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Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Software, Design Entry, Synthesis, Simulation, Verification, Timing Analysis, System Design (Platform Designer, formerly Qsys)
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Is anybody else completely dissatisfied with this new forum?

GLees
New Contributor II
19,075 Views

This used to be a robust forum, lots of new questions everyday and, most impotantly, lots of responses. This new forum is clunky and time consuming to navigate. Nobody seems interested anymore. I used to check-in everyday to see what's new. Not any more.

112 Replies
MaryT_Intel
Employee
3,791 Views

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear about your experience! Can you let me know what is clunky, what's hard to navigate? We want to make this a good environment for people to easily ask questions, get answers, so if you have improvement requests, please let me know!

 

You can also submit issues here:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate/webmaster-contact-us.html

 

Thanks,

Mary T.

Community Manager

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EV
Novice
3,791 Views

I agree.

A start would be to reorganize the grouping and may be adding "sub groups"

 

The FPGAs are lumped with the CPLD and Soc S/W in the same forum (Programmable Devices).

 

Another one (FPGA Embedded Systems)

Description:

Embedded Development Tools, Processors (SoCs and Nios® II processor), Embedded Development Suites (EDSs), Boot and Configuration, Operating Systems, C and C++

The only thing that may missing from that list is "and everything else"

 

When I'm looking for SoCs info, I would appreciate not having to go though CPLD postings.

And for the SoCs, if I'm looking for ARM A9 S/W topics, not having to go through FPGA design postings would be nice.

 

 

HRZ
Valued Contributor III
3,791 Views

Indeed the new forum is much harder to navigate compared to the old one. The classification of the different sections is far from optimal. Two of the current sections have less than 10 posts, which clearly shows there is not enough interest in those topics to need their own separate sections. On the other hand, the first three sections are clustered with posts from vastly different topics which make them extremely hard to navigate. I would specifically object to merging the OpenCL section from the previous forum into the FPGA Design Tools section in the new one. OpenCL and HLS could certainly use their own separate section. I am sure the first three sections can be split into more fine-grained sections to allow easier navigation. One thing I really wished had been kept from the previous forum was the section structure.

 

There are also multiple other problems that have been mentioned before by other users but still remain:

 

1- The forum is still too heavy and too slow.

2- The general design of the forum wastes too much white space. The laderboard/ask a question column on the right is of little practical use.

3- Threads in a section are sorted by last reply as they should be. However, only the author and time of opening the thread is included under the thread name in each section which makes it hard to tell whether the thread has been updated since last visit or not. In my opinion, the author and time of the last reply should also be included as it was in the previous forum.

4- One thing I have noticed is that there is no way to download attachments that can be previewed. I certainly prefer to open a 100-page PDF attachment using my own PDF reader rather than the built-in preview mechanism provided by the forum.

5- The boundaries of each post when viewing a thread are not very clear. There is basically just a very thin line separating replies from each other. Furthermore, the "show more" mechanism cuts replies far too early. The threshold for cutting the reply could be increased for easier navigation.

 

Unfortunately, as it seems, many of the previous users have either left the forum or are not as active anymore and I cannot attribute this to anything other than the sudden huge change in the structure of the forum. I would urge the developers/admins of the new forum to take another look at the previous forum and I am sure they would be able to find a lot of useful features from the previous forum that are missing in the new one.

NDoe
Beginner
3,791 Views

I also think that it has become very cumbersome to check the forum for updates for all the reasons already stated.

 

In addition for me the sort order keeps defaulting to 'Top Questions' - I can select 'Latest Posts' but when I go back after reading an item it reverts to top questions so I have to select the sort order again after every item I look at. Maybe I'm missing something but I can't find any setting to change this behaviour and it's really frustrating!

Daixiwen
New Contributor I
3,791 Views

The same for me. I used to go regularly to the forum but now I just go once a week or even less. It's just too time consuming. I hope it will get fixed soon.

And to HRZ's list I'll add a very important point 6: indicate which thread has unread posts since the last visit! Like him I find it extremely difficult to find out which posts I have already read and which ones are new.

DBay
New Contributor I
3,791 Views

Well, lets see. You can't find this forum anywhere from the Altera/Intel web page or login. You have to have an email with the "secret" link. No one from Intel responds. It is hard to read, hard to find things, takes up a lot of space on the page. It is kind of like the whole intel web page. Clunky, hard to read cluttered, useless, links go in circles, links not correct, too much crap to sort through to find what you want if it is even there.

This is my first impression after trying for weeks to find this forum, hours on the phone to see if anyone in intel even knew they had an FPGA group(they don't I have been told) then finally given the secret location to this mess.

dave_59
Novice
3,791 Views

Not being able to see the timestamp of the last post to a thread and which threads you have unread topics in unheard of in most other forums.

SSFyTMT
Novice
3,791 Views

I agree, very dissatisfied. Lumping almost everything into one a single topic "FPGA Design Tools" is absurd. The interface is slow, lots of wasted space, hard to navigate, poor search tools, etc. I type something into search and hit enter and get "Invalid request: Public caching disabled or specified action not marked as publicly cacheable" - what?!?!? Also, when I ask a question I get a tiny little box to type in. When I'm trying to access a page that requires a login, the post login only takes me to the homepage, not the page I was trying to access.

 

 

 

 

 

mfro
New Contributor I
3,791 Views

For me, the major point missing (besides the ones already mentioned and the disappointing lack of performance) is a "new since my last visit" view.

 

A basic functionality I would expect from any half-decent social media application.

Ken_I_Intel
Employee
3,793 Views

I agree.  đź’”  This feels dumbed down. Like right now I'm supposed to respond using this narrow column because it looks cool??? 

 

FWIW as a former Altera now Intel employee, I couldn't even login without escalating to several people to find out how employee get permission to this site due to bugs in the current website.  I not sure this affects everyone but it could be a reason a lot of old Altera folks are not responding.

vjAlter
Novice
3,793 Views

The new forum interface, well, sorry, but IMHO stinks. The older forum format was much better.

 

I thought the new, narrower, format could be designed for mobile users. Something​ that could make some sense in some forums. Not in this case. But actually the portal states the opposite, that is designed for a desktop browser.

 

Let alone that during the transition from the old Altera domain most links were lost, really too bad :(

ELave
Novice
3,794 Views

Completely, utterly, pointless. And the fact that (a) search engine results don't work because the links are broken, and (b) no-one from Intel/Altera appears to be reading or responding, makes it worse than pointless. It might as well be a Microsoft forum.

 

As a long-time brand X user, I'd have to give this pile of garbage 0/10. It really would be much better just to set up a few usenet groups.

MaryT_Intel
Employee
3,794 Views

Hi,

Thanks for all your feedback. If you're still experiencing slowness of pages loading (@mfro​ ?), please let me know what the browser is that you're using so we can replicate the issue and find a fix for you.

 

As for the narrow columns, we will work on that. Right now their narrow because the Leaderboard is on the right side but we'll move that to the bottom. It will allow more column width then. Give me time, not sure when we'll have this ready to push to production.

 

I'll submit the 'new since my last visit' request to our team to address. What other items can I look into?

@DBay​ , sorry you couldn't find this forum earlier. In addition to the Altera Forums, we integrated all of Altera into Intel and had to train many Intel folks on FPGAs. Sorry they weren't able to point you in the right direction at first but we should have that addressed now.

 

And issues with the Search is still in process. I apologize for the problems and appreciate your detailed feedback. Thank you!

Mary T.

Community Manager

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dave_59
Novice
3,794 Views
I can no longer login in to the forum for the last two days: An unexpected error occurred. Try it again. For help, use the contact or support options below. Account name: dave_59
mfro
New Contributor I
3,794 Views

@MaryT_Intel​ :

 

>> If you're still experiencing slowness of pages loading (@mfro (Customer)​ ?), please let me know what the browser

>> is that you're using so we can replicate the issue and find a fix for you.

 

Thanks. The slowness has - at least for me - improved a bit, but compared to the old forum, I still think it feels somewhat sluggish.

 

Together with the lack of features you'd usually take for granted with a modern product (like a search that deserves its name, a "new since last posted" view, a usable quotation function (!) and lots of other functionality I don't even dare to dream about) I still think this forum barely makes a nice poster child for Intel as an innovative enterprise ...

JCrai
Novice
3,794 Views

I'd like to tag on the end of this,

 

The structure assumes the answer to the initial post is the last post in the thread where most of the time at least part of the answer is in the first reply, when you have a post with a lot of discussion the initial posts get hidden behind the "More Answers" drop down which is just pointless. 99% of the time you want to follow the thread from the start. This added step in an already clunky forum has been very frustrating. Half of the time you look at a post and the first reply under it is half way through a discussion which can confuse the reader!

 

That and the show more drop down is infuriating, again if you are trying to read a thread with any discussion instread of just scrolling down an reading you have to constantly click show more on post after post that has more than 6 lines (which is almost all answers to a question with any complexity!!!)

 

Finally it seems the highlight in the text editor still isnt working, shift+arrow letters and the cursor dissapears!!! (firefox 62.0.3 (64-bit))

GLees
New Contributor II
3,794 Views

Amen. This brother speaks my mind.

Hazlina_R_Intel
Moderator
3,794 Views

Hi All,

My name is Hazlina and I am a Senior Manager for an applications engineering team within Intel. Just to let everyone knows, as Mary alluded above, we are considering all the feedback and inputs received for enhancement. Many of the feedback we received so far will be addressed in the next release. Mary will provide more updates on this as she deem appropriate but I would like to remind everyone to NOT get discouraged with the limitation/issues on the current features/functionalities . This is a new platform for us and everyone here, so we do expects some hiccups but rest assured that we are working to improve it! Please do feedback if you find anything NEW bugs/limitation that needs to be taken into account that is not already mentioned/covered by the previous comments. Thank you for everyone's feedback on this.

 

Thanks.

-Hazlina

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corestar
New Contributor I
3,794 Views

Hello @NRaml, it's encouraging that Intel is at least looking at the issues with the forums. To many of us, it appeared whoever designed the current forum had never actually used a forum and the silence was alarming.

 

It would be helpful to have a list of things Intel recognizes as issues so that we don't repeat ourselves and don't have to look through all other posts. Not to mention, if there is something not on the list, it would tell us Intel still doesn't get it :-).

 

Why not start a new thread, "Planned improvements to the forum" and make it a community effort. I've been as guilty as any of making brusk comments on the current forums, but if it is clear Intel is seriously trying to address the issue, you will get alot of cooperation from people.

 

corestar
New Contributor I
3,223 Views

One thing I've noticed that I think is new (like I said, a list would help) is that when you insert code it does not add a scroll bar if it is beyond a certain length.

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