This new forum software is horrible. Only 4 forums you can post in. No forum to discuss any of this. No obvious way to tell if a post/thread has been read. You cannot subscribe to threads/forums to monitor.
It's obvious you want to eliminate regular users who would help out others. It's just too much work trying to keep track of anything.
Hey andyross,
Thanks for being such an awesome part of Roku Community, you've been with us for a long time! Yes, things look different, we're getting used to it too. But a lot of what you’re used to is still here!
Keep the feedback coming, and if you spot bugs, definitely let us know! We're going to continue iterating over the next few months and we appreciate your notes, especially from users who know use and love these forums.
I agree with andyross. The old forum had its issues, but this new design made things worse in a lot of ways. And unfortunately, it didn't upgrade security to eliminate the spammers as there were a number of spam posts here within minutes of the forum coming back online. And then there is the hunt to figure out how to report them, which is now up in a setting wheel on the right. The forum should be easy to read, easy to follow, easy to determine what are the new posts and when they were posted, easy to see the newest posts and whether they have been read by you or not. This update doesn't do that very well at all. Eliminating the section for billing and payment issues helps clear up the confusion (although that could be fixed by making the customer support and contact section clearer and less of a mess for users to contact support), but that is about the only thing that this update does right. Everything on here is bland and blends together making it hard to read and find things.
And at least your forum design isn't as bad as Netgear's new one, but that is not saying a lot.
JWS9518 Great feedback, thank you! I’ll check if we can surface a “Mark as Spam” option outside of that menu. Totally fair callout.
We do show unread counts on the board page, have you noticed that, or does it not behave the way you'd expect? It tracks posts you haven’t seen since your last visit, but I’m curious if it’s not feeling helpful or if there’s something we could add to make it better. Your point about not being able to distinguish bold vs. unbold threads makes a lot of sense.
Does the Bell+ icon give you the kind of follow/notification functionality you’re looking for? If not, I’d love to know what you’d ideally want there.
And when you say it’s hard to read, do you mean the font style, color contrast, or something else? Someone else mentioned that the thinner purple text is tough on the eyes, so we’re gathering more data on that.
We’re absolutely listening. We did a bunch of user studies over the past couple of years, but they mostly reflect feedback from casual users. Power user input like yours is super valuable, and while some things are limited by vendor capabilities, we’re actively iterating and your insights are helping shape what comes next.
--Austin
Another stupid downgrade is there is no way to tell if you read a post or not. Before, new or posts with a new reply were bold text, and read ones were plain text titles. now, you have to guess how long ago you had read through that forum and try to read the tiny light-grey posted times.
I think Roku TVs should have a separate forum category from players as the issues tend to be distinct.
Looks like I was editing my post as you typed that. I was hoping for a feature like many forums have that jump you the first post in a thread that you haven't read. These don't rely on having to change the sorting order. (Though that's better than nothing.)
Is there a player tag? (only?)
It seems like the most common tags are "TV & Player Features" and TV & Player Settings", so these are not useful for filtering players FROM TVs. (Seems important since many questions are like: why can't I find [some] menu and the answer is that the user doesn't have that type of device.)
I clicked Show All on the tags field, typed player and got "No tags to show". Then I came back to that Show All later, it comes up with a blank search field and still says "No tags to Show". (This is a bug I assume.)
I reloaded the page, then clicked show all again, and this time there was a list of tags, but searching for player still yields nothing, it's also not that easy to scroll that list of tags when the scrolling list gets larger as you're scrolling it. So I don't know if there's a separate player tag in there. It's weird having the scroll bar thumb jump away from my mouse and having to move back up to grab it again.
Minor annoyances:
It seems like last visit time and date is gone. I found it interesting to know whether a user ever came back to see if he had any replies.
When you select Newest below the OP in a thread, the reply box is still at the bottom of the thread (below a post that is now old), which seems odd to me. (I know you can press the reply icons, though.)
Also it seems odd that selecting Newest in a thread is the same as setting it in your profile - ie: makes Newest your selection everywhere, and I generally only like Newest as a workaround for revisiting old threads. Then I get confused when I start reading a new thread backwards.
I believe the old software would list the date a thread was started, along with the date/time of the last reply. This doesn't. You can't tell if something is basically out of date .
And it seems to count your own posts as unread. I think I have read my own posts or replies.
Also, the posts do not separate the @ names from what you type without hitting enter, making it hard to read.
Can you post a screenshot here of what you're seeing? Thank you!
