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What happened to Answers? The change is for the worse

mrunals
Path Finder

It takes time to accept changes but I'm not a fan of the new look/feel

  • Way too much whitespace
  • Fonts are too large
  • Answer and reply format structure is gone
  • Much harder to visually parse the information in posts
  • Forcing structure to questions is good in theory until you try to use it in practice/find answers. What about people who want to answer questions? I'm guessing they have to browse through 20 +/- locations?
  • The search feature doesn't work
  • anndddd you have to use only predefined labels. I'm guessing those are largely unique for each location /sigh

When the page opened from my Google search I literally thought I was on a generic site that had screen scrapped the Answers pages. 

Please reassess. This is not great UX.

Labels (1)

inventsekar
Ultra Champion

Hi.. not sure if this is the right post to ask this question.. but, after search, I see this is the one closer.. 

soo, I had around 5000 karma points on answers.splunk.com but after conversion to Community, my karma points came to 270 something. I assumed that there are some conversions from answers to community, but i missed that something wrong with the conversion. 

may i know if someone else also felt that... can someone please check my old answers karma points and new community karma points please, thanks. 

0 Karma

edoardo_vicendo
Contributor

I also see that the solution is present 2 times.

Would it be feasible to come back to the older layout (or something close to it)?

mmccul
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Regarding the look and feel, may I suggest a custom stylesheet, using a browser extension like Stylus?  If you come up with one you like, maybe even post it somewhere others can grab it.

malvidin
Communicator

@ppablo, since we cannot comment on the announcement, it looks like a discussion started here. 

If you have any issues that impact the security of the site, I'm sure @ppablo would appreciate it if you sent it to answers-support@splunk.com rather than putting it here.

https://community.splunk.com/t5/Announcements/Splunk-Answers-is-being-replatformed-answers-splunk-co...

The first issue breaks the usability of the site, the second is just embarrassing.

  • Posts and Answers from the previous Answers platform were not properly transitioned
    • Underscores in text like "SHOULD_LINEMERGE" are used as modifiers, like "SHOULDLINEMERGE", which breaks almost any discussion that includes common field names or configuration files
  • Khoros doesn't have Splunk in its dictionary, and recommends searching for Spunk
Tags (2)

malvidin
Communicator

Also, the auto-suggest function is too aggressive in changing the search term.

"AMBER_RAW" searches for  "Amber"

"BUCKETDIR" searches for "BUCKETING"

I would also expect that no valid Splunk search command would ever return "Did you mean:"

If I search for nomv, I don't want to search for "none". If I search for fillnull, I don't want to search for "willfully".

I can forgive the style issues, but there are still a lot of usability and content issues to work out.

malvidin
Communicator

I also found that you can't preview a new post without adding tags. If it is required, that makes sense before posting, but not for a preview.

I've also had issues with ghost code samples if the code block is accidentally selected and dragged, but I don't know if that is just an issue with my browser (Chrome 83.0.4103.116) . I also couldn't find a way to highlight code inline.

 

Code samples don't provide SPL as a language - spooky!

 

 

image.png

 

edoardo_vicendo
Contributor

Where is it possible to  suggest for improvements on the new UI?

Is this thread the correct place?

Thanks a lot,

Edoardo

malvidin
Communicator

Officially, no. In the announcement that they might break things, they only request emails for urgent issues. This was the closest post I found to list routine issues that aren't urgent. I know there are also complaints about the new layout, fonts, etc., but I'm trying to focus on the content/capability first.

If you have any issues that impact the security of the site, I'm sure @ppablo would appreciate it if you sent it to answers-support@splunk.com rather than putting it here.

https://community.splunk.com/t5/Announcements/Splunk-Answers-is-being-replatformed-answers-splunk-co...

malvidin
Communicator

When I reply to a message, I don't need to include a tag.

When I edit that reply, I had to include a tag, even though the original didn't have a tag.

I created this reply without a tag, and this edit doesn't have a tag. So it isn't always required. In the other instance when I had the issue, I was the author of the original message. Maybe that's the issue.

malvidin
Communicator

After the change, we cannot add inline code blocks like before. Those code blocks are still visible in other posts, and can be added to new posts, but they are rejected when submitted. It now takes much more time to post when discussing any code.

 
 

-inline_code.png

https://community.splunk.com/t5/Splunk-Search/How-to-extract-the-HTTP-Status-Code/m-p/419343

Maybe I just need to use `backticks`, even though it doesn't show in the preview.

This is the source HTML for the portion of the post. 

<code>"prefix : (?&lt;status_code&gt;\d+)"</code>

And the error I receive when I try to include it in this post. 

code_html_removed.png

dstuder
Communicator

Ugh! The threading is non-existent. This makes the site totally unusable. This can be done with Khoros. Take a look at Atlassian's community site ... also running on Khoros. Their's is easy to see the threading. Please fix this.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/can-you-include-all-child-pages-automaticall...

malvidin
Communicator

I don't know when the change was made, but threading seems to be working now.

0 Karma

dstuder
Communicator

I guess it's sorta better, but there is so much wasted white space that it is still hard to see the threading. The threaded comments take up so much screen real estate that all you see is a couple comments at a time which makes the threading hard to visually pick up. Still not great.

brwalker_
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @dstuder 

Threading will be enabled as part of a larger UI/UX enhancements to be released soon.  

Thanks!

to4kawa
Ultra Champion

I guess it can only trust people who have been doing this for a long time.

And the way they treat people who have responded to them is terrible.

What does this feedback end up being?

The solution.

You need to put it back in.

maybe.

I've thought about my response quite a bit, and I think that's why they accepted it.

mafruma
Explorer

Yes! These are really big issues. 

I was looking for an obscure error this morning and cannot find the posts that Google finds because they are no longer available. 

I will likely need to open more support tickets for all of the questions that I used to be able to find answers to from the amazing community until this has been resolved. 

 

brwalker_
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @mafruma 

Regarding inaccessible posts, we have corrected the problem so if you still encounter this, please provide a link to the post so we can take a look.

Thanks!

inventsekar
Ultra Champion

one more thing...

before update, i actually had around 300+ karma points.. but after update, now i have only "201" !!!

 

you guys also faced this ah?!?

0 Karma

bandit
Motivator

My Karma points went down as I believe they have  a new scoring system, however, my relative ranking is about the same.

0 Karma

gcusello
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Hi al all,

I agree with the first impression of the new look: the old one was smarter than this!

In addition I don't understand what's the algorythm of translation of Karma points: I had 26500 Karma Points in Answers and now I have 779 Karma Points, I was the N° 13 All Time and now I'm the N° 30!

At the end, I didn't find any communication point, in other words, how can I ask something (like the above question) to the Community management?

Ciao.

Giuseppe

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