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Hi everyone! Some of you may recognize me from previous roles here at Spiceworks, but I am now one of the Product Managers here, focusing on elements such as the Spiceworks Community. I wanted to make you all aware of a change coming soon; an update to our site navigation!

While our current version gets the job done, as Spiceworks continues to change and evolve, so do the needs of navigating around the site. You have already seen a preview of this if you’ve seen the navigation on the recently launched logged-out version of Responsive Topics . We didn’t push this to everyone across the entire site because we still had some work to do.

We’ve been redesigning the navigation to pave the way for the growing needs in Spiceworks. The most obvious change is the overall look and feel. We have gone with an update that is a bit cleaner and more streamlined, so you can quickly get to the areas you’re looking for. And don’t worry, the “quick search” feature is still there and we’ve made a few improvements!

We have also been reorganizing the navigation. You’ll see some items from the domestic navigation move into the global navigation. An example of this is “Categories” were previously only accessible in the domestic navigation when you were on a community page such as a topic or how-to. We’ve moved that under Community in the main navigation and brought more prominence to our How-To section, Vendor Pages, Scripts, local IT meetups, and our online events calendar.

When logged in, you will still have your personal menu under your avatar as well as your notification center. Speaking of which, we’ve heard that many of you desire some updates to the notification system. While we agree, please understand that this specific update will not address that. Making more significant changes to our notification system will be a project unto itself due to its size and complexity.

We will also be adding a new feature to the navigation that we’re referring to as the Product Selector. This will provide greater visibility into all of the products and services that Spiceworks has to offer as well as making navigating between them much easier. This will be coming in a future update (aka “soon”) and when it is live I will jump back into this topic to give a little more information on the feature.

I can’t wait for you to get access to the new navigation. While we can all agree that change can sometimes be challenging, we believe streamlining and updating the technology behind the new navigation will be worth it.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know below.

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Sounds great! I look forward to seeing the fruits of your labor!

… that came out weird…

I look forward to seeing how it works!

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Search is improved?

Thank you.

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Can we finally stop Sean from abusing the daily birthday perks?

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Awesome update, Haley! :sparkles:

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That would be great, often the search here on SW fails to find what I know I’ve previously read, I need to fall back to Google to find that something.

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As long as I can quickly get the the Water Cooler, the rest is gravy. :slight_smile:

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I put this in Sean’s post but i will add it here too.

Is there any chance we can have our own “short cut” tab within the drop down of the CATEGORIES that we can then assign to certain areas of the site?

So i may visit WATER COOLER, HPE ADVOCATES, CCNA

but in order to visit those sites i either have to have a bookmark on my machine or have to navigate three other areas to get to them.

Allowing me to click a button to add an area to my “personal shortcuts” would save a lot of time and effort for end users when they want to revisit said areas.

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Originally posted this on the other topic but I’m copy-pastaing it here.

At this time, no. But, it is something we’ve chatted about when we talk about where the navigation is going. I’m going to tag @haley-spiceworks ​ and @jamie-spiceworks ​ to this (for their FYI).

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@thomaslee ​ and @chivo243 ​ in terms of the search improvements - with this first release there will be some improvements to quick search. Upcoming releases we are currently working on will also be bringing additional improvements to the search experience!

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Pleasepleaseplease! Don’t use 37 javascript libraries to make the website impossible to bookmark, frequently crashable, certain page parts not load, heavily dependent on the browsers ability to correctly cache information, etc. Long ago this was called Web 2.0 and it sucked then. I don’t know the latest buzzword, but it hasn’t gotten better. Javascript is cool for updating info in a sidebar, but when the entire framework of the page relies on a dozen Javascript libraries loading correctly, well, then its not so cool any more. Javascript should enhance a website, not be the foundation upon which it is built.

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I have the Water Cooler booked marked on my bookmark bar so one click! @mweed ​

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Please just fix the editor!

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We can ask…

:wink:

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This actually reminds me of a recent convo about this very thing:

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Yeah, it gets talked about a lot (including some posts I’ve started in the past) but it doesn’t seem anything is ever done about it. IMHO, navigation is pretty good, but regarding the editor:

  • The tagging is mystifyingly illogical showing definite non-matches, and seems to be triggered by +, #, @ and possibly other characters, then hangs around in blue highlight mode for nearly the remainder of the sentence.
  • If you quote, but don’t type something below before editing the OPs comment, you can’t type below it.
  • God help you if you accidentally delete the last line in a quoted part and your text gets inside the nesting. Just have to throw it away and start over.
  • Takes about 8 seconds for the editor to settle back to WYSIWYG display if you wish to edit a former comment.
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I just wish it worked better on my Samsung phone, but looking forward to seeing the changes rolled out.

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Editor is the big thing that needs fixed. Looks like it is from 15 years ago. Also when posting a new topic the editor should be expandable. It is tiny on 2k or 4k screens.

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Seems that you’re lucky for being in the US. I’ve times when it takes about a second, often less than 5 seconds. But there are times, when it takes more than 300 seconds. Today, I had a time when it took about 250 seconds. And Spiceworks reminds us in the community guidelines that we’re a global community. But I don’t know if their servers also form a global network or instead a US focused network.

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Hi James, did you mean to post this on another topic as this one is about the updated navigation on community.spiceworks.com. I am assuming you meant to post the above on this topic instead:

https://community.spiceworks.com/blogs/help-desk-cloud-edition-release-notes/3758-cloud-help-desk-unified-tickets-view

@jcassaday