Is anybody else completely dissatisfied with this new forum?

[GLees]

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.

[MaryT_Intel]

Hi @corestar​ , we appreciate your request but unfortunately we cannot go back to the old forum platform. Our old platforms were being End of Life'd so we needed to move our Communities to a new platform. We want to hear all your improvement ideas and are working on them as fast as we can. The 'Show More' has already been removed from posts/replies in the Forums, and we'll get it removed from posts reflected in the My Community section where it shows posts you've made or are following.

Thank you,

Mary T.

Community Manager

[corestar]

I'm getting the same error as mfro. On Windows 7 Pro using FireFox 62.0.3 (64-bit).

[MaryT_Intel]

Ok, @corestar​ , I let my team know this so we can have someone take a look. Thanks for the picture and details. I'll see what we can find out.

Mary T.

Community Manager

[corestar]

Another issue I encountered is you cannot add more than one attachment.

Also, extensions such as .rpt and .lst will gray out the "Answer" button. I had to append a .txt suffix to get it to upload. Please either fix it so it allows such extensions or don't allow them to be selected in the first place. Graying out the "Answer" button is not useful.

Lastly, it does not show the full file name including extension. The default Microsoft foolishness where file extensions are hidden should be avoided.

Also, "Answer" is a very bad name. Just a minor annoyance, but not all posts are answers. Likewise for "Ask a Question".

[corestar]

MaryT_Intel, using unsupported software can of course be bad, but I'm sure it would at least function. For example, I still use XP on a number of machines and am convinced zero support from Microsoft is a positive thing 😀

You may not want to answer, but I'm curious what forum software is being used. I've used a couple free open source ones in the past (eg MyBB, phpBB) that create perfectly usable forums with a few button clicks. Team of 1 guy, me, spending a few hours total. Biggest issue was limiting spam. I'm really not trying to be derogatory, but this is not rocket science. These are well known technologies that have been solved a 100 times in the past. Why reinvent the wheel?

[dave_59]

@corestar​ , I've seen this happen with other forums that were taken over by people who have no idea what a "forum", especially a technical one is. They want single-sign-on for marketing purposes. And that brings up another "bug". When I do sign in, it does not remember the page I was on and I have to drill back down to it.

[corestar]

Today I started getting the following error when I hit "View More" (which I hope you are getting rid of as well). I'm on Windows 7 Pro and using FireFox 62.0.3 (64-bit).

[DBay]

I get all these error messages too. So far, I just hit the 'x' and it just goes away with apparently no problems. I wish I could just ignore all the quartus errors and crashes....

[HRZ]

I just noticed that threads in each section of the forum are now sorted by "Top Question" as default. Why are the designers of this forum so keen on pushing "Top Questions"? This is a forum, not an FAQ. Every single forum I have seen in my life sorts threads in sections based on last reply. Sorting by anything other than last reply will prevent new threads or new replies from being seen and potentially result in such threads going unanswered because they get lost in all the threads the forum considers as "Top" for whatever reason. The same goes for search results; default should always be "last reply".

[Hazlina_R_Intel]

@HRZ​  we will sort the content based on the last activity/reply/post instead of top question in the next Nov/Dec release. ​This is part of planned improvement.

[SDuns]

Two points from my side.

The first point is that this forum seems to be secret and invisible at "intel.com". I have tried several times to navigate to this forum but I didn't succeed.

My onliest solution is currently to type in "alteraforum.com" with the hope that intel didn't stop the redirection.

The second point I have is the complete (fpga) website at intel. This is event more worse than this forum. The complete website is developed for mobile devices, which is very bad for normal desktop users. Endless scrolling is the result and the information is so much harder to find than before at "altera.com".

[MaryT_Intel]

Hi @SDuns​ , I may have some answers/updates that help. 1) There are 2 ways to find these Forums from Intel.com, a) on the Support tab at the top of Intel.com, go to Support Community and it lists all the community forums there, or b) on the Support tab at top of Intel.com, click on Intel FPGA Support Home, and then scroll down/click on Intel FPGA Community. You're right this is not an easy page to navigate! We'll also rename Support Community on the Intel.com homepage Support Tab to Community Forums in the next 6 wks.

For #2, when you say the website is developed for mobile devices and there's endless scrolling, are you referring to the forum questions/responses are all in one column on the left side of the desktop/laptop screen? We agree with your assessment that this needs to change and it will be in our next release, beginning of Dec.

Thank you for your feedback, keep letting us know of other things you find and we'll fix them as fast and as best we can. Kind regards,

Mary T.

Community Manager

[MaryT_Intel]

Hey @corestar​ ,

I appreciated your input around attachments, we'll get that fixed. A user can add multiple attachments by zipping them, but it's not intuitive. We'll work on implementing the ability to attach multiple items without having to zip them first. I'm not sure when this will be resolved, but it's on our to-do list now. Thanks,

Mary T.

Community Manager

[MaryT_Intel]

Hi @dave_59​ ,

Thanks for your feedback about when you sign in, it doesn't automatically take you back to the page where you were before you signed in. I apologize for the inconvenience as you're right, it's annoying to have to drill back down to where you were before. I've asked our development team to look into this and we'll get it added to our list of items to address. I appreciate you letting us know so we can work on it for you. Kind regards,

Mary T.

Community Manager

[HRZ]

@MaryT_Intel​ , any comment on whether the new forum update will involve separating the big forum sections (the first three) into smaller ones? Specifically, moving OpenCL and HLS into their own separate section as was the case in the previous [Altera] forum?

[Hazlina_R_Intel]

@HRZ​ Yes, we are looking into introducing some subcategories for the major topic like the FPGA Design Tools. We are still sorting out on what the subcategories should be. It can't be too many. It has to be sized just right. Any suggestions are welcomed! ​

[HRZ]

@HazlinaR_Intel​ Well, I would personally go back and take a look again at how the categories were in the previous forum and try to replicate that.

[corestar]

Found another minor issue. The dropdown menu at the top of a post shows the EDIT and DELETE options even for other user's posts. Just out of curiosity, I made a minor edit (one of my pet peeves drove me to change "&" to "and"). It actually appears to save it but if I log out and come back in the edit is gone.

So that's a relief, but every other Forum I've ever used does not even show invalid options (e.g. EDIT).

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you really could produce better quality forums in a few minutes with any number of open source packages. Please take peoples' comments in the spirit they are given. If we did not prefer Altera to Xilinx, we would not be wasting our time here. But Altera has no support other than these forums (at least for small customers) and screwing them up was not a small issue.

[MaryT_Intel]

Hi @corestar​ ,

I just added the Edit/Delete to our list of things to fix. You are right, if it's not an option (and it shouldn't be), then it shouldn't be visible to the customer.

Thanks for the feedback, I do appreciate it!

Mary T.

Community Manager

[corestar]

I've been complaining as much as anyone about the new forums, so I thought I'd mention something positive. It really seems like Intel engineers are taking a greater role in the forums. I don't recall that happening in the old ones. I posted a message about a bug in 18.1 (the bad news) and they actually seem to have reproduced it, acknowledged it, and promised to fix it in a future release (the good news). That never happened, at least to me, with Xilinx.

I'll be honest; I've been actively looking at going back to Xilinx. But after using Vivado for a while, it all came back to me at just how horrid Vivado is. And the Xilinx forums have vastly more traffic, but not vastly more useful answers. I really want to stay with Altera.

If Intel would make some sort of commitment that they are not abandoning MAX 10 and Cyclone V level chips and also recognize their SoC tools are garbage, it would make that decision a whole lot easier.

It's interesting that Intel has a team of people (not sure how large) working on these forums, but when it came to their FPGA SoC tools, they decided to use unmodified off the shelf tools from ARM and U-BOOT.

[Pvand1]

I got left behind when the forum moved, but now I can see and reply again. This means I have a lot of reading up to do and the first thi g I notice is having to unfold a lot of stuff. I understand why it is there, but at first glance it doesn't seem that handy. But i'll give it a go the coming days and see if I can start co tributing again. (This is also a test to see if I can really post replies.)