Latest Changes to Dell Community Site

Good work.  Both of the changes you've made remove minor annoyances -- but the forum itself is a great help when I need it.  Thanks.

Don't bother bringing the clouds thing back, it was terrible concept.  Bring back the drop down style of sub categories that the old forum had.  It worked and was easy to navigate, alpha-numberic style listing in a specific order allows for easy navigation.

The avatars should be at the bottom of the page as a click on style typed name tag only.  On the forum page no one needs to see the cute pictograph representation, just a list, if we want to see the individual's pictograph, it will be with their posting and on the "about" page, no need to clutter the forum up.

Good to see that Dell is still listening. 

Darrell_WV

Thanks Sean.  Unfortunately, this notice has quickly gotten buried in the forum with little notice.  Would prefer you to make it a sticky at the top of the "Participate" page.  Also, can you advise solving problem #1, receiving the Sorry/Error page when we first log in and for several posts thereafter.   That is the most aggravating problem of all.

Can you put the previous/next on the bottom as well as being on the top right. When you have scrolled down to read all the threads you have to page back up to get to the previous/next. 

POST #2

All the changes we will end up suggesting will just take us back to what we had, which worked.  Seems like a lot of trouble to go through just to get back to square one.

Europa303

Agree TOP, #1 issue is users getting served with Sorry/Error page. Perodic fixes in the code are being tested this week to improve this situation.

About this blog post, I did a link on the Community Homepage in a text area. Testing out several ways to expose vital communication to all users.

Europa303 Agree TOP, #1 issue is users getting served with Sorry/Error page. Perodic fixes in the code are being tested this week to improve this situation. About this blog post, I did a link on the Community Homepage in a text area. Testing out several ways to expose vital communication to all users.

Great, cannot wait for the "Sorry, there was a problem with your last request!  Please try your request again..." forum error to be fixed, this has been a real aggravation since the first day of the forum.

Bev.

I can usually get rid of this message by deleting all of my cookies, but this is a pain since there are some sites that I need cookies to access (my on-line banking for instance) that I then have to go back and set them back up again.

REMOVE THE STARS, THEY'RE BEING ABUSED.

Just look at this post as an example.

PudgyOne

Lancaster, Pa

Joined on 01/23/2007

Posts: 2,791

Points 5,620

Re: Latest Changes to Dell Community Site

REMOVE THE STARS, THEY'RE BEING ABUSED.

Just look at this post as an example.

Hello Rick,

I don't see this 'thread' as an example of any abuse.

I see that someone felt that certain replies were good, and others were not as good. I don't know where the rules are listed that would lead you to YELL in more than one area of this forum of abuse. But, IMHO from what I have gathered reading though many messages here, someone clicks on a certain number of stars on how they feel about reading a reply or question. Regardless of the reason, anyone is free to 'star' any post at any time. Dell, yourself, nor anyone else, can know why someone gives or withholds stars. Bugbatter herself posted that she was giving herself stars because she felt her answer merited it. :emotion-55:

No rules, or guidelines, with no control are not a good idea. And if someone would get wild hair for good or ill, anyone could take the time and rate any other persons posts, or all of their posts. I does not mean the person getting the stars has anything to do with it, and no one would know who did it unless they complained to a Dell rep and 'bugged' the threads. :emotion-50:

Read back to the very first day this forum opened, and find that I said that the points would not work. I said the the stars were a bad idea, and should be dropped just like they were in one of the last versions of this forum. And I add now, this is true if for no other reason than it made you mad enough to, YELL ABUSE!(yes, all caps is considered yelling and very poor form) all over the forums.

You should also now know that locking replies in a running thread does not prevent someone from quoting you and replying. :emotion-15:

Sean,

Thanks for the good news that Dell will make some positive changes.  Can the advanced search be returned to us as it appeared in the old forum?  It was truly useful and a valuable tool to help us find a specific solution (instead of multitudes of threads only vaguely related by key-words that didn't help someone in a technical bind).

While I've got nothing against change as a whole.

I'd been away for a couple of months, and I come back to try and ask a couple of questions, about a "NEAR" Future purchase of a Studio 15N Laptop?

And I can't find where to post it, or the Linux Forums.

Before it was fairly easy to get around in the site, but now to me at least it's next to imppossible to get past the first page. [:'(]

And these forums really gelped alot when I got my Vostro 1000 about 6 months ago.

Hello,

The new forum format is absolutely and incredibly *awful*. 

It is a complete mess to navigate, the fact that there is now no seperate XPS makes getting support for this premium purchase difficult.

The old Message Forums and community system was one of the things about purchasing a Dell that I loved, the fact that there was an active and responsive message forum community to turn to for issues. The fact that there was a seperate XPS section with relevant information stickied etc. also helped a great deal.

Now with this horrible mish mash of listings and topics it is nearly impossible to find anything worthwhile. 

I have no idea why the message forums were changed, but I can categorically say that I most probably will not be using them in their current form.I'm ..flabbergasted.

Take a look at HP's user forums here : http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board?board.id=HardwareDPC

That's useful, functional and works. Or better yet, just take a look at the old Dell forum system. That was top notch.

I don't know what the idea was for this forum, what the reasons were for changing what worked, but for me:

1) Difficult to Navigate. I need a simple, Threaded message forum with relevant and sensible forum topics to quickly find the information I am looking for, or to post new information.It literally gives me a headache trying to navigate through those individual blog posts/Forum Threads/whatever they are supposed to be.

2) Does not present relevant information when found (Forum posts) in an easily navigable and readable format.

3) Forum topics are too broad making it difficult to find what you're looking for :Bring back the XPS section, the US$5000.00 I paid for my system should be enough to warrant a seperate forum for this 'high end'/'boutique' brand which will have issues that are different from the rest of Dell's lineup. There was information that should be stickied for XPS users that are not relevant to other users. What are you going to do? End up with 20 stickied topics for Laptops/XPS/ Desktop etc. etc. on the forum page? 

4) Dell had one of the best Community Forums of any of the manufacturers, why on earth would one go about radically altering that?? 

I of course came to the forums because I was having problems, and now finding this mish mash of juxtaposed posts and arbitrary information has totally sent my blood pressure through the roof.

Please change the community forums back to a normal, navigable and relevant user interface.

Gel214th

We brought back XPS as a group with a dedicated forum (in addition to a blog, wiki and media gallery). You can access from the community home page under Groups, here is url:

http://en.community.dell.com/groups/xps_club/default.aspx

I just visited the link for HP's forums--while they have improved greatly, just the opposite has occured here.  Amazingly enough, it looks like HP is using the exact search engine criteria that the old Dell forums once employed before we got this ridiculous search box and advanced search that is nowhere nearly as useful as the new HP engine.

Whoever implemented this abomination should be fired--Dell has lost a tremendous amount of goodwill in this debacle and will undoubtedly lose customers as a result of the disregard to their customers.

When buying something as complicated as a PC, the after-service support is as important as the initial purchase--something Dell doesn't understand.