I think the forums work well so far (I’m a bit new here). The only thing design-wise that stands out is the post progress thing on the bottom right is a bit of a distracting shade of lime green when you’ve scrolled all the way down, would be fine as a gray and dark gray combo.
Also the “Migrated from Build” category doesn’t make sense (and is even confusing, I initially thought “oh, I migrated my iOS app to build”) to folks who have never used the old forum, it maybe should be called “Archive” or even better we maybe attempt to incorporate them into the new categories.
Thanks for the hard work and continuing to provide a place for us to give feedback and help each other.
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Things are a bit difficult to navigate on mobile (testing this out while I perform a very important after work activity). Category nav gets covered up and titles of posts are missing (it’s only happenstance that I ended up back at this post). Fix those two things and it’s 10x better than forum sites that bug you to install tapatalk, cringe. Thanks again!
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What’s the intended difference between “Third Party Things”, “Connected Things” and “SmartThings Devices” categories? It seems “Connected Things” is the oddball in the group as it technically can be considered either “SmartThings Devices” AND “3rd Party Devices”
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It doesn’t look like the developer area has the same navigation as the rest of the sites. Specifically the Community link is not on the dev site.
Yea we were testing this forum for a while. So those dates are accurate. Also the old dates from older Build forum posts should also be accurate and sometimes be years old.
And also I have bumped you up a user level to be able to post images. Will check the defaults to make sure we aren’t being overly cautious (really should have imported all Build users in with a different status. Will see if I can do that programatically. Thanks!
Like the new and more public forum. Since, like others have pointed out, I have a long history on using/moderating/administering community sites (first one was this one) I have a few suggestions:
Keeping the signal-to-noise ratio tilted toward signal isn’t easy in any public forum. Consider finding helpful people within the community that you can ‘promote’ to a moderator status (and give them something like discounts, a Ben Edwards designed secret room, or some other perk). This will help take the load off of ST staff and accelerate the vibrancy of the forum overall.
I’d love to see the “designer/maker/developer” segmentation continued in some fashion since it will help everyone (especially me) not inadvertently post in an area where I’m clueless, or asking a question that is drop-dead obvious to a class of users.
Have a “How To”, “I Just Don’t Understand…” and/or “Little Help Pleez” area. This will help newbies and intermediate users ask about some process that isn’t crystal clear from documentation, FAQs, or from trolling the forum. Though ensuring an area like this doesn’t devolve in to a semi-replacement for support tickets, these sorts of areas are always very helpful. They can be especially useful for ST staff to learn what processes aren’t clear, what UI tweaks to the ST phone app might be needed, and can even point out “newbie deal-killers” for issues that stop them dead in their tracks when using ST.
Is it possible to have SmartThings employees better identified? I see there is a group called CoreTeam that I assume is where the employees are. However, when reading a thread, you have to click on a profile to see this. Can you guys be better identified - different color name, a block of text after the name that says “SmartThings Employee” etc? I don’t think just putting something in the picture will be enough since the pics are small. It might be helpful to identify employees as they constitute “official” (or, at least, semi-official :)) responses
I find the navigation distracting. I’d rather it not be positioned fixed with the browser despite how “trendy” that is these days. The most distracting “feature” of the nav is the big black bar that animates down every time “All Categories” page (http:http://community.smartthings.com/) is visited.
Please continue to point these out - they are fairly easy to clean up. This one is done and we will look for more as well but don’t wan’t to go back thru posts that have no current value, either. (also many of these example apps are available from inside the IDE (on the right where you Browse SmartApps:
The specific bit you mention “the black bar that animates” was a kluge that we will get to be more elegant. There were some things we weren’t happy with (that was one) but decided to launch anyway rather than wait another day with the old forum. Keep the feedback coming!
Have to say that I much prefer the old forum. It was easy to find what I wanted to read (multiple times a day).
Go back to a linear forum that works like every other major forum online. Put the development time into SmartThings and not having to spend your time trying to figure out the next best way to browse an online forum.
@scottie We appreciate the feedback. We switched to this forum style for a number of reasons. Most had to do with a better way to discuss things on the web today as well as usability improvements. However 2 major reasons we’re 1) we didn’t want to spend time maintaining forum code and features so we could focus all our efforts on our product and 2) we were spending too much time fighting spam and dealing with registration/login issues. So far this forum has vastly improved those two areas even if some of the UI is pretty different from traditional forums.
