Imported data & sidebar changes!

Last night we imported all posts and comments from the old forum into our new format. It's all fully searchable and readable. Check it out and let us know what you think!

In addition, we removed a sidebar and expanded the size of the main content area.

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anthony_34093

I much prefer the expanded content area.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Great to hear!

anthony_34093

Many of the pictures from the Supper Club thread seem to be gone. To be honest, its challenging to read through the larger threads like that one in this format also.

Brandon_34695

Could you follow me to topics I posted on in the past? It might be asking too much, but searching for all the threads I care about and finding out if they have activity is a lot more difficult in the new forum.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Yes - this is an issue that we're actively working on - when relevance is fixed and relevant posts (this includes things like posts where a recent comment has been made, etc.) are floated to the top of the feed, we expect that this will be mitigated. Hang tight.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Good call on the Supper Club thread - we're working on restoring the old data. We'll think about the large thread issue as well. Thanks.

ejf12009

I suspect that this will pass quickly, but my first reaction is that the site now feels unbalanced. There's about the same amount of white space to the left and right of content, but because of the right side bar the actual forum area isn't centered. My screen currently looks like the attached picture; for now it feels a little weird to have the forum confined to the bottom half of the screen and feeling a bit un-anchored since it's neither centered nor left-anchored to a sidebar/navigation pane.

ejf12009

Another comment: while typing the post i just created, text entry was really laggy. That is, when typing quickly there was a noticeable delay between hitting a key and the character appearing. Backspacing was worse, big delay (a second or two) between hitting the key and seeing text disappear.

I'm using Opera on Windows 8 x64

Andrew_Hsu_30145

This is a great point of feedback. Keep it coming. Are you a designer btw?

First, I tried a slightly different design in local development, seen below, and didn't like it as much - it felt too bounded. The plain white background of the original is minimalistic and feels open. Then I "rubber-duck designed" with Grant and realized that a large part of the reason this is happening is something I've been meaning to fix - the right sidebar is meant to stick on the page and not scroll with the flow of the page. When I make that change I suspect things will be better for you. Let me know though.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Ok I just added the sidebar fix - let me know how you feel about it now!

ejf12009

No, absolutely not a designer! Let's go with aspiring applied mathematician. So don't trust anything I say about web design, for sure.

As expected, the website feels a little more natural now. Especially after scrolling down past the top image logo: then the forum text area takes up more screen even though it's no wider. And for some reason it feels easier to just focus on the grey area containing text when it runs top to bottom of screen.

I'm not sure how I feel about the sidebar staying with you as you scroll. It's good that the create new post button is there, but it almost feels too sparse. My first though was it should be as 'tall' as the screen, but beyond that being resolution dependent I no longer think that'd look good. But maybe a few navigation links (to the forum sections) instead of the featured recipe* would help.

*I love ChefSteps recipes as much - probably more - than the next guy, but this does seem like a weird place for a picture recipe link. But again, see above about me not knowing anything about design.

Anyway, keep up the good work! I'm enjoying the new forum.

Brandon_34695

Searching for "what's for" yields results, but not all of them, searching for "for dinner" finds the right thread, searching "what's for dinner" has 0 results. In Safari beta and Chrome, at least.

Thanks for your help!

Brendan_Lee_56950

How will things like the "whats for dinner" thread work in this new forum style? will each post that we would have usually put in that thread become it's own individual thread or will there be a way to easily access a longstanding thread to add to it?

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Will investigate. Thanks for the report.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Good question - we've imported all the data from the old forum and giant posts like What's For Dinner are still accessible and readable. As we've made the design decision of having nested comments and replies in the new community, we faced a challenge in how to import such giant threads and keep them readable, while keeping the technical side of things maintainable.

We ended up deciding to do 3 things:

1. Paginate giant threads

2. Import comments in reverse chronological order, namely newer posts up top.

3. Remove the Hot/New sort order options for imported posts, and default to "New", so that any new top-level comments would appear on top and maintain order.

You’ll still be able to reply and all threads will still be searchable, accessible, and linkable.

There's no magic bullet, and we acknowledge that for some of the very large old threads, this can lead to some amount of confusion on following the flow of the conversation. However, there actually aren't very many big threads and it's a bit of an edge case.

With the new design and software will come new modes of participation, and our goal is to lower the barrier to posting and commenting and get more of the community out of 'lurker mode.' Practically, we're hoping this will lead to posts and comments moving forward being shorter and more frequent, while still maintaining the level of depth and quality that ChefSteps is known for.

The truth of the matter is that we're still experimenting with the new community and it's all one big exciting experiment that we're thankful you're a part of. Your feedback is vital to this process so keep it coming!

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Ok, I just fixed this. Thanks again. For those interested, the problem was that a few hundred imported posts had the wrong type of apostrophe (encoding issue), so the search wasn't matching properly.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Yeah I share your view that the sidebar feels a bit sparse. We're going to probably figure out some more useful things to put on there. The 'Featured Recipe' is sort of a placeholder.

Brendan_Lee_56950

I get a "NEW" badge on a post even when I'm the one who added the comment to said post.