Forums 4 - Release 29 - June 9th

Question

Recognition Prep Work
We have been doing a lot of work on the back end in test environments to prepare for a July 7th deployment of a new recognition system. I plan to post something next week point users to the "CTP" environment so users will know what to expect and have an opportunity to post bugs and ask questions. We are targeting this for sometime next week. 

New Home Page Prototype
The current forums home pages (for MSDN and TechNet en-us) are ridiculously large. There is just way too much content on them causing issues with performance and usability. We are experimenting with some alternative home pages for cases of too much content. An update is on CTP now at http://ctp.social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums and http://ctp.social.technet.microsoft.com/forums .  Next week when we officially point people to CTP we will include instructions on where to post feedback for both the new home pages and recognition. The home pages on CTP currently have a couple of enhancements: 1. if logged in, shows the last forums the logged in user has visited 2. shows top 10 most posted to forums for the last week 3. offers a more efficient view with a 'find forum' feature to more quickly get to the forum you want. This page isn't finished, we are still working on it, but it should give people an idea of the direction we are heading for the July update. Recognition currently in CTP has a lot of bugs and issues, so that won't be updated until next week.

Spam Abuse Fixed
Since deploying some spam mitigation code last month we have see a lot of false positives and other issues. Today's deployment should address most of these.

Forums Role Management
We have made some changes to allow the Microsoft Forum owners to more easily manage their moderators. Only MSFT Forum owners will notice this change. 

"Questions Only" Forum Setting
We have implemented a forum setting allowing MSFT Forum owners to only accept 'question' thread types. This is 'off' by default but this allows more flexibility for a forum owner to only take questions in their forum if they so choose.

Ask a Question page clean up
We have removed some of the ugly javascript pop up dialog mess in the 'ask a question' or new thread page.

Removal of Reason Dialogs
We have removed the 'reason' dialogs from some of the forum actions. These javascript dialogs really served no purpose other than annoying the people that use the application.

Various other bug fixes
We have fixed various bug fixes and are continuing to look into some of the log in issues people have been reporting. We are also taking the 'paging' issue, where people asked for the paging to be put back at the top of the forum view. We are also targeting a long standing bug around the silly thread preview issue, where a thread doesn't expand if out of brand context. Expect these changes next month.

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Community Forums Program Manager