A New Community Site; or Where are all the old forum posts?

We’ve nearly finalized the migration from the Build Forms to this new site. Soon we will take down the old site and redirect traffic here. You can still find all the old posts from the Build Site here and here.

You may have received some a ton of emails about posts you have been involved in on the old site. Our test did not point this “feature” out, so we’re sorry for the “spam”. Please think of it as a stroll through memory lane, my how far we’ve some as the SmartThings Community.

Enjoy!

This will probably be the first, last and only time I say anything negative towards you all.

This new forum is probably the least user friendly I have used. The old one may have been antiquated and had no real direction for posting but it was easy to navigate and familiar to the normal “forum” format.

Don’t care who designed this new forum layout but obviously he/she/they were over ambitious with making a new design and cool bells and whistles that they forgot about end user friendliness. The designers are not the end users, the customer is.

Rant off…

Thank you.

Thanks for your feedback @kg4fku - we agree that this is quite different from other discussion forums. We think it is better and the way things will go. We hope you give it some time. For more on this forum and it’s goals and objectives (apart from SmartThings) I would encourage you to check out Discourse and their meta forum

Some of the beliefs the designers/developers of this system hold are:

Conversations, not pages
Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button?We’ve replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.

Get notifications when mentioned
It’s difficult to have a conversation when you can’t hear anyone. When someone quotes your post, we’ll notify you. When someone mentions your @name, we’ll notify you. When someone replies to your post… well, you get the idea.

Simple, but with context
Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Expandable replies are attached to the bottom and top of each post, so you can discover the fuller context of the conversation – without breaking your flow.

We think people will like other features too, like

  1. Being able to reply from emails
  2. More easily keeping track and seeing what is new and unread since your last visit
  3. Automatically expanding and displaying things such as, social media, github links, and videos (try it, it is cool)
  4. Many more features around replying to specific things and creating new topics from replies
  5. Not to mention the reduction of spam from old forums.

Again, I hope you give this new interface some time and kick the tires a bit.

I think the new forums are Awesome. Great job guys.

I tend to agree with @kg4fku
This forum looks great and good job for that but it’s an amazing pain to navigate. It’s feel like it’s all over the place, which is the last thing a developer need. But I think that if you guys had proper documentation, the forum would be less important and then this user friction would not exist.

The basic feeling is that I needed an easy way to get support as a developer by either adding docs or being able to have this “live” support on a simple forum (ask question/get answer). Instead it feels like you focus on having a pretty forum which doesn’t fix any of my current problem.

Edit: Actually this is a really frustrating experience, I wanted feedback on SmartThings Labs and LAN Devices Which is placed on a Migrated topic. What am I suppose to do? Post a new topic? Are they migrated just for the sake of it? In this case they shouldnt have been migrated at all, it’s adding to the confusion.

@zzarbi We have just launched “proper documentation” yesterday :slight_smile: Hopefully that will help some. I think the content of these forums will continue to self-categorize and get better. We will do a better job of curating these forums as well as the tools for doing so are much better.

The forums are meant to be used by the community, for the community. If you have support questions those are best addressed at the Support Site - where live chat is available.

Yes actually, I just noticed those docs. I can’t wait to look at it more in depth.
Hopefully this will help all of us achieve great things.

Did I miss the announcement that our old logins won’t work?

And I have no idea about whether this new one is better, but unlike some of the complainers above, I really hated the old forum with its false notifications that never led anywhere and many other oddities.

Here’s hoping this one is better.

Everyone’s accounts have been migrated over. Did you have to register a new username?

I have to chime in and point out that the new forum is exceedingly painful. My password was somehow lost, navigation is very hard, the UI is not nearly as clean (your UI for your app is still fantastic, maybe even better; find that guy to help) and the first links in this topic to the old build information are broken…

I hate to sound disrespectful, but this new forum is not at all to the level of excellence that I have thus far seen from you folks.

This link is now fixed. As for the other issues, we are going to continue to improve this site over the coming weeks. Thanks for your feedback.

Can you fix the links in the forum as well? For instance “http://build.smartthings.com/forums/topic/using-z-wave-light-switch-to-turn-on-secondary-outlet-lamp/” is listed in a post, but doesn’t resolve. This should be a simple re-write rule…

We are looking into this. Thanks!

I think it’s great that you guys are using Discourse.

However, I am trying to find the new location for the project page for the ‘Gentle Wake Up’ app. This was the URL on the build site: http://build.smartthings.com/projects/gentlewakeup/

I can’t figure out what the URL for this project is on this new community site. Are there project pages on the new site? Doesn’t seem like it, but I can’t imagine that you would just delete them or remove the entire concept of those pages without mentioning it.

I also looked and searched through the build archive section but was unable to locate the page there.

Thanks!

Projects have not been migrated and I am not sure how we are going to do it. We are looking for ways to provide this content but have not found one yet. Stay tuned.

I just picked up a SmartThings hub to evaluate against my current setup, a Vera Lite that I like but feel like it will never progress any further. This community forum, it pains me to say, is a bit of a disappointment. Overengineered, unnecessarily fancy, and way too much effort to find and follow topics of interest are the first things that come to mind. I see myself coming here only if there is an issue that I absolutely cannot solve on my own and a search for the solution cannot be found at a different website. I really don’t think I’ll be scratching my eyes here just to explore new topics. There are dozens and dozens of tried and true forum packages. Many are free and open source and many have more than a decade of development and refinement behind them. I don’t like to sound so negative, but I also don’t think it does anybody a favor to not be honest.

I have to agree. The site seems clunky, there appears to have been a lot of useful information that has been deleted, and it doesn’t work right on Android (and there is no Tapatalk plugin).

I suppose it provides ST something they want/need, but compared to every other forum I am on, the experience is not good. Stark contrast to the rest of ST’s otherwise stellar support experience.