The new NXP Communities interface is horrible compared to what we had in LPCWare.

[jdupre]

I don't quite know where to put this, but this forum interface is horrible compared to the LPCware forum.

There is horrible lag typing and editing text in the discussion editor, cutting and copying code from LPCXpresso into here requires a lot of reformatting, and there is no simple way to format code blocks in the editor that I can see.

And all the dates on the messages that were transferred from LPCware got set to the same data last June. Ugh.

Am I alone in this thinking?

[volkeroth]

There is no other way to put it: this is a complete and utter mess. I can't even find my own posts I did minutes before.

Something simple as starting a thread is hidden in a listbox in the upper right.
The people responsible for this crime against the man machine interface conventions should be forced to use this abomination for the rest of their lives.

Can we please have a somewhat usable forum back? Please?

[jonnevalola]

If you read Jill Duffy's review of Jive on PCMag http://uk.pcmag.com/jive/33934/review/jive you'll understand that what we are seeing here is a direct result of taking Jive as the platform. But that probably wasn't Brendon's decision.

"Jive is an all-purpose, Web-based, workplace communication and management tool. On one hand, Jive is brimming with options and features. On the other hand, it's cluttered and difficult to navigate, both conceptually and literally. It has a great foundation, but it needs more focus."

My gripe comes from the fact that there are literally hundreds of good discussion group solutions available. Then you take Jive, a "social intranet software platform", that is supposed to improve communication and management by being a do-it-all solution, and end up with a sub-standard forum. Probably cost a lot for NXP too. Money that would be better spent paying experts to read and comment and actually create value to the customers.

PS.

And its not only Jive. Every single "social business software" is a sham. I have never ever seen anyone actually use them the way they are advertised, in any of the several large corporations I've been in. You get 2 wiki pages by the one who ran the project to get that software into the organization and then nothing. Why is it a sham? Simple: a workplace organization is ALREADY a social network with more powerful tools than a stupid portal at its disposal. Such as the telephone. If I have a big problem with a product, think I am going to waste my time starting a thread about it, when I know the people involved personally? Exactly. The law of least effort applies, you can't win against it.

[jonnevalola]

I totally agree.

It's a fashion thing. "Bulletin board"-type forums with clear indexes and categories are out, an social-media type "streams" are in.

This is not the only forum that has been destroyed by this fad.

I wonder how long it takes for the clients of web developers to realize "streams" don't work in the context of information pools, where the time of publishing an item is not so relevant.

[brendonslade]

Hi Joseph and Jonne,

Sorry to hear you dislike the new system. We appreciate that a new interface can be a pain and takes some getting used to. We moved from the old site to provide a more integrated experience - more of a one-stop-shop for customers, with the content easier to find. The Jive platform we use for the Community site has many capabilities and we are looking at how we can fine tune things to improve your experience; let me try and address some of the specific issues:

1) Good catch on the cut and paste from LPCXpresso. We are looking at this to understand what is happening in terms of hidden characters causing some of the code disappearing when pasted. As an interim you can paste into a Microsoft application like an Outlook email or Word, then cut and paste into a community posting and keep a decent format. I know this is a bit painful, so we will be looking for a better solution as well.

2) We wanted to ensure we didn't lose all the good info in the historical postings when moving from lpcware to this site, so this content was (obviously) brought over. Unfortunately we had no way of "tricking" the Jive platform into using dates that looked original. We did preserve the user name and original posting date in the imported postings however.

3) Style wise, Jonne is right that this community site does default to the more in the social media style. If you select the LPC or LPCXpresso IDE community then click on "Content" from lower menu, then you can get a more traditional view of the postings, more like what lpcware.com had:

We genuinely appreciate the feedback and hope that you will continue to visit us regularly on the site. NXP is increasing focus on LPC products and we have many exciting new products coming, so we really value your business and contribution to our community. We will post any updates on the issues raised above.

Best regards

Brendon

[brendonslade]

Jonne and Joseph: we've tried reconfiguring the defaults for the Overview page of each forum for a more traditional forum and less social media oriented feel. Take a look and see what you think.

Jonne: On the topics of more experts on the forum, we are in the process of ramping up more first line support in order to provide more timely responses. Pulling in the designers to get an issue resolved takes a little longer and sometimes we need to find and correct product documentation along the way. We are aiming to continuously improve, so please stick with us as we build up this capability. I've escalated your particular issue to see if we can get it resolved ASAP.

Regards,

Brendon

[brendonslade]

Following up to (1) in my posting above, you can avoid unwanted formatting by using these short cuts for pasting:

• Windows:  CTRL + Shift + V
• Mac: Command + Shift + V

The pasting behavior will vary between browsers; I found that IE retains most formatting and colors, but Chrome removes colors and tabs.

[jonnevalola]

Hello Brendon

Thanks for taking the time to answer this thread.

Every single company is trying to model their customer engagement experience to resemble that of using Facebook or Linkedin or similar.

My simple question is: "Why?"

We already have those things. Engineers do not come to a site like this to socialize. We come here because we have technical issues that we need to solve and have exhausted other sources of information. My baseline expectations for a site like this are very simple, and they go like this:

1) there need to be knowledgeable people from NXP side reading and answering questions

2) there needs to be a powerful search to be able to pinpoint any other issues that are close to the issues that you are having

3) the archive of answers needs to be maintained minimum 5 years backwards

Other than that, I don't give a tinker's cuss (pardon the old english expression) about social points or what someone is doing on a totally unrelated field of application to the one I am using.

Coming back to point #1, I saw my question asked in another way by a bloke before me (Paolo Bernasconi) and he got a vague answer from someone from NXP who probably didn't know what they were talking about. After that initial reply, there was no followup.I then asked the same question again: https://community.nxp.com/thread/432482  And this time nobody is picking up the call.

I have a suggestion: how about taking some of that money used to put bells and whistles into a site like this and investing it into knowledgeable engineers that can answer our questions? If that happens, I'll give praise to NXP to moon and back no matter what social media intranet system the site runs on.

Jonne