Forum Discussion
Is it just me or is this AMA forum super slow? Each page load is taking ~15 seconds.
I'll address this here only because the response feels very "MS" to me. As in, "we're building something to do that, thanks for the feedback." The reality is that MS will likely never build a great place for AMAs because it's not Microsoft's business (and shouldn't be).
All the infrastructural improvements you need for an AMA exist already, in the place where AMAs happen: Reddit.
We should just https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/227tme/we_are_the_microsoft_excel_team_ask_us_anything/.
I'm starting this thread here because rather than just send the feedback directly to the good folks on the Excel team, I thought it better to include feedback that others may have as well (via replies).
I found this AMA to be much less engaging than previous AMAs (on reddit) for several reasons:
- The performance of the site is terrible. And it's only getting worse as the AMA goes on. Everyone is seeing it.
- The fact that in order to "read more" of a reply I have to navigate to a separate page/URL is ridiculous. There should just be some javascript that shows the rest of the reply. The page navigation is taking 30 seconds per page load. It's unusable. Howie's response is a good example of something I was interested in, but that took me 1 minute to navigate to, and return from:
- There is so much whitespace in this forum, that it's impossible to quickly get a read of what's going on. I'm literally scrolling through pages and pages of wasted space just to see what questions were asked. There is no need for a line that identifies the user, then a bunch of whitespace, then a wide spaced block of text, and then more whitespace. A compact view would be much better for this type of real-time interaction (reddit does a good job of this)
7. We don't need the "Your content was last auto-saved at 09:49 AM" boxes to pop up as we're typing our replies. If you want to autosave go ahead and do it silently - it's not something we need to know is going on. It's an infrastructural thing.
6. There appears to be no way to "sort" posts. I can't see the most popular at the top, or the newest at the top. I only get "latest activity." Or at least that's all I can find (it's the default and I can't find a way to change it).
- 5. In order to post a question, which only needs a title, you also have to enter a description, or you can't post. This then contributes to the whitespace problem mentioned in #3
Dan, practically all these topics are discussing on TechComm from scratch, after it was moved on Lithium platform. There are some improvements, team do great job - but some issues are looks like not resolvable. Resources, budget, platform limitation... If you guys from Microsoft with your fresh view will give your feedback to TechComm team that will be great - just to prioritise the ToDo list.
I hope Ms will give us a compendium of all queries & their replies.
- Yes, I try to remember to press the Ctrl key before clicking More, so the slowness is on anew page
4. Just reloading the main page takes 30 seconds now...and without doing that I can't see any new posts/content.
Dan Battagin , I'd recommend RSS
Wow, you're right that RSS is way faster and more complete. Still requires a page load to reply, but you're right that reading is much better!
- Ya, it's pretty slow.
- Well, even my own post was bitten by the "Read More" which means you have to click through to see the content. And that takes 30+ seconds right now. Sigh.
