What happened to the forums?

I disagree with just about every thing you said about what I can do, or how useless my feedback will be. Apple will pay attention to areas on this board that need attention or cause the most confusion.

Sure, there are changes in the interface that I've had to track down, like where to go to look at different aspects of the board, and turning off the email notifications. Still there are other areas that will directly affect the usefullness of any assistance provided, like ordering my comments from 6 weeks ago to the top of the list, the second item is from 1 day ago, the third from 4 days ago, the 5th from 2 weeks ago, and the rest that are in some order that can not be determined. This sort of tracking can't be good for anybody.

If Apple decides to modify their interface then that's their business. If they make changes that makes it difficult for me to carry on a thread and see when there are replies, then that's their business also. They usually treat their business pretty well with well thought out design decisions and adjust them as needed by feedback perceptions.

pointm wrote:

how do I search just on the snow leopard forums?

I found you can do this by typing in your search and waiting for the results to pop up. Then press Only for Mac...

If you are on the search results page already, click More Options under your search term and enter Mac OS X under Restrict to a Community.

Hope this helps. I'm pretty turned around in the new AD, but overall I am pretty happy about it.

To get an ordered list of your last posts go to the personalised Your View page:

https://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa?showpersonalized=true

You can then customise the Your Content widget to show however many recent posts you want that you've participated in, in reverse chronological order.

The first time I went into Your View, I was totally lost - talk about intuitively challanged!

Why?... Change should be for the better - this ain't!

Cumbersome & no longer intuitive. Before searches were simple - not now. Looks horrible and the bubbles use more screen space.

My guess is the volume of posts will increase because folks just can't be bothered looking anymore AND there'll be a drop off in the number of users.

Cynics would say it's just a ploy to stop people helping themselves so they opt for Care Plans.

Really!

"..I suggest to get use to it.."

why in the world would I need to get used to it??

people who are able to help do it on their own time, last thing I need is to go thru some learning curve spending hours trying to figure out simplest things on the message board of all places.

the concept is wrong and badly executed.

One of the things people overlook when they decide to update something is that they forget all the previous work that was done by others, in the past, to make the existing format successful.

That seems to be what has happened here.

All the good things about the old Apple Discussions have been messed about with, for no plausible reason, and all the new "features" just make it worse, not better.

Maybe it's just that some Apple employees are worried about keeping their jobs. I can't think of any other reason why these non-improvements have been implemented.

I am pulling my ******* hair out about this freaking redesign. I cannot even search within a specific area. Who the **** designed this? I cant find out how to use this. Completely uselss garbage. WHO IS LISTENING? WHAT THE **** IS GOING ON HERE!!!!!

Yeah- and every time you add anything, make a comment, etc, you get sent back to the top of the thread. In other words, it's pretty much impossible for sentient beings to use these forums any more. I gave up and I only came in here because I got an email notification of Ron's message. And guess what? To add this response to Ron I had to log in (which lost me my place in the sequence of messages) so I went back and clicked on the link in the email, which sent me not *here* but back to the first message on page 1 of this thread.

Bearing in mind the threads often go to 10 or more pages, this ridiculous behaviour makes it completely unfeasible to spend much time here.

Oh and guess what else? when I'd finished typing this message and clicked to save it, once again I was sent way back to the top of the thread. Not to the message I'd just posted.

This is pretty sad. I wonder what sort of person decided that these were improvements?

Sayonara!

Tom in London wrote:

In other words, it's pretty much impossible for sentient beings to use these forums any more.

I'm not saying it has been easy, but some of us are still using the forums, & I don't think we are all plants or other lower life forms. 🙂

Listed DUDE, Apple Discussions was a resource that was primarily used by folks that were faced with a problem (usually, from their perspective, causing stress, loss of data, a technical calamity, or just a general snafu). They were searching for answers, and Discussions was clean, simple, to the point.

What we have now is some fools idea of merging Yahoo Answers / FaceBook / iChat all wrapped up in a convoluted design that only MICROSOFT would love. Oh, by the way, the configurability options of this is on par with WindowsXP. Convoluted, confusing, not helpful, completely UN APPLE and NOT THE THING you want to do when a persons tech life is imploding or they are having a problem.

IF I have a problem, I want quick, fast, easy answers. Now, where Discussions would be formatted concisely and to the point, now I have to scroll through a bunch of cartoon-like discussion iChat bubbles to read what I really came here for. I DON"T WANT BUBBLEGUM, I want answers.

BTW, the only reason Im responding to this thread is that I found it through GOOGLE, not APPLE. I WILL NOT be participating in this messed-up puke inducing unnecessary redesign from this point forward.

I understand quite well what discussions.apple.com is used for & what people want from it.

What you may not understand is that the software that ran the site is an older, no longer supported version of the only suitable product for managing a site of this size, & that the site's ever increasing use was overwhelming it.

There really was not much choice about it: either upgrade to the current version of the site management product or watch the site go off line more & more frequently until it was mostly unavailable to anyone.

Things are far from perfect with the new design, but the ASC team is working hard to get the bugs out & implement the most requested features ASAP. But keep in mind that they have to take the site off line to update it, & together with the complexity of the system (which almost certainly runs on a large cluster), this means the changes will not come overnight.

For now, if you need a quick answer, the best place to go is the "All Content" tab of the page you first see after signing in. Select a "community" (what were previously called forums) as indicated, & begin typing in your question in the box labeled "Ask Your Question." It isn't immediately obvious but as you type the question the site will begin to suggest topics (now called "discussions") that may already have the answer you need.

Good riddance. I find it hilarious that some people continue to complain about the new forums without providing constructive feedback and continute to threaten to leave but yet are still posting.

What is needed is some constructive feedback so that Apple can help improve the forums. They are listening, but I'm sure they are tired of hearing of meaningless whining.

Amen R C-R

Listen, the feedback is here, all Apple needs to do is read it. Its no threat. This service is now useless as it is.