Forum Discussion
Can you please stop changing the layout/navigation?
Just when I'm comfortably used to the next iteration, and you change everything all over again. How do I get to the page listing all my favourited spaces now? I have to browse the Communities instead, and select the spaces one by one, takes me 10 times more clicks to go over it. The Dashboard is no longer available (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/Community-My-Dashboard redirects to the Home page and is useless now).
- Allen
Community Manager
Hi VasilMichev,
Favourited spaces are being phased out, simply put only a small handful of users were using them and got how they were used.
We are instead going to surface another community feature in their place called subscriptions. This will allow you to get email digest of areas you subscribe to. You can control how often you get these digests here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions:notification-settings.
The problem with favourites was that they are not native to the community platform we are using and so it was very hard to do anything useful with them. We could only pull 25 of your favourited communities in one go and that is becoming troublesome now the community is getting much larger.
Hence why we deprecated 'My Home' because it was nearing its maximum capacity for the number of favourited spaces you could have.
Moving to the concept of subscribed spaces will help us get the latest and greatest information into your inbox so you can deal with it at a time that suits you, as well as meaning you do not have to be actually logged into the community to get it. You will also be able to see your subscribed boards and threads here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions:email-subscriptions.
I get from what you are saying that your looking for a quick way to get to the conversations you have favourited, but I am not 100% sure why it would take 10 times as many clicks to get to that content, I agree it may take a couple of extra clicks.
We do surface content from the spaces your a member of on the home page as well, maybe you could share with me a little more what it is you got from My Home that you do not think you will be able to get via either Subscriptions or using these feeds?
I truly appreciate the time your taking to share your feedback because its always valuable to listen to what our MVPs tell us.
i don't need more stuff in my inbox, I just want to be able to scan through a Community/Space and if something looks interesting, readit and contribute if I can. Lithium makes this much more difficult than Yammer and has not provided me any compelling reasons to hang out for any significant period of time. I'm much less involved than I used to be for this exact reason.
- Allen
Thank you for sharing, I am obviously sorry to see your not spending as much time in the community. What criteria are you using to identify 'interesting stuff'?
Is it:
- Discussions on a specific topic?
- Discussions on a specific product?
- Discussions you have previously engaged with?
Really looking to try to help address this but I need some hard information on what exactly it is we are not delivering so I can work with the team to identify how we might help you meet this.
Again I would like to re-iterate that we can not continue with the 'Follow' and My Home UI in the way it was working until now as it would have started to miss more and more content as the number of potential sources increased.
We may discuss pros and cons for each approach forever, but main point new navigation pushes to change the style of work with the resource. After that you spend time to become more familiar with new UI, make almost automatic some actions - and after that we have another new UI. That cycle continuous forever. Not only here, elsewhere.
As for me previous approach was more suitable. One icon to shift on any of my places. Emails - they don't give full picture (post itself plus replies) and don't show exact content of the posts (lost of formatting in some cases, no attachment). RSS works bit better from that point of view. Thus if something interesting I open the page. And why to jump from email to site and back if I could see everything on site only?
Allen If I wanted to use email notifications, I would. I'm already part of a dozen forums/communities (TechNet/MSDN, Answers, MTC, EE, Spiceworks to name a few), if I subscribe for new posts on each of those my mailbox will simply explode. I prefer to browse the MTC instead, and the Dashboard was fine for this purpose.
Again, it's about getting to the Spaces I follow, not Communities, not Conversations. Home tab lists 4 per page, how many times do I need to press the "more" button to get all the results? Perhaps you can move that page someplace else and have it load a more suitable number of results?
- Allen
Lets see if we can come up with another way to meet your use case because, as I mentioned in my original reply, the feed used for My Home was going to become broken in the next month anyway so it had to go.
I take it that using the 'Conversations I started' or the 'Conversations I have replied' to on your profile page does not meet your needs?
So, the ask here is to have a list of all conversations that you have expressed some sort of interest in listed in perpetuity somewhere right?
This list must:
- Know which spaces / discussions or individual posts you want to be able to review
- List them in chronological order
- Expand indefinitely without a need for you to click see more or next?
Did I miss anything?
