This used to be a robust forum, lots of new questions everyday and, most impotantly, lots of responses. This new forum is clunky and time consuming to navigate. Nobody seems interested anymore. I used to check-in everyday to see what's new. Not any more.

Indeed the new forum is much harder to navigate compared to the old one. The classification of the different sections is far from optimal. Two of the current sections have less than 10 posts, which clearly shows there is not enough interest in those topics to need their own separate sections. On the other hand, the first three sections are clustered with posts from vastly different topics which make them extremely hard to navigate. I would specifically object to merging the OpenCL section from the previous forum into the FPGA Design Tools section in the new one. OpenCL and HLS could certainly use their own separate section. I am sure the first three sections can be split into more fine-grained sections to allow easier navigation. One thing I really wished had been kept from the previous forum was the section structure.There are also multiple other problems that have been mentioned before by other users but still remain:1- The forum is still too heavy and too slow.2- The general design of the forum wastes too much white space. The laderboard/ask a question column on the right is of little practical use.3- Threads in a section are sorted by last reply as they should be. However, only the author and time of opening the thread is included under the thread name in each section which makes it hard to tell whether the thread has been updated since last visit or not. In my opinion, the author and time of the last reply should also be included as it was in the previous forum.4- One thing I have noticed is that there is no way to download attachments that can be previewed. I certainly prefer to open a 100-page PDF attachment using my own PDF reader rather than the built-in preview mechanism provided by the forum.5- The boundaries of each post when viewing a thread are not very clear. There is basically just a very thin line separating replies from each other. Furthermore, the "show more" mechanism cuts replies far too early. The threshold for cutting the reply could be increased for easier navigation.Unfortunately, as it seems, many of the previous users have either left the forum or are not as active anymore and I cannot attribute this to anything other than the sudden huge change in the structure of the forum. I would urge the developers/admins of the new forum to take another look at the previous forum and I am sure they would be able to find a lot of useful features from the previous forum that are missing in the new one.

For me, the major point missing (besides the ones already mentioned and the disappointing lack of performance) is a "new since my last visit" view.A basic functionality I would expect from any half-decent social media application.

Well, lets see. You can't find this forum anywhere from the Altera/Intel web page or login. You have to have an email with the "secret" link. No one from Intel responds. It is hard to read, hard to find things, takes up a lot of space on the page. It is kind of like the whole intel web page. Clunky, hard to read cluttered, useless, links go in circles, links not correct, too much crap to sort through to find what you want if it is even there.This is my first impression after trying for weeks to find this forum, hours on the phone to see if anyone in intel even knew they had an FPGA group(they don't I have been told) then finally given the secret location to this mess.

Not being able to see the timestamp of the last post to a thread and which threads you have unread topics in unheard of in most other forums.

I agree. 💔 This feels dumbed down. Like right now I'm supposed to respond using this narrow column because it looks cool??? FWIW as a former Altera now Intel employee, I couldn't even login without escalating to several people to find out how employee get permission to this site due to bugs in the current website. I not sure this affects everyone but it could be a reason a lot of old Altera folks are not responding.

Is anybody else completely dissatisfied with this new forum?

119 Replies

HRZ
Frequent Contributor
8 years ago
I just noticed that threads in each section of the forum are now sorted by "Top Question" as default. Why are the designers of this forum so keen on pushing "Top Questions"? This is a forum, not an FAQ. Every single forum I have seen in my life sorts threads in sections based on last reply. Sorting by anything other than last reply will prevent new threads or new replies from being seen and potentially result in such threads going unanswered because they get lost in all the threads the forum considers as "Top" for whatever reason. The same goes for search results; default should always be "last reply".
Hazlina_R_Intel
Contributor
8 years ago
@HRZ we will sort the content based on the last activity/reply/post instead of top question in the next Nov/Dec release. This is part of planned improvement.
SDuns
New Contributor
8 years ago
Two points from my side.
The first point is that this forum seems to be secret and invisible at "intel.com". I have tried several times to navigate to this forum but I didn't succeed.
My onliest solution is currently to type in "alteraforum.com" with the hope that intel didn't stop the redirection.
The second point I have is the complete (fpga) website at intel. This is event more worse than this forum. The complete website is developed for mobile devices, which is very bad for normal desktop users. Endless scrolling is the result and the information is so much harder to find than before at "altera.com".
MaryT_Intel
Occasional Contributor
8 years ago
Hi @SDuns , I may have some answers/updates that help. 1) There are 2 ways to find these Forums from Intel.com, a) on the Support tab at the top of Intel.com, go to Support Community and it lists all the community forums there, or b) on the Support tab at top of Intel.com, click on Intel FPGA Support Home, and then scroll down/click on Intel FPGA Community. You're right this is not an easy page to navigate! We'll also rename Support Community on the Intel.com homepage Support Tab to Community Forums in the next 6 wks.
For #2, when you say the website is developed for mobile devices and there's endless scrolling, are you referring to the forum questions/responses are all in one column on the left side of the desktop/laptop screen? We agree with your assessment that this needs to change and it will be in our next release, beginning of Dec.
Thank you for your feedback, keep letting us know of other things you find and we'll fix them as fast and as best we can. Kind regards,
Mary T.
Community Manager
MaryT_Intel
Occasional Contributor
8 years ago
Hey @corestar ,
I appreciated your input around attachments, we'll get that fixed. A user can add multiple attachments by zipping them, but it's not intuitive. We'll work on implementing the ability to attach multiple items without having to zip them first. I'm not sure when this will be resolved, but it's on our to-do list now. Thanks,
Mary T.
Community Manager
MaryT_Intel
Occasional Contributor
8 years ago
Hi @dave_59 ,
Thanks for your feedback about when you sign in, it doesn't automatically take you back to the page where you were before you signed in. I apologize for the inconvenience as you're right, it's annoying to have to drill back down to where you were before. I've asked our development team to look into this and we'll get it added to our list of items to address. I appreciate you letting us know so we can work on it for you. Kind regards,
Mary T.
Community Manager
HRZ
Frequent Contributor
8 years ago
@MaryT_Intel , any comment on whether the new forum update will involve separating the big forum sections (the first three) into smaller ones? Specifically, moving OpenCL and HLS into their own separate section as was the case in the previous [Altera] forum?
Hazlina_R_Intel
Contributor
8 years ago
@HRZ Yes, we are looking into introducing some subcategories for the major topic like the FPGA Design Tools. We are still sorting out on what the subcategories should be. It can't be too many. It has to be sized just right. Any suggestions are welcomed!
HRZ
Frequent Contributor
8 years ago
@HazlinaR_Intel Well, I would personally go back and take a look again at how the categories were in the previous forum and try to replicate that.
corestar
Contributor
8 years ago
Found another minor issue. The dropdown menu at the top of a post shows the EDIT and DELETE options even for other user's posts. Just out of curiosity, I made a minor edit (one of my pet peeves drove me to change "&" to "and"). It actually appears to save it but if I log out and come back in the edit is gone.
So that's a relief, but every other Forum I've ever used does not even show invalid options (e.g. EDIT).
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you really could produce better quality forums in a few minutes with any number of open source packages. Please take peoples' comments in the spirit they are given. If we did not prefer Altera to Xilinx, we would not be wasting our time here. But Altera has no support other than these forums (at least for small customers) and screwing them up was not a small issue.

Forum Discussion

Is anybody else completely dissatisfied with this new forum?

119 Replies

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