Any plans to make this Community more like the BT TV one?

[Midnight_Voice]

I find the UI here hateful.

Are there any plans to make it more like the BT Community?

Both are Khoros, so the underpinnings should be the same, despite its chameleon-like ability to appear very differently depending how the skinning is done.

[Midnight_Voice]

@DarrenDev 

Aren't ‘Helpful’ acknowledgments the EE equivalent of Kudos?

I also find the login frequency annoying; I imagine this is a design decision, but I wonder if there is any good reason the expiry is so much shorter than on the BT Community?

I don’t know about the direct input being faster than the BT approach, but yes it is better; I was just able to look right back up the thread while replying, whereas the BT approach silos you with the one posting you are replying to.

Here’s the Unread Topics list, in the second screenshot, right at the bottom of the page shown in the first screenshot (where the boldening of unread is working at the moment!) ; the area goes entirely blank if you have read everything, with not even a title, though, so you will only see it when there is new stuff. You can press View All there, and get the display shown in the third screenshot:-

I thought I’d got the BT Community to do something similar to that third display, even though there seems to be no formal method for it, by appending /unread to a page I was looking at, but I can’t reproduce this at the moment 😢

[DarrenDev]

@Midnight_Voice you'll see my account isn't in the list under Most Solutions, or Top Helpful. My account isn't eligible.

When you log into the EE community, it's with an EE ID. That same browser window can be used to log into all other EE sites without entering credentials again, thus it expires quicker for safety.

I hadn't spotted the unread list at the bottom - it's showing a lot of threads that I have read. The main list varies a lot - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It sometimes shows stuff as read that I know I haven't read.

I use Edge and Chrome.

[Midnight_Voice]

@DarrenDev 

Ah, I see what you mean about not being eligible. I guess the Helpful I just gave you goes straight into the bit bucket 😛

The Now Community, RIP, had the same short expiry on this iPad, as the EE Community, and for much the same reason; same login for the Community and for the streaming. OTOH, that login persisted forever, unless actively deleted, on TVs and such. Cue bewildered users who had thrown away or sold TVs without wiping them, only to find a new subscription mysteriously bought in their name months later 😛

I think I’ve seen things I’ve read coming up in the Unread list in the past, but I haven’t caught it out lately. And I’d rather have a false positive there than a false negative in the main display, though getting both exactly right would be the ideal.

Unread things marked as read (no bold on the title) is the bug to be chased down. As they are always to be found in the Unread list, it seems to be a formatting error in the main display, rather than the posting being actually misclassified. As you have seen this on Edge, I guess that rules out it being just a Safari issue.

[Midnight_Voice]

I’m aware I started a hare running here, and never came back 😢

My main problem with the Community turned out to be a bug, the unreliable boldening of Unread threads in the main listing. Hopefully this will get fixed; it’s very clear, and reliable, as to what I have and haven’t read in the BT Community.

For the moment, the workaround I have successfully adopted is to work off the ‘Unread’ list, which does seem to be reliable now. And it also shows less of the original posting, so you get more on a page, closer to the density of the BT Community.

But the BT Community remains nicer to look at - better choice and use of fonts and colours, while the EE Community is pretty monochrome.

Also - and this is a problem with many Communities, not just this one - there is too much emphasis on the original posting. Good for people coming new to the thread, but not when there are sixteen pages, and you’ve read fourteen of them. You know there’s stuff you haven’t read, but there’s nothing to help you find your high water mark.

At least the BT Community tells you what the latest posting is, as well as what the first posting was; the EE Community doesn’t. But you can’t click on that last posting and have it take you there, which is a lost opportunity.

Actually, the holy grail here is something the Now Community promised, even gave us a setting for, but never implemented. It was called ‘Jump to First Unread’; which, if you think about it, is exactly what we need. The idea was for it to be a global setting, by user, to determine what happens when you click on the thread title.

Our hope was that this is a Khoros setting, with the functionality it needs already provided, so it just needs the flag for this to be added to our user profiles. But for some reason, Now gave us the flag setting, but never the functionality.

I think this is such a great option that I don’t understand why every Community out there doesn’t implement it.

[Chris_B]

@Midnight_Voice   Sorry for the late reply.   The image I posted was from Safari on my iPhone and I get exactly the same on my iPad.  

[Midnight_Voice]

@Chris_B 

No worries. I just took these iPad screenshots - the first on Safari, where you can see the top posting isn’t emboldened, but also that the topic is listed (correctly) under Unread Topics.

And the second two from Chrome, same issue, except I couldn’t get both topic and Unread display on the same page.

I don’t have a moment’s trouble with the emboldening on the BT Community.

It’s great that it works for you, but it doesn’t work for me, and it seems not for @DarrenDev either, and it ought to work for everybody.

Maybe we need to compare iPad model numbers, and iPadOS versions, and see what comes out of that? It might help with tracking down the issue. Mine’s an A1980 iPad Pro (11 inch) on iPadOS 17.5.1. I don’t have an iPhone.

[Midnight_Voice]

@Chris_B 

A further observation; I did see an emboldened unread topic, followed by another unread topic that wasn’t emboldened, taking the definition that causes topics to be in the Unread Topics list, namely that they have at least one unread post.

The emboldened unread topic was one post long and I indeed hadn’t read it.

The unemboldened unread topic had several posts I had read, followed by one at the end that I had not read.

I wonder if the bug/difference is that the emboldening is used only for completely unread topics, and not for partially unread topics, as it should be?

Would that explain the difference in what you an I are seeing, and reporting?

[XRaySpeX]

You are looking at the top-level Community > Community Activity. I rarely look at that; I don't find it useful. I see both completely unread topics & partially unread topics correctly boldened all the time in individual forum lists & All Topics.

When you look a particular forum with the list of the topics within it there is also a list of Unread Topics (on R on a wide PC screen). When you click on 1 of those topics it takes you to its 1st unread post.

Does the boldening or not work out correct for you when you view All Topics ?

[Midnight_Voice]

@XRaySpeX 

Thanks for that. But I’m confused 😢

I’ve never used All Chat, and I have no idea how to access it for myself. I can follow your link to it fine, but I can’t find

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/TV/New-EE-TV-Box-Pro-finding-no-channels-in-Internet-Mode/td-p/1399632

in it at all, at least not where I’d expect it to be, above 

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/TV/How-much-is-EE-TV/td-p/1418626

and these are the two threads that I have at the moment in Unread Topics in 

EE Community >Home Services >TV

which is mostly where I am following things. Is that one of the individual forum lists of which you speak? In which case, though it works for you, it doesn’t work for me.

But though I can see both emboldened and unemboldened threads in All Chat, I can’t see the one there that is problematic in the TV list, the only one, at the moment, that is in the TV list unemboldened but in the Unread list.

Finally, clicking on an item in Unread Topics takes me to the first posting in the thread, not to the first unread, when these are different, as they very often are.

As above, all this is on my iPad Pro, which is where I choose to handle this stuff. It may be different on a PC (I have one, so I will take a look) but it shouldn’t be this different.

[Midnight_Voice]

@XRaySpeX 

Firefox, Windows 10, exact same issue as on the iPad:-

The title of the topic with the unread post is not boldened.

And yes, genuinely (and completely) unread topics are emboldened, though there are none in these screenshots.