Forum Update is Live

Question

In February we released the new Microsoft forums platform with the Expression Forums, as well as a handful of new forums on the MSDN, TechNet and general Microsoft forum sites. To-date there have been over 10K posts by almost 3K users. We faced some initial challenges in the area of performance and quickly deployed two small releases with a number of fixes to address these issues. Speed and reliability were improved considerably.

We’ve been listening to your feedback in the bugs and suggestions forums, and have been working on incorporating much of the feedback into the next major release of the forums. This release will go live in the next week or two, after final testing is complete. In addition to fixing hundreds of bugs, including many submitted by the community, it will highlight the following areas:

Performance and reliability: A new lighter weight editor to reduce the time it takes to create or reply to a post. Bug fixes to reduce the number of 500 errors users are experiencing.

Usability: A new filter called “Unread”, which displays any thread which has new posts added since your last visit. This allows you to see which threads you’ve never read (bold), as well as threads you’ve read that have new replies.

Discoverability: The ability to expand or collapse forum category headers. Clickable category headers for a page with just those forums. More links for Top Answerers and Recent Users show the full community taking part in each forum.

Moderator’s: Split one thread in to two, or take two similar threads and merge them in to one. Change a discussion to a question or a question to a discussion. Make a thread sticky more easily.

Thanks
-Andrew

Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com

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Andrew Brenner, Forums Product Planner

Answer 1

I'm pretty excited about the "Unread" filter, I've been playing with it internally on my development enviroment for the past few weeks and it's working great. This is real helpful for users who like to read "Every" post in a forum since it will show you threads with anything you haven't seen.

In fact I haven't seen many other forum systems do this, they usually have a "New since I last logged in" but if I don't read them all and log in a second time I've lost what I didn't read.

I really like the new editor we're using and the bugs we've fixed like the one about stripping whitespace when adding code.

I'm real excited to get this out and get feedback on it.

In the meantime we're now working on our next release with yet more bugs fixed and suggestions taken. One of the things we're fixing is the ability to search a single forum, or a category of forums (today you can only search "All Forums") also in the resulting thread list when you do a search you'll also see the Forum name that the thread belongs to.

So stay tuned...

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Sam Jarawan STO Forums Senior Development Lead

Answer 2

Today these changes went live and we want your feedback! We’ve created a couple new threads in the suggestions forum to get the discussion going:

• How is the performance you experience on the site today?
• If you could make one more change to the forums, what would it be?
• Is there anything on the old forums you miss on the new platform?

What’s next?
Over the coming weeks we’ll start working on the next update to forums. Our focus for the next release, in addition to responding to your feedback (many of your suggestions are already being incorporated), is to make it possible to migrate forums from the old platform to the new. That means being able to bring content, profiles, and points over on a per forum basis, and leaving forum and thread redirects in place, so all links point to the new location of the forum once it’s been brought over.

Expect another update like this one in about a month with details on when the next release will be available and what’s included. We’ll begin migrating a few carefully selected forums after this next release, and they’ll be announcements in the forum a week before to let you know what to expect.

If you have feedback about the release or the move to the new forums, please let us know. You can post your feedback in the suggestions forum.

Thanks
-Andrew

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Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com