Forum Discussion
MTC is getting ridiculously slow
I agree with what you're saying, because it's the truth.
I've had my fair share of experience in many communities of StachExchange websites, even successfully proposed and built a new community there.
But, they are a Q&A community, while Microsoft Tech Community is based on discussions, much like Reddit. some posts are asking questions, some posts are merely informative etc.
discussions are more flexible way of allowing people to communicate. StackExchange websites have stricter rules for asking and answering questions, that's why the quality of the content there is much higher.
I think what Microsoft Tech Community needs is to have 2 kinds of posts. Discussion posts and Q&A posts.
- Discussion post: people can discuss about the subject of the post, no chit chat, no spam, no off topic.
- Q&A posts: people ask proper questions, the one who is asking the question needs to show that he/she has done fair amount of research before posting his/her question. so, nothing like: "How do I open Microsoft Edge?" or "Help me fix this". they should mention what they have tried already that didn't work and be specific. again, no spam, absolutely no chit chat, posts that try to answer the question should be able to be down voted if they don't answer the question or are low quality.
there are some fundamental changes needed to be applied to this website, but nothing that can't be done, it can, I just don't know if people like Allen can do it on their own or need permission from like MSFT CEO or someone else, before doing this.
and if they do it, they better keep it separate from this website, like on a separate domain, accessible only to the developers and people who willingly want to participate in testing the new website and report bugs etc. it will definitely pay off.
HotCakeX Thanks for the detailed response.
I totally agree and understand that MCT is for discussions and Q&A but I have few points here to share:
- Regardless of type of forum (Q&A or Discussion), the performance and appearance of website is just not aligned with Microsoft Brand. Loading pages everytime whereas we have remarkable frameworks to create SPA apps, is just outdated! Even now to reply to your response, the website redirected 2 times!
- The reasons other websites are more successful is because they "do it right the first time". They listen to the community and users. To me, it seems Microsoft Community team does not care about our feedback. The reason for invest our time and write detailed responses is to improve the platform and the company we love and value.
*edit thread split to keep this on topic*
- Oh yes, Lighthouse is savage,
even on Google's own websites it shows problems, though the problems on MTC are a lot more - HotCakeX
For what it is worth, it is better than I remember a few months ago. But there's still a lot of inefficient stuff being done per page load. The LightHouse tools still give it a fail on performance 😞 - I'm seeing a lot of improvements in terms of speed and page load times ever since they moved the server to Azure.
- Allen
I was about to leave feedback about MTC having poor performance but then I found this thread. I am relieved to see your honesty about the situation and acknowledged the problems with Lithium/Khoros limitations.
Out of curiosity, do you think we might see the new Khoros features making any debut on this site this year? It would be nice to see some level of improvement to the overall performance (and more consistency with the rest of the MS brand; the TC lacks consistency with the rest of MS' website IMO). by other info, do you mean the video recording of how the site loads on my system? sure i'll do it.
but I can also run traceroute if you want, on the specific content that takes so long to load.
I'm not sure what I saw in my HAR file in Dev tools was accurate but it looked like a 750KB file, from MTC server, took 15 seconds to download/load ??
also I hope the HAR file shows that my Internet speed is not bottlenecking
- Allen
Community Manager
HotCakeX ,
Yes you guessed the email correct, apologies for my typo. The specific issue with China relates to videos we have in the Tech Community from YouTube, as YouTube is blocked in mainland China.
I have had a look at the HAR file you sent us, if you could also send the other info I asked for as something definitely seems wrong with the load times in your HAR.. i.e. it took 3 seconds for you to get a 40x40 image from the community CDN. When I did it I got the following:
350mb Fiber = 286ms
27mb 4G connection = 321ms
anyway happy to keep looking through this for you and hopefully get to the bottom of what is making things so slow for you. The HAR you sent me is for the User Profile page and that is one of our slower pages but it's still not as slow for me as it is for you.
Jandost_Khoso - I appreciate you taking the time to give us your feedback, we benchmark the Microsoft Tech Community against a selection of other communities, especially focused on those - like ours - which are not primarily a support forum. That is not to say support does not go on here but its definitely not our focus, Microsoft provides Answers for that (and I am sure you will like it's UI as a result).
You clearly know a fair deal about Lithium (or Khoros as its now called) so you will no doubt be aware that the Microsoft Tech Community has a very different look and feel to many other Khoros communities. The reason for that is we have tried to update the UI / UX to make it feel more like a modern UI / social media like. It's actually part of the reason we had performance issues in the first place. We are essentially trying to load as much content that you might be interested in during a single page load as we can.
Before I started this performance tune up our pages were taking 13,14 seconds to load, I hope thus you can understand why 3 seconds feels like a bit of win. As I said in my earlier comment we aren't done yet and have plans to take a deeper look at how we might get even quicker once the move to Azure is complete in Dec.
We, however, can not escape fundamental truths about the Technology the Microsoft Tech Community UI is built on. Khoros are working on a new skin, coming next year, which will make more use of ajax and other modern web technologies. We are naturally looking forward to that so we can build a new skin which feels more up to date, better aligns with user expectations and delivers on our desires to make the Microsoft Tech Community the home for IT Professionals working with Microsoft Products.
I know we aren't there yet and I am sorry you feel we do not listen to our community, because nothing could be further from the truth. Naturally we can not do, and should not do, everything everyone asks of us but I ensure our user feedback gets a seat at our table in every sprint.
Further we do have a Community Insiders group that we have setup, the goal with that group is to cast a much wider net than just MVPs, employees and our team to capture feedback and test out new features and functions before release.
