Announcements for all Forums Forum

Forums 4 - Release 8 - October 16, 2009

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:42:44 Z

The October 09 release focussed mostly on some minor user interface updates, bug fixes and additional locale support. Even though the update was functionally minor there were a few minor interface annoyances the team will be looking into over the next few weeks. These include:

Some fonts in the system are a little too large, such as the filter interface causeing some wrapping in the filter bars above thread lists

Code snippet fonts became too large, we'll reduce them soon

For those beta testing the NNTP Bridge Client beta, no update this week. We plan to post an update the next release in mid November

October 16th Changes Include:

Substantial effort to support the MSDN Redesign and maintain visual consistency and user navigation contexts across our shared online properties

Doubled the number of locales supported (bringing the total to 35 locales). The following are the new locales introduced with this release: Australia (English), Austria (German), Belgium (Dutch & French), Bulgaria (Bulgarian), Denmark (Danish), Greece (Greek), Indonesia (Indonesian), Kazakhstan (Russian), Netherlands (Dutch), New Zealand (English), Norway (Norwegian), Portugal (Portuguese), Romania (Romanian), Slovakia (Slovak), Sweden (Swedish), Ukraine (Ukranian)

Forum feeds fueling the Community Activity control on the MSDN Home Page

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 7 - October 1, 2009

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:20:37 Z

New Features

Code Formatting Support for C++: Code formatting now includes support for C++ language.

RSS Feeds for Community Activity: We have created a few new RSS feeds for some integration scenarios with MSDN coming in a few weeks.

Most Popular Threads Brand/Locale: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/threads?sort=popularity&outputas=rss
Most Popular Threads Any Category: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/visualbasic/threads?sort=popularity&outputas=rss
Top Participants Brand/Locale: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/user/leaderboards?outputas=rss
Site Stats Brand/Locale: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/stats?outputas=rss
Recent Posts Any Category: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/visualbasic/recentposts?outputas=rss

RSS support for Forum Syndication: We have added RSS to the forum syndication options (previously we only enabled atom feeds). We have changed the default behind the syndication orange buttons in all the forums to RSS.

Answers Specific Updates: We have done a few things specific to the answers forums platforms. We have updated the Ask page for a variety of reasons, most of them usability related. We ran some usability tests on the Ask a Question page and implemented some of the suggestions from the usability folks. The page is also easier for use to maintain and enhance in the coming months. Aside from updating this page we did some additional back end work on instrumentation which ultimately helps us understand more about how users are using the application.

Error Logging and Reporting Enhancements: We have done some internal work to integrate some error handling libraries to help us more quickly address 500s and other errors some of our users have reported. We will have more accessibility into the error text being logged on the back end which should lead to a more reliable application later.

MSDN Specific "New Thread" log in text: MSDN Users asking questions when not logged in will see some additional useful information when posting explaining there are some related useful external sites and resources to get help. Prior to this change we simply showed users a link to sign in. The new text and links explains there are asp.net and other sites available, provides links and also explains to users they need both a live id and profile to participate.

New Locale Support (fi-fi, en-ie, en-sg, de-ch, fr-ch): Have added some support for a new locales. These will come online sometime in the coming weeks and months depending on the internal resources to create and maintain forums in these newly supported locales.

What about the Bridge? Users of the offline client NNTP Bridge beta will have to wait a few more weeks for an update. We simply have not been able to make enough progress on the really important bugs we think were blocking and did not want to make an update available just for the sake of making an update available. We want to address the blocking bugs and this will take a little more time.

Bug Fixes

Forums: Top Answerers Users Missing
Locale: List of Categories are not displayed in the forums category list box if there are no forums specific to that locale
Feed RSS : Thread title is not a hyperlink in RSS result page
Arrive word is misspelled in My Settings page
Text "You cannot vote again or vote on your own post" should be changed based on user signed in or not.
RSS: Feeds are generated for Private forums as well
Forums: 404s thrown from MyThreads, My Forums Threads and other multi brand views (pages and RSS)
Wrong Locales appearing in the Masthead locale dropdown
SR# 2-2914967297 : Forums:: Bug in forum eyebrow for Answers.
Forums: Default syndication urls to =rss instead of =atom
Forums: Wrong category in eyebrow
Updates to ensure the application at least functions on the mobile pocket IE.
Ensuring forum threads are only viewable in their intended brand/locales
Locale : Leaderboards failing for all of the new locales except Fi-Fi
Web.Config: The new locales should be enabled for forums and all other apps
Locale: HelpFile is not localized for new locales (fi-fi, de-ch, fr-ch)
tooltip (answers brand specific) message should be different for join a question
Locale: This user has not yet visited or participated in forums is not localized
Private search page:: Clicking on display name on Private search result page doesn’t redirect to profile page
Message View::Voting icon and text in the message for thread are close (i.e. don't have space)
Ask your question: (answers brand specific) Watermark does not disappear if user clicks on the ordered list button
A lot of German Localization bugs wrong strings in a lot of places
Locale: "Partner" key word is localized in fi-fi locale. Partner key word (used for affiliation) should not be localized
Locale: Tooltip is not localized for the text "You cannot vote again"
SR# 2-2784225228 : Forums:: Broken forum post. Illegal characters.
Forums: Voting ux region is too narrow
Forums: Search term not found
Forums: (answers brand specific) Join a question need singular versions: "1 persons" doesn't sound good
(answers brand specific) Locked thread allows users to join a question

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 6 - August 28, 2009

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 02:44:07 Z

The August release included some new features, bug fixes and an update to the Forums NNTP Bridge Beta.

New Features

Related Threads
This feature was implemented initially in the answers brand forums last month and we are going to turn this on soon for the rest of the branded forums, likely early next week. This feature gives users more helpful options when landing at a thread page from an external search engine.

"Need an Answer" (answers brand only)
This feature is implemented only on the Answers brand forums, focusing on the consumer forums. The feature allows users to declare they also need an answer to a particular question. The feature is intended to enable a few key scenarios.

Allows users to quickly subscribe a question so when an answer is provided, they receive a Live Alert
Increments a value to help enable teams to gauge the impact of a particular answer
Enables answer providers and markers the ability to filter and sort by questions that the most users are waiting on
Informs forum owner which questions impact the most users
Help reduce duplicate questions by enable users to get answers to existing ones

The feature is one of a few changes to enrich the experience for users landing on a forums thread from a search engine, giving them additional options to participate.

Identicons
The drab default redundant user avatars are now random images.

Forums NNTP Bridge August Beta
The Forums NNTP Client Bridge is a .Net client application a user can install to configure their NNTP Reader of choice to read and post to forums. The August beta is the latest beta update, prior betas were only made available to MVPs and Microsoft affiliated users. More information on how to get up and running on the client bridge can be found in a Microsoft Connection here: http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=927 Users can download the bits, try them out and log bugs at the connection.

Bug Fixes
Below are some of the bug fixes in this release.

Fix for live alerts failures when moving threads (in some scenarios)
Database Job Fixes: Fixes to the aggregators to address outages and latency issues in My Threads, My Alerts and Recognition Point updates
New Windows Live Account Creation bug where new users are not properly redirected
Incorrect redirects for some merge thread scenarios
Forums post order is changing when a post is marked as helpful
Flat View::When “Always Show Answers First On Thread Page” is checked in My Settings. Then Answered post should be shown in Answers and All Replies section
IE6::problem with posting reply (other than root post) using IE6
IE6::Forums UI is disturbed on IE6 Browser
Splitting a thread throws 500 error under some scenarios
Marking a post as helpful, deleting a post and undeleting a post is taking some time
IE 6::UI::Medals, User Avatar, Display name on message view are not aligned displayed
Users who don’t have access to Private forums Category URL fall back to Forums Home page after Signing In using Private forums Category URL.
Forums: Posting takes users to their recent posts
On Clicking Reply or Quote the bottom scroll bar on message view page is moving to right side (Only on IE 7)
Vote icon should not be dispalyed in the Edit window
Unmarking a post marked as Abusive doesn't display unmarked text in message view of the post
Related Threads: Box container for related threads title should be “Related Threads” instead of "Related Topics"
IE 6: UI issues in Expression brans
Forums UI: 404 error returned in UI when clicking on Italian Breadcrumb
Forums: Live alerts failing silently
IE 8 & FF::Forums: Post Ordering: Thread Page View : Answered posts are not dispalyed above all replies for Unauthenticated User
UnMarking post as Abuisve display's the text "Flagged Abusive by" in the message history of the post
Moving a thread to another forum (Across different shards) resets view count
IE6:: Feeds are not dispalyed properly on feed results page where OutputAs = Atom is passed in feeds URL
Forums: Message history for delete adds mark as abusive flag unecessarily
Expression Brand : Display names are cut off in thread preview and browse users page
UnMark Abusive post is failing results in error message
Change type thread fails for Thread starter with error message "You are not authorized to perform this action"
Mark As Abusive::Mark as Abusive posts are displayed as red for normal users
Abusive Posts should show "already reported" label

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 5 - July 9, 2009

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:57:51 Z

Forums 4 Release 5 is scheduled to be deployed end of the day July 9th.

Changes
An update to the Expression masthead to be consistent with the rest of the Expression online sites
Answers branded thread pages will show related topics in the right rail

Bug Fixes
Fixes for rendering RSS for User Threads for users having DBCS characters in their display name
Fix for editing a post, some users see flashing and edit text disappearing when attempting to edit
Update to the Atom date times to correct an offset for UTC, enabling offline aggregates to correctly show local date times
Fix to place Answers back into the thread "All Replies" section (When unselected in the "My Settings" page)
An IE 7 specific issue to not horizontally scrooll to the right when replying
URL eyebrow and banner image fixes for the Microsoft and Answers branded forums

Notes
The team is looking into a release in the next few weeks to ensure thread posts are ordered by date time and not helpful vote counts. We are also looking into a few minor visual updates to the voting user interface to make it more discoverable and understandable.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 4 - June 25, 2009

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:51:25 Z

In an effort to get users more involved in highlighting helpful posts we have moved the voting input user interface control into the left column of each post. We also gave it a different "up voting" visual treatment. The team will be monitoring the usage of the voting in the coming months to see if it is being used more. We want it used more so we can offer more alternatives to surface content the community has decided is helpful.

June introduced a few changes to the default thread view. There were two basic changes: ordering posted by vote counts and removing redundant answered posts from the all replies" section of the thread. Since introducing these minor changes many key community contributors have advised us to change it back to preserve the date time layout of the "all replies" list of posts. It is too difficult to follow the flow of a conversation that let to the answers without the posts in their date time order. The team is evaluating a change to restore this useful aspect of the thread ordering. We are also looking at some changes to the voting user interface to make it more obvious and discoverable, in addition to the change in location. The ordering and voting updates do not have dates for going live yet. They will not be in the June 9th update but will likely be deployed soon after that.

Prior to the June release clicking a user name took the user to a page showing the users forums contribution totals (numbers of posts, answers, etc) with links to their threads. We also included a link to the profile page if the user wanted to view others or edit their own profile. June changed this to put the forums contribution date into the profile itself, centralizing the data with the profile and removing redundancy across the two pages (forums contributions and profile).

Updates to badges to only show badges you have earned and not disabled looking badges you have not. The goal was to show less clutter in the user interface while still recognizing user’s contributions.

A bug was addressed to ensure moved and merged thread urls end up redirecting to their proper location. The team also resolved some thread subject encoding issues in the application to correctly render special characters.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 3 - May 28, 2009

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:55:41 Z

May enabled a new feature called “escalate” enabling MVP Moderators to flag threads for MSFT attention. This can only be used in forums where the Microsoft Forum Owners have decided to enable and allow for this feature. Moderators that have questions about this feature or if it will be enabled in their forums should contact their forum owners. Escalated threads (by MVP Moderators) can be filtered by moderators and is a way for MVP Moderators to flag threads that need a Microsoft response.

Forum RSS feed formats were changed to default to ATOM feeds. Existing RSS feeds authored or subscribed to prior to the May release will continue to functional indefinitely.

The team also fixed a few internal facing bugs in some of our core reporting.

Users can now search in private forums. This includes the ability to search forums that require special access or permissions such as moderator only forums.

Changes have been made in how thread views are counted. Prior to the May release views were updated on every request. This exposed the potential abuse to inflate the view numbers, used by some to gauge popularity. A change was made in May to ensure this number cannot be easily incremented or abused.

The team also addressed a few RTE issues around formatting code and editing hyperlinks.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 2 - April 23, 2009

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:31:23 Z

This release focused one improvements for our private forums.

Live Alerts are enabled now for our private forums, including moderator forums.
Pages that require authentication now ask for it rather than erroring out.
Users viewing forums that have cooresponding technology centers in technet or msdn will get masthead tab contexts.
A new "Microsoft Partner" affiliation is now rendering for users who are part of the Microsoft Partner program.

We have also deployed various fixes reported by our users. We have made some updates to the "Top Answerers" boxes statistics and some user statistics for contributions. Another area udpates for Release 2 was the idea of navigation context. So for a handful of forums that have related centers, users will have more relevant masthead tab links in the tops of pages. Users in Visual Basic forums now will get Visual Basic documentation when they click the "Library" link at the top of the page.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 4 - Release 1 - March 27, 2009

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:26:46 Z

Overview
Forums 4 (the March release) was a complete rewrite of the user interface. The goals were mostly focused on performance, but most other areas of the user interface were re evaluated as they were rewritten.

Enhancements
Vast Performance and responsiveness improvements, in some cases increases up to 50%. Most pages improved around 25% or so
Fixes for globalization Issues, longer strings in many languages would simply break the user interface
Updates to Top Answerers lists showing the number of answers contributed in the last 30 days
Enabling moderator features such as “Mark as Answer” in thread preview
New lighter weight editor
Entire threads shown in thread preview
Visual queue for incoming live updated threads
Question and Answer pairing display in thread view
Moved My Links to right rail bringing content higher in the screen
Enable unauthenticated page views to increment the thread view counts
More visible Helpful Voting user interface
New treatment for most icons
Fixes for some edge cases for My Threads list of threads
Fix to enable category scoped searching, searching from a single category page
User feedback for events that take time (posting, expanding a thread for preview)
Ability to select category listed forums for move thread
Fixes for some users inability to subscribe to live alerts

New Features
New “My Settings” page displaying participation and additional preferences
Ability to disable tag clouds, live updates
In-line replies in thread views
Ability to save favorite forums to “My Forums”
Aggregate view of favorite “My Forum Threads”

Other Changes
Page Based Moderator Tasks - moved from previous “sliding div” to their own pages
Dialog Based Moderator Features - simple alert dialogs for sticky and delete actions
Thread and Flat View is now a My Settings preference (user setting), not a forum setting
Queuing implementation for some thread moderator actions, thread locked while queue in process

Deprecated Features
Removed filters on thread page
Persisting expand collapse state of category pages is not yet implemented
Auto updates on category and thread pages

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 3 - Release 10 - Feb 26, 2009

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:23:26 Z

Forums Release 10 include various bug fixes to the system. One notable feature was the new "Ask a Question" page. This page was created to enable users to post from any context, not simply within a forum. It also brought back some important features from past versions, such as the ability see related questions while posting. The old div based user interface to post new threads lacked the adequate space for explaining some features to users such as tagging and alerts. The new experience devotes an entire page to the process.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 3 - Release 9 - Jan 30, 2009

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:20:29 Z

Forums 3 Release 9 focus was on localization fixes and migration from the forums.microsoft.com domain.

Community Forums Program Manager

Forums 3 - Release 8

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:43:26 Z

This week we released several bug fixes and changes into the forums.

The most interesting or impactful changes are:
- Update to the forum search list of scoping options. You'll notice that in the drop down box for the forums search you'll now see fewer options. The available options should make the list easier to use. You can now widen the scope of the search from the forum or category you're looking at. If you're in a specific forum you'll search that forum by default.

- Hyperlinks will now allow strings with "ID=" in them. The overzealous ID stripping has been fixed and you should now be able to insert links properly.

- Updates to MVP Profile Sync. This should make our MVP tag much more reliable.

- Updates to the search application. You should notice some small changes to the search experience that will make things better.

As always if you see a problem, please report it in the bug reporting forum here.

Jeremy Kelley

Forums 3 - Release 7

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:47:04 Z

Hi everyone!

Today we had a major deployment of what we're calling Release 7 of forums. The major work behind this release has gone into increasing our ability to scale and offer you new forums, while facilitating our migration of the remaining forums on http://forums.microsoft.com.

There is one new feature you may be interested in as a forums user.

Live Search is now the forums search provider!

If you search a category or forum you may notice a strange looking GUID being added to your search. The GUID is used to help scope your search to the context you've asked for, so if you want to go back to global scope, you can remove that search text.

Thanks!

-Jeremy

Jeremy Kelley

New forums have migrated on 10/9/2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:39:47 Z

Welcome all new forums users from our recently migrated forums!

Here's the list of forums joining us on the new platform this week:

· Office Live Basics, Essentials and Premium

· Open XML Format SDK

· Small Business Application Development

· Visual Studio Tools for Office

· Commerce Server 2007

· Commerce Server 2002 and Earlier

· MDM General Discussions

· MDM Integration

· MDM Business Rules and Workflow

· MDM Data Quality and Profiling

· MDM Setup, Configuration and Security

· MDM Entity and Hierarchy Management

· MICROSOFT UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AJAX SDK

· MICROSOFT UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS MANAGED API SDK

· MICROSOFT UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS CLIENT SDK

· MICROSOFT OFFICE COMMUNICATOR 2007 SDK

· MICROSOFT OFFICE COMMUNICATIONS SERVER 2007 SDK

· Visual Studio Team System Code Name "Rosario"

· Getting Started With Visual Studio Team System

· Visual Studio Team System - Architecture & Design

· Visual Studio Performance Tools (Profiler)

· Visual Studio Application Verifier

· Visual Studio Code Analysis and Code Metrics

· Visual Studio Team System - Testing

· Visual Studio Team System - Web and Load Testing

· Visual Studio Team System - Database Professionals

· Visual Studio Team System - Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF)

· Team Foundation Server - General

· Team Foundation Server - Setup

· Team Foundation Server - Administration

· Team Foundation Server - Build Automation

· Team Foundation Server – Power Tools & Add-ons

· Team Foundation Server - Process Templates

· Team Foundation Server - Reporting & Warehouse

· Team Foundation Server - Team System Web Access

· Team Foundation Server - Version Control

· Team Foundation Server - Work Item Tracking

· Technology Area - Team Foundation Server

· Connected Services Framework

· Parallel Computing General

· Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework

· Windows Live Search: Development

· Windows Live Messenger Client: Development

· Windows Live Spaces: Development

· Windows Live Controls Development

· Windows Live General: Development

· Virtual Earth: Map Control Development

· Windows Live ID: Development

· Microsoft adCenter: Development

· Windows Live Writer: Development

· Windows Live Data Development

· Windows Live Alerts Development Forum

· Windows Live Agents Development

· Windows Live Messenger Web APIs: Development

· Microsoft Atlas APIs: Development

· Reference Source Server Discussion

· Windows Communication Foundation

Jeremy Kelley

Forums 3 - Release 5

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:33:54 Z

Forums Release 5 went live yesterday, and includes enhancements to sign-in, marking posts as helpful or abusive, and many bug fixes.

Stay signed in

With the addition of the latest version of Live ID authentication, you can stay signed in to forums for up to 24 hours. If you close your browser, then open a new one, when you navigate back to forums – you’re still signed in!

Save your password

If you install the Windows Live Sign-In Assistant (part of the Windows Live suite), you can easily switch between different users sharing the same machine. Plus, you can finally save your password and sign in to forums very quickly every time you visit.

Marking posts helpful/abusive

We listened to your feedback about options in the vote menu not being discoverable, and removed it. There is now an option next to quote to let other users know a “Post was helpful”. We hope this will encourage more helpful flagging, so that the best information is more discoverable. On the other hand, we’ve made reporting abusive posts more discoverable by moving the link back to the bottom right corner of each post where it was in the old forums.

Many bugs have been addressed in this release as well, so please check any bugs you’ve previously reported to see if they’ve been addressed. In particular, we fixed a number of issues regarding special characters in display names and tags. As always, we welcome you feedback, please let us know what you like and what you don’t by posting to the bugs and suggestions forums.

We’re preparing to migrate more forums over from http://forums.microsoft.com, I’ll post another announcement soon with details of what to expect.

Thanks,

-Andrew

Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com

Forums 3.4 is live!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:33:09 Z

Today’s release (3.4) is live and includes a number of new features, as well as bug fixes. Here are a few of the highlights:

· Persist Expand/Collapse on forums home – When you visit the forums home page (MSDN | TechNet | Expression | Microsoft), we remember which categories are collapsed and which are expanded. That means the next time you go to the home page, you’ll see the forums you use the most, and not the ones you don’t.

· Visual Updates – After listening to your feedback, we have made some enhancements for usability and accessibility to make our forum pages easier to read.

o Forum view – Moved “New Thread” to filter bar, moving messages higher up the page, and added the number of results being displayed.

o Proposed Answer Updates – Proposed answers are more clearly differentiated from the true answer.

o Browse Users Updates – Updated to include avatars and user badges.

· Threaded View – Switch your thread preview mode from the flat “list” view to a hierarchical “threaded” view. The setting is persisted and applies to all forums.

· Mark all as Read – If you want to start fresh and mark all threads as read can do so by selecting “Mark All Read”. After that the “unread” filter will only show new threads or threads with new posts since they have selected the mark all read option.

· Categories in Breadcrumb –This adds an extra level in the breadcrumb, so you can navigate up from a forum to a group of forums (ex. Windows Server forums), without going all the way to the forum home page. This helps users who come in to a forum thread from a search engine, navigate “up” to find the right forum for their question.

· Mobile Support – This is an initial release of support for mobile devices. You can view forums, threads, and messages, post new messages and reply. You must have already signed in and created a profile. The mobile version can be accessed by simply adding “mobile” to the url as in http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/mobile/en-us/forums/.

As always, we welcome you feedback, please let us know what you like and what you don’t by posting to the bugs and suggestions forums.

What’s next?

After today’s release our sole focus will be on performance and scalability, so feature work will take a back seat for a few months. We’ll still fix important bugs, but there won’t be significant additional functionality until later in the fall.

Thanks,

-Andrew

Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com

Forum 3.x Sustained Engineering Release is live! - June 30th, 2008

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:20:00 Z

Monday, June 30, 2008, we released a sustained engineering release (SE) to the Forums 3.x site. Some of the fixes with the SE release include:

· Live Alerts Enhancements: Include Forum Name and Reply Content

· New Top Answerers rotator lists

· Show Moderators Per Forum

· Ability to Lock a Forum, so it is read only

· Enable Moderator Only Posting forums

Report your suggestions here: Forums 3.x Suggestions

Report your bugs and problems here: Forums 3.x Bug Reporting

For more on this release from our Dev Lead, see this post: http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en-US/suggest/thread/2904e5ca-75cc-4637-913a-c97832e50a16

Thanks-
Alicia

Program Manager, Server and Tools Online Engineering Live Services Team

Forum 3 Update (Release 3.3), is live!

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:10:46 Z

Our next update to Microsoft Forums, Release 3, will go live next week. You’ll notice we’ve added a few improvements you’ve asked for, like search within a forum, sign-in prompt on reply/start new thread, thread preview enhancements, as well as a number of bug fixes.

What you won’t notice right away is the work we’ve done to enable migration of forums from the current platform (http://forums.microsoft.com/) to the new one. Starting soon after 3.3 is live, we’ll begin migrating the first set of forums, including forum threads, user profiles, and recognition points, all on a per forum basis. That means when forums you’ve participated in on the old platform come over, the only thing you’ll have to do is add alerts for any threads you were tracking. The first set of forums migrating will be…

MSDN
.Net Development
Visual Basic
Visual C#
Visual C++
Visual Studio

TechNet
Forefront
Windows Server 2008

Announcements about what to expect have been posted in each of these forums. When migration begins, another announcement will be posted letting users know that the forum will be locked temporarily to new posts. As soon as the migration is complete, a final post will be made (notifying RSS subscribers of the new location), and then all forum/thread urls will point to their new location on Forums 3.

If you have any questions or concerns, post your feedback in the suggestions forum.

Thanks
-Andrew

Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com

Forums Overview Video Now Available!!!

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:12:30 Z

I've just posted a 15 minute overview video of some of the new forums features that you may not notice right away. Check out my blog or go directly to the link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sjarawan/default.aspx

http://xpstream.winisp.net/samjarawan/msdn%20forums%20overview.wmv

I am Sam

Where are all the forums?

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:45:42 Z

Current forums will migrate to the new platform starting later this year. In the mean time, to visit them go to http://forums.microsoft.com/.

Forum Update is Live

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:55:39 Z

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

Andrew Brenner, Forums Product Planner