Feb 2009 GarageGames.com Feedback Thread

#21 I just had reason to check the official docs page for TGB, and frankly it's a mess. As a result of the prolific over-use of frames, I have five scroll bars onscreen - a vertical scroll bar for the main window viewport, and both horizontal and vertical scrollbars for both the navigation and view sub-frames.

Also, the page I'm looking at tries to use a meta element to specify Windows-1252 encoding, but the server is reporting it as UTF-8 instead. The relevant spec requires user agents to honor the encoding given in the HTTP header in this situation, with the result that standards-compliant browsers display the page with a number of "unknown character" symbols, as shown in this screen shot:


Edit: Also, notice how the fixed-width layout of these forums results in the right part of the above screen shot being cut off.

Edit2: Some more info. If you go to the documentation home page, the "OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION" link in anything except TGB opens in a new window. But that link on the TGB page lacks the target attribute to open a new window - so instead, the TGB docs page ends up "trapped" in the frameset of the fixed-width document index window.

#22 The forums fixed width is my only real gripe.

Edit: and I have to go back to forums, then reclick on the unread posts button. This is the only forum I have to do that in. It's kinda a pita.

#23

Quote:Also, Gary, we did change the links of pages you've visited to change to a different color, but it's pretty subtle (from a blue to purple). It may need to have a more obvious contrast...looking into that.

The difference is indeed subtle, but it doesn't appear to be showing up at all in FF. Or at least not for me... might explain why some people aren't seeing it.

I spent far too long trying to find a discernible difference using FF before it occurred to me to try IE where the difference became visible.

#24 yay seeing who's GG!

#25

Quote:we did change the links of pages you've visited to change to a different color, but it's pretty subtle (from a blue to purple). It may need to have a more obvious contrast...looking into that.

I can see it if I look really closely on my desktop monitors, but on my laptop it's still not visible in any of my browsers.

Thanks,
Gary (-;

#26

Quote:it doesn't appear to be showing up at all in FF.

i can see it in FF but it's dang subtle.
here's how it shows up in ff for me:
elenzil.com/gg/images/linkcolor.png

#27

Quote:I still want to see if somebody is a GG Employee, Associate or "just" a TG... owner.

I also want the associate forum back, please.

And I really miss the dev shots :(

Other than that - looking pretty good now, thanks for your hard work! :)

This sum's it up for me at this point. I see the employee tag has been added which is really nice.

#28 Havent noticed this till now, thread listings are sortable by every column, on each category! Awesome.

#29 I'd like to see categorized browsing for Resources again... Trying to find resources by search alone is just not the greatest. If I want to just browse resources pertaining to a specific topic, I can't do that anymore. And browsing page after page of resources in order of most recent makes my head hurt after a while.

#30 Bug?

None of the "Watched List" modes seems to display the watched blogs.

#31 It is definately apparant that the guru's at GG are still hard at work fixing this website. Great going gang. :-)

#32

Quote:Since it isn't mentioned above, add the TGE (Private) to the View All Unread feature. The TGB (Private) is there.

It's exactly the other way round for me: TGE (Private) is there but TGB (Private) isn't. Looks like a bug that excludes the forum for the first product bought...?

#33

Quote:Havent noticed this till now, thread listings are sortable by every column, on each category!

But only for the View All Unread (x) page, not the forums in general.

And yeah subtle is the word about the visited links color. Not very noticeable at all for the color perception challenged, especially someone who has the degree of color-blindedness that I do. I did have a friend verify that the colors are different, so I guess ah... good job anyway.

Suggestion: How about a way of subscribing to specific forum categories like we used to be able to do.

#34 Another idea/request for the forum listings:

Currently a given forum thread list shows: Topic Title, Author, Number of Replies and Last Post time stamp. Could we add there also the last reply author? Exactly as in the forum summary.

#35 Ref.: post #28

Is no more! :(

#36 Been trying to stay out of this. You guys have had a rough month, but have done great work. I'm confident that the new site will be much better than the old one. Congrats to everyone. =)

Here are the things I really miss:
- Snapshot of the Day
- The "Community Overview" portal page.
- Associates
- Tab-views of "recent blogs" by "Employee", "Associates", "Community".
- Ability to page-through "Featured-Blogs" ( "It was just here yesterday...")
- "Unanswered Forum Posts"
- Forum Posting: "Preview Button"
- Photos in Bios

Additional Features:
- Tagging of forum threads as "Questions" or "Comments".
- Tagging of forum "Question" threads as "Resolved" or "Unresolved"
* I almost don't want to say this .. but Microsoft's TechNet Forums has a slick implementation of this feature. Everything else there is bad so don't look to carefully. ;-)

Community Overview Page
The ability to see in one glance the most-recent blog-posts, forum-threads, snapshots, and job listings was very powerful. Most of the stuff I discovered/read/commented on was because of that format.

The "Recent Forum Threads" view was an important mechanism for driving traffic to the slower forums and getting the experts to answer questions. I rarely visit most of the forums, but if a "recent topic" catches my eye I'll click. Once there, I'm likely to go down the list of other threads in the forum.

Similarly with the "Snapshot of the day". If I saw a cool snapshot, I would read the persons bio, vist their web-site, read their last 5 blog entries... As the graphical-anchor on the community page, this was the mental-hook that kept me coming back.

Great work overall, I'm just hoping some of these things are on the planning-board.

#37 @Steven: Thanks for a well thought-out response. Most of the items on your list are on our list too. The Community page definitely needs an overhaul, which would cover roughly half of what you outlined. All of your suggestions are definitely on our radar.

#38

Quote:"The Community page definitely needs an overhaul, which would cover roughly half of what you outlined. All of your suggestions are definitely on our radar."

That's the answer we're looking for! Thankyou.

#39 The visited links turn a slightly deeper blue for me. I am always reading this on the Macbook, where I adjust the brightness on the screen. Visited links should have a very different colour.

Pagination options: Want. A "Show all" button would be perfect for me, really.

My most wanted feature is one I haven't seen brought up, and I can't find any settings for it: Filtering forums.

The old system had an option to select what forums we wanted to view, and the unwanted ones didn't show up in the subforum index or "View unread" listings. I would like to filter out a few of the forums, at least.

#40 The MarkupLite CODE blocks truncate text that is too long, instead of wrapping it. This leads to errors when people cut and paste the code into their application. To work around this issue, you need to manually wrap the lines.