Community Update 01/07/19

[Simon-J]

Hi Everyone,

Over the weekend we released a number of changes to the Community, here's a quick breakdown of what's changed:

New user menu

- You'll notice that clicking your user avatar right now launches a bigger user menu. The main changes here are that we've moved your notifications and messages into this menu rather than having them as separate icons.

Content search removed from navigation bar

- We'd noticed a number of users were using the content search for community / help related questions, for this reason we've moved the content search icon off the Community page

Archived notification banner

-  We've made it easier to identify when a post or topic has been archived by adding a blue banner to the top of these pages which also includes a link to the active boards

Bug Fixes

- general bug fixes have been deployed across the Community,  these are mainly display issues, font sizes, extra white space on mobile pages etc.

We're working on it:

We know there's a couple of things that might not be working quite right we're working on getting these fixed here's a quick update on a couple:

Community sign in / sign out

You might've noticed some weird behaviour like not being signed into the Community when you're signed into NOWTV.com or vice versa? This is due to an issue with somthing called "single sign-on" put simply this is what links the Community and the rest of the NOW TV site together. This needs a bit of a rebuild, we're in the process of putting all the pieces together and will update you soon.

Emojis, quote, font style etc on mobile 

Currently when posting or replying on mobile you will only be able to enter plain text, this is due to a problem with the new text editor. A bug has been identified and we're waiting for an update from the provider. We'll update this as soon as we hear.

We're always working to fix and improve the Community and we have a number of improvements in the pipeline. Please comment below if you have spotted any bugs you think we've missed or any questions / suggestions.

Thanks

Simon

NOW TV

[RoyB]

@Simon-J 

Thanks for those things.

The most useful change that I would like to see is that the Last Poster, date and time, are also shown on the Recent Activity screen.

And that clicking this, or some part of it, takes you to that posting.

This would be the most enormous timesaver.

[Simon-J]

Hi @RoyB ,

Could you clarify where you mean by the "Recent Activity" screen? Would that be the section under "Category Activity" on Category pages or "Discussions" on board pages?

Thanks

Simon

[Anonymous User]

@Simon-J  @RoyB 

For me it would be this page https://community.nowtv.com/t5/Forums/ct-p/Forums

[RoyB]

@Simon-J @Anonymous User 

Yes, the one as linked to by @Anonymous User 

But I’m new here (still) - what’s a board page? Is this one?

If so, then this at least has Last Posted, but not by whom, and not with a jump link, both of which would make this aspect of the Community more usable.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about on the Vanilla-powered YouView Community - touch/click the date/time on any ‘Last by’ entry to be taken straight to it.

This would transform the usability of, say, @Anonymous User ’s regularly used Box Sets thread, and indeed any long thread to which relevant, or even irrelevant, postings have recently been made.

[Anonymous User]

That Youview site is much more user friendly. Clicking on topics or notifications within the DigitalSpy forum also takes you directly to the last unread post. Unfortunately when clicking on links here you are taken to the beginning of a thread. On the Recent Activity page it would make much more sense to be taken to the most recent posts when clicking on a link.

[Simon-J]

Hi @RoyB ,

So I can finally give you a bit of an update on this.

In the next couple of weeks I'm going to roll out some improvements to the navigation, which include that jump link - there'll be a "latest post" item followed by the date - clicking the date will take you to the newest post in that board, there will also be a count that shows you how many unread posts there are for you personally in that board.

For the time being this will only display on boards (for example "about the community" is classed as a board, which I appreciate isn't that useful. Where it's really needed is on a topic (for example this discussion  is classed as a topic) but right now there's a bug with this affecting some Communities - I know this functionality is really important to all you guys and it is to me too so I'm looking at getting this rebuilt from scratch.