hanging around the neck of the entire Umbraco Project. At least a year ago several key members of HQ admitted how bad it was and promissed fixes... so much for that I suppose.
Lastly,
The email address I use here at our.umbraco is not visible here but coinciding with my complaints I have started to get OPTED IN to numerous SPAM offerings at that address. Clearly one of the site admins here needs to GTFU. The childishness is sad.
@William Dates added to the search. I STRONGLY resent the implication that any of us would give your email address to spammers just because you think we hate you for voicing your opinion.
The current forum is not great, but it's good enough. We're improving it slowly and I don't understand how you could think the search is worse than a year ago, these are the improvements we made a few months ago: http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2013/2/8/our-umbraco-has-had-an-update.aspx
Hi William,
I will take the tone and people on this forum (save for a select few posts) any day over what's on e.g. StackOverflow these days. The quality of the software just doesn't count for me, as much as the quality of the experience for someone with a real problem asking a question, and even if it's the 100th time that question's been asked, *no one* takes the "Oh come on, do a search before asking such a simple question..." path; instead, there will most likely be more than a couple useful answers. This makes the Our forums (and the community) very special.
That doesn't mean the software shouldn't be improved when something's wrong - but the likelihood of bugs getting fixed is vastly increased by having them reported on the tracker. Yes, someone could be monitoring the various forums for potential bug "reports" and log them, and maybe that's something someone will volunteer to do, who knows?
It has been discussed to try using the StackOverflow/-Exhange engine but there were some serious licensing issues with doing that, which made it impractical.
/Chriztian
Sebastiann:
In my honest opinion the forum is not "good enough" as evidenced partly be the lack of participation and comments from numerous peers I have sent here in hopes they would adopt Umbraco. Yes, I like Umbraco so much that I have attempted to introduce it to numerous peers over the past 4 years. Not a single one has adopted the platform. Primary reason: The state of this forum and the scattered and disorganized documentation. Umbraco is a very (EXTREMELY) frustrating experience to those who are not comfortably nestled into the entire project and looking from the inside out.
Christian:
Yes, the folks here are extremely kind, and those that can help do. As for "search first" comments on other forums, they drive me insane as well. If you do a bit of digging, you will find that I have contributed well over 10,000 posts on a popular reef aquaria forum, almost ALL of them in the spirit of helping others in the hobby. I answer the same questions hundreds of times in the forum and via private message and email, all in the spirit of helping others.
I use Umbraco and like the product. I have no personal resentment or dislike for any member of this forum or the project. It is simply my opinion that regardless of the hard work, brilliant talent, and good (best) intentions, that the management of the project (and the "our" experience) needs some serious restructuring.
This site is extremely critical to the survival of Umbraco and (in my opinion) rolling our own "forum" is an enormous waste of time and resources that could be devoted to improving many aspects of the Umbraco experience. I get the spririt of wanting to build the site ON Umbraco but at some point we have to realize that the resources could be much better used elsewhere.
Would it really be heracy to use vBulletin as the backbone of the forum?
@William So far you've committed some logical fallacies:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/special-pleading
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/loaded-question
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope
And probably some more of them.
Think about the collossal wast of time it would be if we would have to set up a PHP server, learn and configure vBulletin, migrate everything over, integrate that somehow with the downloads / releases section, the event calendar, the wiki, the documentation section. No thank you.
Now, we're alway open to constructive criticism, but just harping on about how bad you this forum is for you is not very helpful.
We've discussed multiple times to use a different engine but always came to the conclusion that it would be "an enormous waste of time and resources". We're not building this site on Umbraco for the sake of building it on Umbraco. We're building it on Umbraco because we know Umbraco inside out and it is the least waste of time and resources.
Look at this list, many things have been implemented either by us or by community contributions: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/ourumb-dev-forum/features/36858-How-would-you-improve-ONE-thing-on-Our
Oh and: I've been where you are, just less frustrated: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/ourumb-dev-forum/features/9161-Here
Again, if you have constuctive suggestions for improvement that do not involve changing to different forum software, we're happy to listen and improve. One step at a time.
Editing a topic should now be fixed.
Sebastiaan...
My goal here (as usual) is to get the attention of those who can make a difference. I have no interest in a personal fight, nor have I have staked my opinion on logical fallacy. Attempting to portray my comments as being fallacy based simply to dismiss the concerns I have articulated, is frustrating at best.
RE: You have been where I am, but less frustrated:
The difference between where we are looking from is key. You are somewhat "on the inside" now and therefore (likely) have a much different perspective for this project. From this side of the the fence the "issues" are starting to pile up and things like the broken editors here and in Umbraco are starting to fester. The inability to get expected search results and the ever broken U spell checker and fragmented documentation, mind numbingly painful upgrades, etc. are all starting to blur together into a very frustratintg experience. Yes, I was "where you were" a few years ago, but my frustration has continued to mount, as has that of many others.
Okay. Well, as I said, I look forward to your bug reports.
I also find this forum to be very clunky to use. I think a lot of Umbraco users put up with it because we have to - there isn't an alternative, although I'm seeing lots more posts about Umbraco appearing on Stack Overflow these days. Considering that the friendly Umbraco community is a big selling point of Umbraco, then a full featured professional forum would be a good way to bring this community together even more. Don't get me wrong, I love Umbraco and I think the team are doing a great job, and I realise it would take a lot of time & resources to migrate to another platform. Just giving my 2 cents.
Sorry for butting in here guys, but Will if you want a polished forum, Get a laptop. Grab a clone of source from
https://github.com/umbraco/OurUmbraco
and start polishing :).
While this may be "open source" software, a reasonably large portion of the user-base likely wants nothing to do with the actual process of software development. They are likely to contribute help in the forum when they can and post bug reports to the FORUM, but avoid the issue tracker and other direct participation in the project. They do so with the assumption that their forum reported bugs will be prioritized and fixed by the "team" of folks tasked with doing so.
Giving the user-base access to the development tools (Issue tracker, source control, etc.) and encouraging participation is commendable, necessary and a wonderful aspect of this project. It gives those capable of and interested in direct participation the means to do just that. The serious error (fatal flaw) here is treating the entire user-base as participating developers and building the work flow and public interface to appeal to that mindset and declaring it "good enough". From a dedicated open source developers perspective, "our" is good enough. From the casual adopters perspective, it is an enormous and frustrating time sink. I can't stress this point enough so I will repeat it:
To those on the inside, those who enjoy software development and/or navigating the open source "rabbit hole" things are fine. To the rest of us, the documentation is incomplete and scattered, the forum is cumbersome, and installing and upgrading Umbraco is a nightmare.
Is the goal here to cater only to hardcore open source fans or is to build a product with widespread acceptance and appeal that is easy for any developer to adopt and use? If it is the later, then I suggest some serious paradigm shift with "our" and the basic way in which Umbraco development is manages and presented to the public..
As much as many of us love Umbraco, the warts just won't go away and are in fact spreading becuasbecause in control refuse to admit they are warts to begin with.
Charles:
I don't have the slightest desire, skill or time to devote to coding forum software. That fact does nothing to negate my right to offer feedback, request features or comment on the direction of the project. I participate by using the product, offering feedback to help better the product, attempting to encourage others to use the product and participating in the "community" with the time and skill that I can offer. Your comment is useles.
Charles,
You are correct, I have done a lot of "complaining" and have a right to do so. The purpose of my posts is to drive improvement to the site and the project. The only purpose of your posts here has been to offer sarcasm and take personal swipes at me. You don't need to take my "valuable feedback", but the adult thing to do would be to ignore it if the only responses you are capable of are childish personal jabs that do nothing to further the converstion.
William,
Just a couple points i would like to make:
1. Christian mentioned stackoverflow me and Matt Braislford have a running joke about posting on there how we are scared to do it. Most of the time its been a very negative experience
2. My newbie colleague Jordan only yesterday posted for the first time he was amazed he got a working answer within minitues see http://our.umbraco.org/forum/developers/razor/43492-Cannot-set-class-on-form-using-HtmlBeginUmbracoForm-in-MVC
3. I recently started working with EPIServer so have the privledge of being a newbie not had that in a long time. I have got a few posts on http://world.episerver.com/ still waiting for replies for basic queries. We are currently paying a third party agency for some hand holding. Have been very frustrated at lack of response currently trying to fix a simple search issue (its also lucene which i know like the back of my hand ;-} ) so I can understand where your coming from to a certain extent. Having spent some time with the Core and other MVPS and leading contributors on the project I can say they contribute becuase they love it. Its not about the money just passion of being involved in something awesome. There is only so many hours in the day and only so much the guys can do. At the retreat a study was made of our with suggested improvements see https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u7nz11yd3bmime/42084%20-%20Team%202%20-%20Umbraco%20analysis.pdf yes they have been talks about it etc etc but i have seen many improvements over the years
My other take on this is I am getting an awesome product and top notch support for free you may disagree but there is my five pence worth.
Regards
Ismail
is working on a reply...