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A set of comments on the new CSC site

Peter Paluch
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Hi everyone,

During the last weekend, CSC has been migrated to a new infrastructure, and there are already some strong opinions about some of its features (or lack thereof). Being a long-time member of CSC, I do not think that dismissive comments about the new infrastructure being plain wrong and putting back the previous version of CSC is a constructive feedback. The team behind CSC had its very good reasons to move to this new infrastructure, and naturally, when our common ways of doing things change, we all feel uncomfortable, me included. But I also know that in IT, things actually can be improved and the CSC team is listening very closely to our opinions and wishes. Just making this immense transition from one infrastructure to another in the course of a single weekend is a feat of IT engineering in itself. So let's simply tell them what we miss. The more agreement and support any constructive feedback gets, the easier it is for the CSC team to justify the improvement to the infrastructure.

So without any hard feelings, these are my comments regarding the new CSC site:

  1. The visual style of the new environment uses a subdued font color in threads - it is not black, rather, it is some sort of gray. Perhaps it's just me and my declining eye vision but I am having troubles reading posts when printed out in this gray. The visual contrast and readability of the text would be much improved if the text was printed out in plain black. Can something be done about this, or - perhaps - could a user be given an option of choosing his/her own simple environment settings including the font color?
  2. The "VIP Endorsed" function seems to be unimplemented yet - I see no button to endorse posts of others.
  3. The "Upload" button to submit a file attachment can be confused with the "Save" button used to submit the entire post. At least in Firefox, the button is placed approximately under the centerline of the editor window, somewhat pushing itself into the user's attention. A user can be tricked to click on the "Upload" button instead of "Save" button when submitting a post. This is not really a problem, more of an inconvenience. My personal suggestion would be to either visually group the "Browse" and "Upload" buttons together, or let the "Upload" button appear only when a particular file is selected for upload.
  4. In individual posts - or better said, responses, the text is wrapped in a curious way - a word at the end of the line is simply cut and continued on the new line. As an example, think of "rec/eives", "wil/l", "a/ddress", "t/he", ... The wrap depends on the font size - if I change the font size, the text expands or shrinks, causing different words to become cut at line breaks.
  5. If multiple people respond to the original post that started a new thread, their posts are displayed in the order from the last responder to the first one. As an example, check this thread: https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12133626/cdp-neighbours - here, Reza responded first, then me, then Julio. Interestingly, the thread starts with Julio's response, then mine, then Reza's. This ordering is reversed to what should be the natural order. I believe the ordering of posts in a thread should follow the timeline, starting with the earliest responses, plus observe the threading.
  6. The new text editor misses most of the advanced features that were available in the previous CSC version:
    1. Elements like tables or horizontal lines are not available.
    2. I can not quote the previous post or a part of it. Sure, I can do copy&paste but there is no visual "Quote" style I could use to highlight the quote.
    3. There is no visual style for configuration snippets or command outputs that require a kind of "Raw source" style (Courier, no stripping of whitespace at the line beginning, no inter-paragraph indentation, etc.).
    4. It is not possible to perform font changes, at least between Arial, Times and Courier. This would also be welcome, as sometimes it is necessary to change the font within a paragraph without using a totally different visual style.
    5. The editor window can not be resized. Clicking on the right bottom corner and dragging it is ignored, although the corner has its "grip" highlighted for this function.
    6. The editor takes inordinately long to load - seconds, sometimes even tens of seconds.
    7. On the other hand, some of the current features, such as "justified" alignment, do not seem to be useful - especially considering the fact that my responses are aligned as "justified" although I have written them using the default of "align left" setting. Is it possible that the alignment applies only to first posts in threads and not to responses?
  7. After entering a particular CSC section from the Directory link (say, "WAN, Routing and Switching"), the list of discussions is not sorted by the date of the latest post (in fact, I do not know according to what key it is sorted - it would seem that the list is sorted by the date of the thread creation). In particular, threads that have just been responded to are not moved to the top of the list. This makes it difficult to track threads you have joined because even if someone else joins the thread, or the original poster reponds, you do not see that the thread has been updated.
  8. I am not sure if the RSS feeds work correctly. In particular, I was looking for an RSS feed that posted a new update each time any thread in a particular section is created or replied to. However, none of the RSS feeds in the new environment appear to provide this functionality. There is a feed called Discussions and another feed called Discussion Messages - I have tried them both but the first one seems to only advertise newly created threads and not their replies (which would be logical), while the second one works in a weird way: if a new thread is created, it displays only the header and an empty body. In addition, it seems that both new threads are their responses are sometimes missed from this feed, i.e. it loses some of new threads or their responses. In addition, it tends to display the entire response body which is overly large.

If anyone agrees/disagrees, or has his/her own set of thoughts and suggestion - please bring them along!

Best regards,
Peter

 

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Daniel Bruhn
Level 8
Level 8

Hi Peter,

We have darkened the font color on the site.  We hope it's a bit easier on the eyes.  More fixes to come.

Cheers,

Dan

Cheers, Dan

View solution in original post

10 Replies 10

Gordon Ross
Level 9
Level 9

I agree with all your comments. You miss the big ticket item of no email notifications, though.

 

Plus here's another one: I followed the link from the RSS feed for this article, and I got the message saying I'd posted the message! See attached.

Please rate all helpful posts.

Hi,

 

In the same way I am also seeing the Correct Answer button for this thread even though I have not started it :)

 

I have to say Peter voiced most of my issues quite better than I did myself on a previous thread. The layout of the different views whether it was inside the discussion or the list of discussion of a certain section of CSC needs some work done to make it more easy on the eyes to read.

- Jouni

Hi Jouni,

Are you still seeing the "Correct Answer" button even if you aren't the author?  We haven't been able to reproduce this.

Thanks,

Dan

Cheers, Dan

Hi Gordon,

I agree with all your comments.

Thank you!

You miss the big ticket item of no email notifications, though.

I am not using them so I did not know there is an issue with them, too. I am spammed enough even without subscribing for e-mail notifications ;)

I followed the link from the RSS feed for this article, and I got the message saying I'd posted the message!

Well, you surely wanted to :-P

Best regards,
Peter

 

Hi all.

In addition to what Peter suggested, I found that VIP Space disappeared from Additional Community and also I was not able to send a private message to my followers.

Just my two cents (for now :) )

 

Regards

 

Carlo

Please rate all helpful posts "The more you help the more you learn"

Gordon Ross
Level 9
Level 9
The count of views on the list of postings doesn't appear to be working on this forum. Apart from the first posting, all postings have a view count of zero.
Please rate all helpful posts.

I see that view counts are starting to increase now...
Please rate all helpful posts.

Daniel Bruhn
Level 8
Level 8

Hi Peter,

We really appreciate the feedback.  Let me address each of comments/suggestions inline below:

  1. The visual style of the new environment uses a subdued font color in threads - it is not black, rather, it is some sort of gray. Perhaps it's just me and my declining eye vision but I am having troubles reading posts when printed out in this gray. The visual contrast and readability of the text would be much improved if the text was printed out in plain black. Can something be done about this, or - perhaps - could a user be given an option of choosing his/her own simple environment settings including the font color? (This has been brought up by a number of users and we agree.  It is on our list to darken the font color)
  2. The "VIP Endorsed" function seems to be unimplemented yet - I see no button to endorse posts of others. (VIP Endorse has now been enabled.  All current VIPs should now be able to endorse content)
  3. The "Upload" button to submit a file attachment can be confused with the "Save" button used to submit the entire post. At least in Firefox, the button is placed approximately under the centerline of the editor window, somewhat pushing itself into the user's attention. A user can be tricked to click on the "Upload" button instead of "Save" button when submitting a post. This is not really a problem, more of an inconvenience. My personal suggestion would be to either visually group the "Browse" and "Upload" buttons together, or let the "Upload" button appear only when a particular file is selected for upload. (I'm having our UE team look into this)
  4. In individual posts - or better said, responses, the text is wrapped in a curious way - a word at the end of the line is simply cut and continued on the new line. As an example, think of "rec/eives", "wil/l", "a/ddress", "t/he", ... The wrap depends on the font size - if I change the font size, the text expands or shrinks, causing different words to become cut at line breaks. (This is a browser specific issue.  We are seeing it on Firefox and it is being addressed.  If you are seeing it on another browswer please let us know)
  5. If multiple people respond to the original post that started a new thread, their posts are displayed in the order from the last responder to the first one. As an example, check this thread:https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12133626/cdp-neighbours - here, Reza responded first, then me, then Julio. Interestingly, the thread starts with Julio's response, then mine, then Reza's. This ordering is reversed to what should be the natural order. I believe the ordering of posts in a thread should follow the timeline, starting with the earliest responses, plus observe the threading. (This is a user preference setting in your profile.  I see yours is currently set to "Display most recent comments/replies first) 
  6. The new text editor misses most of the advanced features that were available in the previous CSC version:
    1. Elements like tables or horizontal lines are not available.
    2. I can not quote the previous post or a part of it. Sure, I can do copy&paste but there is no visual "Quote" style I could use to highlight the quote.
    3. There is no visual style for configuration snippets or command outputs that require a kind of "Raw source" style (Courier, no stripping of whitespace at the line beginning, no inter-paragraph indentation, etc.).
    4. It is not possible to perform font changes, at least between Arial, Times and Courier. This would also be welcome, as sometimes it is necessary to change the font within a paragraph without using a totally different visual style.
    5. The editor window can not be resized. Clicking on the right bottom corner and dragging it is ignored, although the corner has its "grip" highlighted for this function.
    6. The editor takes inordinately long to load - seconds, sometimes even tens of seconds.
    7. On the other hand, some of the current features, such as "justified" alignment, do not seem to be useful - especially considering the fact that my responses are aligned as "justified" although I have written them using the default of "align left" setting. Is it possible that the alignment applies only to first posts in threads and not to responses? (Agreed on all fronts of the current WYSIWYG editor.  We are exploring other editor options)
  7. After entering a particular CSC section from the Directory link (say, "WAN, Routing and Switching"), the list of discussions is not sorted by the date of the latest post (in fact, I do not know according to what key it is sorted - it would seem that the list is sorted by the date of the thread creation). In particular, threads that have just been responded to are not moved to the top of the list. This makes it difficult to track threads you have joined because even if someone else joins the thread, or the original poster reponds, you do not see that the thread has been updated. (The listing page is currently cached and displaying based on time stamp of content creation.  We are working on a fix for it to display based on create or reply timestamp.)
  8. I am not sure if the RSS feeds work correctly. In particular, I was looking for an RSS feed that posted a new update each time any thread in a particular section is created or replied to. However, none of the RSS feeds in the new environment appear to provide this functionality. There is a feed called Discussions and another feed called Discussion Messages - I have tried them both but the first one seems to only advertise newly created threads and not their replies (which would be logical), while the second one works in a weird way: if a new thread is created, it displays only the header and an empty body. In addition, it seems that both new threads are their responses are sometimes missed from this feed, i.e. it loses some of new threads or their responses. In addition, it tends to display the entire response body which is overly large. (Can you please post some screen shots of what you are seeing in the Discussion Messages feed?)

Really appreciate your feedback and hope to have the issues you have identified resolved soon.

 

Thanks,

 

Dan

Cheers, Dan

Daniel Bruhn
Level 8
Level 8

Hi Peter,

We have darkened the font color on the site.  We hope it's a bit easier on the eyes.  More fixes to come.

Cheers,

Dan

Cheers, Dan

Hey Dan,

 

The font color change is a great improvement! Thanks for your continued work on the CSC fixes and for your great support of CSC in general :)

 

Cheers!

Rob

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