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Dropzone Site Launch & Bugs Megathread

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13 hours ago, Erroll said:

The new forums do not appear to take me to the first unread post in a thread, as before. They all point to the first post in a thread.

It seems like everything I read before the change over is now 'forgotten'. Clicking on the blue dot goes to the first post in the thread.

 The only 'go to latest post' that work correctly are the ones that I've read since the change. 

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21 hours ago, Meso said:

Clicking on the blue dot on the left of a forum post will take you to the latest unread post. Clicking on the date on the right of a forum post listing, under the user icon will take you to the latest post.

Thanks. Works a charm.

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Four points to correct, for now:

1. Far too much space between each forum on the main forum listings page on desktop. It is 4 full screen heights to go from top to the bottom of the page. That's a lot of scrolling. The number of topics and posts should be on one line, and the massive amount of white space above and below the forum name should be reduced significantly. 

2. Please bring the red numbers showing how many unread threads and unread posts are in each forum. This was one of the MOST useful features. You only entered the forum ONLY if you saw it is worth the time (enough unread content) .

image.png.23f966a4d16617388e198907cfd987c9.png

 

3. I cannot edit my own classifieds (which were moved over from the old website). There is no EDIT button.

 

4. When you try to edit your profile, many dropdowns have no options (like Container selection).

 

B.

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After some very light nights last week and into the weekend to get this site going, I'm back in the office this morning and will be spending this week going through all this suggestions and feedback posts and doing what I can to resolve them as quick as possible. Some of the items mentioned above are able to be resolved fairly easily, while others may take a bit longer. I will however post updates in response to certain reports and feedback. 

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On 1/18/2019 at 3:15 AM, Bluefox said:

Bug Description: Not able to post new classified ads.
URL that it occurred: Classifieds, Submit an advert
Time of occurrence: Today 1/17/19 8:14 EST
Action being performed (where relevant): When you try to post a new classified ad you can't because the image file will not upload. I tried browsing, drag and drop etc but the file won't show up/up load. An image is required to submit an advert and since the new website won't accept an image no new adverts can be posted.

Thanks for your help and the new site is looking great.

Thankfully this has been resolved as of Friday night, and ads should be able to post without issue.

 

On 1/18/2019 at 6:56 PM, mbohu said:

One of my favorite features of the Forum was the list on the bottom of every Forum page, which showed the 10 most recently added-to Forum topics, independent of which category they were coming from. If your current system has the capability to add this feature back in, I think it would be a great one to add. 

Is it essential that it exists on every forum category? This can be done, but don't want to add extra content where not necessary. We've added this back to the main forum page. If you go to the primary forum landing page, you can see that the bottom of the forums will now show the latest 10 posts from across the forums.
 

On 1/18/2019 at 11:47 PM, meat.missile said:

1. Why would you make everything so big and clunky? When you upgrade sites you should streamline things. You really should have topics and posts in the same row and different columns. There is also way to much white space. Compared to BASEjumper (please leave it alone) this is worse than it was. 

Big and clunky is a modern design standard. Websites of the early 2000s followed a sense of squeezing everything in together, but with time that style has become seen as a negative user experience. And the modern practices push for more white space and larger, bolder fonts etc. With that said, we realize that the white space in some areas may exceed what is considered a good amount. And we're busy working on adjusting that in places at the moment too. You'll notice that the forum categories are now half the height that they were.
 

On 1/18/2019 at 11:47 PM, meat.missile said:

2. Doesn't even work in internet explorer. 

3. Mobile isn't terrible. At least you can see the descriptions of the forums on mobile.  It is nice you made it mobile friendly but again, the amount of information per inch is so much less than before, very bubbly and lots of white space. 

I wasn't able to see it not working in internet explorer, I did test on mine now before responding and didn't encounter any issues? 

We may actually remove the descriptions from the mobile forum layout so that its neater and more along the lines what what you're after, the amount of information that gets shown on a screen at any single time. Remove the descriptions will make the categories much easier to navigate. Unfortunately some areas are tougher, like the threads. The size is directly related to the amount of info being shown. If we were to drop the info like "Thread starter" and "Date thread was started", it could be streamlined more.
 

On 1/19/2019 at 12:39 AM, husslr187 said:

In classified the text from the previous ad runs into the next one

 

Thanks, this was something that we had issues with pre-launch but thought we had resolved. I'll look into this too.

On 1/19/2019 at 4:15 AM, wan2doit said:

Just went to wind tunnel index - https://www.dropzone.com/forums/forum/47-wind-tunnels/

Had a previous interest in and had commented to the "Canadian laws and wind tunnels thread".

This wind tunnel index page indicated 0 replies to the thread topic. I remembered commenting on it so opened it to see if post was deleted - that was not the case and 3 replies were there that were there b4 shift to new format.

Not end of world - just figured you all may want to know.

Thanks for letting us know, will definitely check this out.

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2 hours ago, markisoke said:

Is it me or is the site just incredible slow (visiting from the Netherlands)

Edit, take a look at this: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=nl&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dropzone.com

We hadn't noticed it being particularly slow in use, we are aware of some images being pulled through larger than they should be. Which we are working on. But running it through benchmarks, the reports definitely aren't good. We'll investigate this and ensure loading times are increased. Thanks

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I was a big user of drop zone.com, but so far this is a big negative change to me, and I suspect usage could drop substantially.

1.  Previously google search sorted through the forum topics well - if you typed “katana vs crossfire” google would link to several dropzone.com discussions, and we could read through lots of views.  Now those links are gone because the site is reogranized, so the google results just produce page errors.  The  site search functions don’t work nearly as well as the google algorithms, as they provide a long list of tangential topics in the search results.

2.  I tried search for “107” which previously brought up, e.g., the katana 107s that are for sale.  Now it seems the search does not work properly within classifieds as I got “no results” although there are some for sale in classified.

3.  It seems awfully slow.

4.  I don’t agree that this new layout is better.  The old one used space more efficiently, while this makes us scroll through more.  The slow speed adds frustration when needing to scroll.  

Sorry to be so negative, but as I said I’m a big fan of the site and hope some of these problems can be resolved.  I’ve seen similar sites in other fields disappear when the design changed.  The loss of links to google searches is a real disappointment as there is an accumulated knowledge from over ten years of forum discussions which is now much much harder to discover.

 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Meso said:

Thankfully this has been resolved as of Friday night, and ads should be able to post without issue.

 

Is it essential that it exists on every forum category? This can be done, but don't want to add extra content where not necessary. We've added this back to the main forum page. If you go to the primary forum landing page, you can see that the bottom of the forums will now show the latest 10 posts from across the forums.
 

Big and clunky is a modern design standard. Websites of the early 2000s followed a sense of squeezing everything in together, but with time that style has become seen as a negative user experience. And the modern practices push for more white space and larger, bolder fonts etc. With that said, we realize that the white space in some areas may exceed what is considered a good amount. And we're busy working on adjusting that in places at the moment too. You'll notice that the forum categories are now half the height that they were.
 

I wasn't able to see it not working in internet explorer, I did test on mine now before responding and didn't encounter any issues? 

We may actually remove the descriptions from the mobile forum layout so that its neater and more along the lines what what you're after, the amount of information that gets shown on a screen at any single time. Remove the descriptions will make the categories much easier to navigate. Unfortunately some areas are tougher, like the threads. The size is directly related to the amount of info being shown. If we were to drop the info like "Thread starter" and "Date thread was started", it could be streamlined more.
 

Thanks, this was something that we had issues with pre-launch but thought we had resolved. I'll look into this too.

Thanks for letting us know, will definitely check this out.

Credit where it is due. The new changes to the layout are much much better on desktop and mobile. 

On mobile we don't really need to know how many views and replies there are. It would be more useful to see when the last reply was so we know it is new. Even then, the blue dot is a good enough indicator that there is a new post. 

As for IE I cant comment, it may just be a difference in configurations.

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(edited)

Some good things in here, thanks.  FWIW I'm also in the "too much whitespace" camp.

When I sign out, it does appear to sign me out but I don't return to the default page, i.e. index.html.  Instead I remain on the page I was viewing when I logged out.  I tried the Back button and it worked as expected, i.e. it didn't automatically go to a cached page where I was logged in.

ETA: If I log out from viewing my profile, the profile is still visible even though I can no longer edit it.  This is a (mild) security concern.

I've also noticed very slow response.

Edited by TangBu

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1 hour ago, skydiverek said:

I agree, same here. Loads forever !

 

I note the same. I’ve used the site on desktop, mobile phone and tablet since the inception of the new site. All devices are fewer than 24 months old and are up to date on operating systems.

On the iPad, and the windows computer, each time I click on a link, the secure site padlock disappears, there then follows a pause of a few or up to twenty seconds, and the ‘secure’ padlock reappears. As soon as the padlock appears, service is normally quick. 

I also miss the ‘how many new posts’ red number. That was the most useful part of the old presentation format in my opinion / usage.

Many thanks for the effort put in to this. 

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I'll be responding to everything in more detail a bit later, but for now I just want to say that we're aware of the loading time issues and we're looking at ways to resolve this as a priority. 

And many of the feedback issues provided are things that will be worked on, if you're finding the site harder to use, don't worry we're going to still use your feedback to fix most of those issues, this isn't the final product by any means. But we needed to go live to receive this kind of feedback from you guys to make the small little changes that us developers may have missed.

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