Not digging the new SpiceWorks

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-14T19:38:41.284Z

philjans:

… Expert Exchange from now on for me … really sad …

I’m sure if Spiceworks charged everyone 20$ a month, they could have hired staff to modernize the old platform.

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-14T20:07:03.510Z

The old site had a lot of white space, but it did shrink further. It was roughly ~830px wide of actual post, now it’s ~690px

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PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-14T20:31:06.237Z

Oh powers that be, what do you think about increasing the width?

Discourse Meta – 3 Dec 20

How to increase width of topic

dev

Fantastic, thank you!

Of course currently it’s about 106 chars across per line, which puts it above some readability guidelines. I don’t know that I agree with this but here you go:

Baymard Institute

Readability: The Optimal Line Length – Articles – Baymard Institute

The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.

James404d · 2024-03-14T20:32:55.963Z

I found changing this setting got rid of the extra space.

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Ash-18 · 2024-03-14T21:35:52.528Z

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jeffnoel · 2024-03-15T11:23:20.730Z

See my other thread on this. I want all those goddamn blue dots to stop nagging me and go away at the click of a single button–again, like every other forum can do. It’s bad enough that I can’t hide the categories that I never read, but having them persistently present the siren’s call of that effing dot is maddening.

Feature Request - "Mark all as read" button Spiceworks Support

If this is an available feature, please enable it. All the blue dots are stressing me out. One for the entire Community One in each Category One in each thread Please and Thank you

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-15T13:16:43.488Z

Can’t help you on the blue dots, but you can edit the category list and the tag list. Just mouse over categories or tags and click the pencil and you can uncheck (or check) to change the list on the left.

jeffnoel · 2024-03-15T13:28:27.709Z

If that were the case, there would be only two entries on my feed.

Suzanne-Spiceworks · 2024-03-15T13:33:32.307Z

You might want to try going to this page:

https://community.spiceworks.com/u/jeffnoel4/preferences/tracking

Right now you are tracking all of these:

tracking

If you really only want to see two things, take out the other ones that you don’t want, and see if that helps.

(Patrick’s suggestion might help as well, but he was talking about customizing the left hand menu, not your feed.)

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-15T13:44:23.072Z

Suzanne (Spiceworks):

(Patrick’s suggestion might help as well, but he was talking about customizing the left hand menu, not your feed.)

Correct I was talking about the menu as I thought that was what was being referred to.

jeffnoel · 2024-03-15T13:49:14.835Z

I was also talking about the Left-hand Menu. I had two things checked (one of which, Vendors, I cannot uncheck). I figured it out, though-- you have to drill down into the Categories by name in order to uncheck them.

Edit-- There; that’s better.

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uselessinfomine · 2024-03-15T14:46:46.896Z

Sitting here and saying that it’s awful is not a massively helpful to the people who are trying their best to support it. Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s dead. The layout I can live with. I’m one of these people who don’t like change, but I need to accept that we’re not getting the layout back. Let’s try and be constructive about this - people mention that we can put RFCs in for improvements, so where do we put them in?

I’d request an ability to sort by posted date (rather than last activity). The last activity thing makes it feel like a bulletin board rather than a site for reading articles. I don’t want to know that people have responded five minutes ago to an article that doesn’t interest me - I’d like to be able to see what else has been posted.
Equally, the concept that the site has of new articles at the bottom of the page is not fantastic - February 12th is not new at present. It may be unread, but in that case, just call it unread.

Let’s stop complaining and try and do something about it. We’re (mostly) IT techs, so we’re are supposed to bring solutions, not problems.

Suzanne-Spiceworks · 2024-03-15T14:54:08.031Z

This is where to add community feature requests:

https://community.spiceworks.com/tag/spiceworks-community-feature-request

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-15T15:03:23.797Z

UselessInfoMine:

I’d request an ability to sort by posted date (rather than last activity).

Bookmark this, and then add a custom link with it (left side menu at the bottom there’s a pencil) and that will follow you to other devices.

https://community.spiceworks.com/latest?order=created

Dan8422 · 2024-03-15T15:26:37.650Z

I thought it was just me. But I guess not. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to add a request for help post this week. It’s still “ask a question” but it was not intuitive.
I can’t add much to everyone else’s comments except to largely agree with 80% of them The notifications thing is totally stupid. I get notifications in topics that I know I have never been interested in or looked at. Finding anything is very frustrating. I didn’t even know there was a dark mode!

PatrickFarrell · 2024-03-15T15:30:07.872Z

I agree it was very frustrating. I will say after a week, it’s really not anymore. I had to spend some time beating notifications into submission so I got it where I liked it. It was insane when we flipped over. I think if you keep at it for a week, you’ll feel a lot more comfortable with it.

jeffnoel · 2024-03-15T15:41:55.537Z

UselessInfoMine:

Let’s stop complaining and try and do something about it.

There’s nothing wrong with doing both.

s31064 · 2024-03-15T20:39:05.674Z

Amen! I couldn’t have said it better. I wish I could spice this 10 times.

This is my third or fourth visit back here, and I haven’t found a single thing I came looking for. Today I couldn’t even find “Ask A Question”. This is a perfect example of how to destroy a great collaboration site.

s31064 · 2024-03-15T20:44:09.824Z

molan:

It really feels that ever since SW was sold they have completely stopped listening to the people that make up and use this community. (Bring back the days of actually implementing the feature requests voted for by this community!)

SW says its listening to us. but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise…
SW has systematically removed the features that we use, ignored requests for items we want and pushed out change after change that (such as this community update) that takes away from the community, ignores the needs of the people using it an seems to promote some hidden agenda (likely around monetizing our clicks and maximizing the amount of those clicks.)

@sean-spiceworks you are between a rock and a hard place as the public face in the community and a long term employee of SW as We know this isn’t in your control and there is likely some Exec higher ups driving these changes… not yourself and the other front line workers.

Another post I wish I could spice up ten times, especially the first sentence.

s31064 · 2024-03-15T21:00:57.595Z

And again, another post I wish I could spice up ten times, especially “If I’d been paying to access the community, I’d be really angry right now and I’d ask for a refund”.