Take a minute and tell us what you think! Not more than once.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

I am getting these nagging pop-ups:

       Take a minute and tell us what you think!

Please, I've already told you once, twice, ...

It is time to stop these pop-ups. Note, when we are typing in a message, and your silly pop-up pop's up, the typing goes into the bit bucket. The pop-up is annoying, the loss of text stymies my train of thought, and the pop-ups are an overall bad experience.

Other readers to this thread, please reply with your opinions.

Jim Dempsey

[JohnNichols]

Reminds me of something, but I would rather not say as it is probably not allowed, so I will refer you to Ben Franklin who once said 

“The body of B. Franklin, Printer (Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents torn Out And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be Lost; For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author.”

Or in Australian :  A letter to Intel - please stop. 

[Neels]

I agree, the popups are very annoying and distracting. And it just did so again while typing this!

So far the new forum format has not been a pleasurable experience! I do hope they fix it because as a UX it is a disaster.

[AlHill]

I am using firefox with adblock.  No popups on the new Intel community.

Doc

[kolber__Michael]

I am getting them everyday.

[MaryT_Intel]

Hey guys, cc: @JohnNichols, @Neels , @jimdempseyatthecove 

Thanks for letting me know! I am so sorry about that. I sent this over to my IT partner and our research company to see how we can minimize those pop-ups for you. Believe it or not, I read all that feedback!

I apologize it's not creating a good experience and we'll fix it. Ping me anytime you have suggestions for improvements at intel.community@intel.com and it comes right to me.

Thank you!

Mary T.

Support Community Manager

email: intel.community@intel.com

[JohnNichols]

Mary:

Thank you for your response. 

The main problem is the difficulty in determining what you have read already. 

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

G. K. Chesterton

[Techguy45]

I guess they really really want your feedback. How else are they going to get it.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

>>I guess they really really want your feedback. How else are they going to get it.

Ya, but I am starting to feel like a mamma bird coming back to a nest full of hungry nestlings.

Jim Dempsey

[Neels]

Well, if they want feedback:

1. Whoever they contracted to create the new UX has experience in social forums;

2. They have zero experience in creating a UX for technical forums;

3. On technical forums the single most important thing is to transfer knowledge, real knowledge, not some gossip;

4. Once the technical knowledge has been provided, it must be easily searchable for the next 20 years or more (I stll look at some stuff on the DEC forum when I can find it);

5. Nonsense like "Kudos" etc has no importance and should not clutter the pages;

6. I want to be able to easily return to the main pahe from anywhere in a thread, even if it contains more than a 100 posts and spans a number of pages, having to scroll to the top is not on.

[andrew_4619]

This is starting to do my head in, you get repeatedly prompted for this survey day after day and it asks exactly the same questions if you take the trouble to read it. They are not even very good questions, my answer is neutral to most of them because they are irrelevant to me. You don't even get an option to add any comments.  The whole thing has low value and high annoyance, please please Intel do something about it.

[JohnNichols]

Soemtimes this page does not show the scroll bars and you cannot post 

[MaryT_Intel]

Hey JohnNichols,

Can you send a full screen shot of what the issue is - no scroll bar - to me at intel.community@intel.com? I'll have our team take a look.

Also, can you send pics of this issue: "The main problem is the difficulty in determining what you have read already. "  We'll take a look at improving that too.

As for that annoying survey widget that pops up, we're working on that too. It should only pop out when you click to have it pop-out. But we're working to resolve it so I really appreciate the heads up on that.

Let me know what else can be improved. @Neels , I've also got your #6. added to our list:  

6. I want to be able to easily return to the main page from anywhere in a thread, even if it contains more than a 100 posts and spans a number of pages, having to scroll to the top is not on.

I totally agree on that one. It may already be on our to-do list but I'll add it if not.

Thank you!

Mary T.

Support Community Manager

email: intel.community@intel.com

[jimdempseyatthecove]

This **bleep** pop-up is incessant. It pop-ed up while I was entering my password. just how is that going to provide any meaningful feedback.

[MaryT_Intel]

Hi @jimdempseyatthecove ,

We're working on it! I'm sorry it's taking time to figure it out but it is in process. Please accept my apologies!

Thanks,

Mary T.

Support Community Manager

email: intel.community@intel.com

[mecej4]

Mary T.:

Is it too late to declare a victory for Khoros -- that we have been overpowered by Khoros -- and go back to the older forum software?

In fact, I remember that the even older forum software that was used in 2011 was better in many regards than its two successors.  Why do we need to go through self-flagellation every few years?

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Compuserve is dead, long live Compuserve

(popular forum software in the 1990's)

[Steve_Lionel]

In the 15 years I spent at Intel, we went through this cycle every few years. The old forum software was deemed "unmaintainable", new software was obtained and heavily customized by a team of contractors, all funding for maintenance was cut, and a few years later the current software was deemed "unmaintainable". Lather, rinse, repeat.

The first time this happened, since I had been running the successful forums at DEC/Compaq, and the current IDZ forums had effectively been abandoned, I was brought in to recommend a replacement. I spent months investigating options, based on my experience as a user of many different forum implementations, and made a recommendation - which was ignored - and they never asked me again. 

It wouldn't be so bad if Intel had chosen a well-known and well-supported platform, but no, they kept finding the most obscure and little-used vendors with the worst user interfaces. But I am sure the reporting for management was top-notch. An exception perhaps was the previous system that was done "on the cheap" based on Drupal, a less-common open-source content management system. While it did offer a forum, almost no one used it and it required extensive effort to be at all usable. Drupal has been abandoned, so they needed to find something else. Intel could have chosen one of the industry leaders, such as VBulletin, if they wanted a supported solution, or PHPbb for a VERY popular and customizable open-source solution. I had never heard of or encountered Khoros before.

I don't mean to single out Intel for this - it seems to be a standard corporate failing, and the user forums at many of the larger tech companies are similarly awful. When I was at DEC, they did this with bug tracking systems every few years. Great for management reports, terrible for the people who actually had to use the darn things. (Intel does this too - Jira is the latest offense, and my Twitter-sphere is full of complaints across the industry about Jira.)

[AlHill]

Steve, I have been around a long time as well, and have been on many boards and forums.  Since 2009 when I joined the Intel forums, I have been through five forum upgrades/replacements. 

There are a number of issues on the backend required to support the ICS staff and sales.  While there are certainly better boards out there, interfacing with the backend is not something they do or are concerned with. 

Then, there is the budget, cloudflare, salesforce, spam/virus checker, language translation, etc, and growth in the user community.  The users see none of this.

When I first started with the Intel forums, as a volunteer, we were batteling up to 500 spam per hour to keep the forums usable.  Additionally, back then, Intel was not crazy about having forums.  So, it was a challenge on multiple fronts.  Some good choices were made, and some bad choices were made.

Keeping up-to-date and managing the backend is a very challenging task.  When I read some of the comments about this Khoros system, from veterans and newbies, I am surprised by some of their comments, attitude, and resistance/reluctance to the changes which have to occur.

I have made a couple of comments on issues to help ease the pain of transistion, which seem to have been ignored.  For example, a popup blocker will stop that annoying popup.  I use adblock on Firefox, and I have never seen the popup.  I know Intel would like feedback, but I also do not like to be bothered when posting.

My position, and I am not an employee or contractor, is to give it time.  Two things will happen;  users will adapt, and Mary will make progress with modifications and fixes.

Doc

[Steve_Lionel]

Al, thanks for your comments. I too have not seen the popup discussed here, but I don't consider that as forum-related. I have a general problem with being asked to take a survey for every single transaction I have with a business, but that's life right now.

I've been around forums since the mid-70s, and currently run several out on the net. In my view the biggest problem is the perception that forums are a sales tool. They CAN be, in that a popular and responsive forum is an incentive for customers to buy your product. I have seen many Intel compiler users mention that to me over the years. But trying to tie it directly to a sales database, or similar, is a waste of effort. Forums are a support thing, and there should be ties between the forums and a company's tech support team. The most successful forums are those where the support team actively engages users and become part of the community. I am saddened to see that Intel has moved away from that in recent years.

The IDZ "belt" program, especially Black Belt, was a brilliant idea that encouraged knowledgeable users to help others on the forums (and blogs), reducing support load. While those of us who attained Black Belt still have that status, Intel no longer provides any recognition or support of Black Belts and the program is effectively dismantled.

As for translation - most other forums offer that too, but there is very little non-English activity so I wonder if there is any benefit, especially when a post is made in a non-English section and never gets a response. If Intel is serious about this, it should assign people to monitor these forums and make sure they get responses.

Spam is a solved problem in pretty much all the forums I have been in. The tools are there. Intel has just chosen to go its own way, with predictable results.

[DataScientist]

I have also seen this popup repeatedly as reported by @jimdempseyatthecove. Indeed it just popped up again in front of me while I was writing this comment (see the attached screenshot below). It can become annoying if you have already responded to it a couple of times, yet it appears again and again. It reminds me of Google's persistence in recommending (i.e., forcing) everyone to use Chrome instead of Firefox/Explorer when Chrome was not so popular. They would repeat the message regardless of the user's preference until they would surrender and move permanently to Chrome. This Intel popup message appears to be as vicious as Google Chrome's ad. It keeps asking for comments over and over, even if one has already responded to it or does not want to respond at all.