The continuing adventures of updating the Touch Site

Czarcasm

Adyx wrote: »

If there really is such a big problem with new users finding their way around, why not take a better leaf from Facebook's book and have an (optional!) tutorial thing that highlights features and explains the functions.

It's been a problem every week for years apparently, which was taken no account of when they were redesigning the site over, erm, the last year or so-

Dav wrote: »

Every week for years we have been getting emails from people wondering how to create a thread (despite that very obvious "NEW THREAD" button on every forum) because they simply don't understand that this is a much more structured site than they're used to.

Speaks volumes in itself really.

Boards.ie: Danny

Czarcasm wrote: »

Danny I'm not picking at you specifically, I know yourself, Ronan and the rest of your team do some sterling work in the background on this site, but known bugs need to be sorted first before implementing new features, otherwise you're just pasting over the cracks in the site and the whole thing ends up lacking any cohesive structure, then good luck tracing back the source of the issue because the site code looks so messy from all the chopping and changing that's been going on around here lately.

Hey Czarcasm,

Recently I've been taking a back seat in feedback and letting things run their course but since you're addressing me I think it's only right I respond.

Since January we have rewritten the touch site codebase from the ground up. We have re-used very little of what ran the touch site before then. We've done this to allow for easier prototyping of new features and to consolidate our code bases across the entire offering - Touch, Talk-To and in the future the main site. We're acutely aware about how some software principles need to be adhered to so we don't end up with an unsustainable code mess - our case in point is vBulletin; it is a mess and has been for years with no forethought gone into many features. We don't want that in the future.

When you work in software your dream is to create perfect software. To have an issue tracker with no issues. I would love to get that issue list down to zero. The reality is that we don't have time for this, nor do a lot of software teams. There are all sorts of other factors involved in software - business pressures, time pressures, development resource pressures etc that when it comes down to it you're looking at 'good enough' software. Good enough is not bad but it's not perfect either; it has issues. The high priority issues get resolved as soon and as best as we can, often taking a team member out of the development cycle while it's resolved.

I've just checked now and we have 14 open issues on our touch site that will directly affect the user experience. Many of them are feature requests or improvements - better handling for polls with lots of options, a confirmation you're about to delete a private message and displaying thread prefixes. There are only a few high priority bugs - one of them being this one which I spent all Friday working on and will spend a part of tomorrow implementing a solution for. We cannot give the same priority (i.e. stop the development cycle) for a bug that results in a 1 pixel border being skipped on certain buttons or the attachments button not working on a browser that according to Google Analytics accounts for 0.5% of touch site traffic.

In Feedback I find it almost never helps to talk in vague terms so lets get specific. Apart from the back button issue highlighted above what are the bugs on the touch site that make it more difficult to use than the old one? If possible please start threads in Site Development; I've been pushing for quite some time to get code bugs put there where the dev team look most often. Bugs go from Site Dev to our issue tracker and when the development cycle is up for review (or there's a lull in deliverables) the bug list gets reviewed. If you've not spoken up about an issue you're having, or an issue we've marked as resolved in Site Dev is not resolved and you've not said so (and gotten a response from us) then it'll never be fixed.

To address the other posts here posting issues.

Discodog wrote: »

I would prefer Boards to fix old problems first. Email notifications now take me to the main site. Even when they were working they would take me to the first post on Touch.

I reported these problems six months ago.

I have this thread from you back in September 2012. I have marked it as a feature suggestion and provided you some feedback on thread. At no point have you come back to us on that thread to say that it used to work (albeit in a somewhat hampered fashion). You reiterated your request at the start of February 2013, and again I responded telling you that I don't believe our email notifications ever had links to the touch site and that it was not what we were doing i.e. we were busy porting over the existing touch site, and email notification updates were not in the remit. Again you never came back to me to correct me or provide more details. Feel free to update your original thread in Site Development with a correction of my assertion that we never directed users to touch in email notifications. Otherwise you'll be here the next time we launch something on touch with the same problem - help us to help you. If it is a bug then it will go on the issue tracker and will get fixed.

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

I do agree that it would be better to sort the problems first. The infinite loading bug being a particular pain in my ass since the most recent redesign. I don't even see what it offers over the old way of just loading a new page with the content. It even affected this new function when I was testing it out, after selecting the category it wouldn't load the next part. The loading image just kept spinning, the only way to sort it is to reload the page.

Firstly what it offers - a faster user experience. Some benchmarks showed up to 40% reduction in load times between pages during development. It's also a great way to see if inline page loading over AJAX for possible use in the main site. There was a thread on this in Site Development, but as you can see it's been marked as resolved and closed. If this is a persistent issue for you please feel free to make a post in Site Dev, we can re-open the issue in the tracker and get to fixing it. The page numbers missing has only recently come to our attention and is proving very difficult to replicate. It too has a thread in Site Development, please feel free to throw your +1 and any other info you have about it into that thread.

Danny

Czarcasm

Quality post Danny and thanks for the feedback. It gives the community too a better insight into the workings behind boards and like I said, the sterling work that you guys do in the background, under as you mentioned all manner of pressures and constraints.

There's and idea for a feedback thread- Boards Staff AMA

Boards.ie: Danny

Czarcasm wrote: »

Quality post Danny and thanks for the feedback. It gives the community too a better insight into the workings behind boards and like I said, the sterling work that you guys do in the background, under as you mentioned all manner of pressures and constraints.

There's and idea for a feedback thread- Boards Staff AMA

You're very welcome. I'd happily participate but I fear that considering the length of my previous post it'd be just me and Wibbs at the end of the thread, everybody else having gotten TL;DR syndrome back on page 1

Danny

AlmightyCushion

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Firstly what it offers - a faster user experience. Some benchmarks showed up to 40% reduction in load times between pages during development. It's also a great way to see if inline page loading over AJAX for possible use in the main site. There was a thread on this in Site Development, but as you can see it's been marked as resolved and closed. If this is a persistent issue for you please feel free to make a post in Site Dev, we can re-open the issue in the tracker and get to fixing it. The page numbers missing has only recently come to our attention and is proving very difficult to replicate. It too has a thread in Site Development, please feel free to throw your +1 and any other info you have about it into that thread.

Danny

I get that they're faster (it minimises the amount of content you need to load). I'm normally appreciative of anything that decreases load times (the amount of sites that have increased their page load times massively by putting on some facebook widget type thing is ridiculous and pisses me off no end) but not if it sacrifices reliability and this does for me. I'd say about 25+% of inline page loads get stuck. It's gotten to the stage where as soon as I see the loading icon I just hit the refresh button.

As for the page numbers being missing, it happens every time the inline page loading thing loads the posts for me. If the page loads the old fashioned way it's fine, if it uses the inline loading I get no page numbers.

Boards.ie: Danny

Thanks for that, I've re-opened this thread so if you can pop over there with your phone OS and browser name along with their version numbers we can work on getting it resolved for you and the other folks affected by the issues.

Danny