XF 2.2 Updates since we upgraded XenForo.com

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Having upgraded XenForo.com yesterday, we've fielded lots of feedback and implemented a fair few changes.

Here's a handful of things we've done in response to your feedback.

Editor styling​

We've removed the gradient entirely from the unfocused editor, and changed the styling when the editor is focused so that the background now gets lighter on focus, in order to give an editing background that is more like the final destination background.

XenForo 2.2 RTE unfocused​

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XenForo 2.2 RTE focused​

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We have also rolled out this change to all input fields across the entire system, changing from the approach we've used since XenForo 1.x, where the background would get darker on focus.

XenForo 1.x​

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XenForo 2.1​

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XenForo 2.2​

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Question thread changes​

While reading comments yesterday, it dawned upon us that there are times where the person who asks a question may not always be the person best qualified to select the correct answer.

For example, the person who asks the question "How do I charge my iPhone?" can select the correct answer by virtue of having tried each of the suggested responses, and picking the one that achieved the goal stated.

However, the question "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" does not lend itself to having the solution selected by the questioner, as they may not actually be able to distinguish a correct answer from a false one, in which case solution selection should probably be left to staff, or a user group that is specially identified as being qualified to select correct solutions.

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Therefore, we have now implemented a new permission forum.markSolution, which controls whether or not users can select solutions for their own questions. If they can't, then the only people who could mark a solution would be those with the forum moderator permission forum.markSolutionAnyThread. If they don't, then the concept of marked solutions for questions essentially disappears.

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Article linking​

You may have noticed yesterday that clicking on an article link within an article forum would take you to the first page of the thread, showing the article and the first page of comments, even if the article was highlighted as having New responses.

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We've now changed this behaviour to act more like normal threads, so clicking on an article that you have already read that has new responses will jump you directly to the replies you have yet to read.

Content vote arrows​

These have been subject to quite extensive bikeshedding, but we have implemented some styling changes in response to feedback and we are discussing additional modifications. Watch this space.

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Article user info​

In response to feedback, we have changed the display of article user info somewhat:

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Bugs​

And finally, we're busy responding to bugs identified by visitors and those that we notice ourselves.

We've fixed lots of defects in the editor UI, BB code mode, previewing and text handling, some errors with multi-quote and many more.

At this stage, we are rolling out fixes live to the site pretty much constantly, so don't be too suprised if you find that something you thought wasn't working properly appears to magically fix itself!

Until next time...​

Toodaloo.
 
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Chris D said:
...and people getting over their instinctive resistance to change!
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I don't think people are resistant to change per say, they seem to be resistant to the type of change. Me included of course. The gear and wrench were just fine, or perhaps a quill, but empty brackets seems to denote something is missing rather than it meaning bb code.
 
Bionic Rooster said:
I don't think people are resistant to change per say, they seem to be resistant to the type of change.
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One of the forums I'm helping with an upgrade has members who still prefer the old vBulletin 3.8 they ran on. One member I believe even begs the staff every so often to please convert the forum back to vB 3.8. What I've noticed, though, is that older members tend to resist change the most--any change at all upsets their universe. Most of them adapt even after a vocal few grumble about it, though. There are a few out there who don't even like the idea of "Likes" to a message; I can only imagine how they'll feel once "Reactions" become available. 😁
 
Rudy said:
One of the forums I'm helping with an upgrade has members who still prefer the old vBulletin 3.8 they ran on. One member I believe even begs the staff every so often to please convert the forum back to vB 3.8. What I've noticed, though, is that older members tend to resist change the most--any change at all upsets their universe. Most of them adapt even after a vocal few grumble about it, though. There are a few out there who don't even like the idea of "Likes" to a message; I can only imagine how they'll feel once "Reactions" become available. 😁
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That's one problem I never had. The board we replaced had awful board software, a custom job in Drupal. I can't think of anyone who preferred it to Xenforo once we had people moved over to the new board and saw it in action.

And for us, Reactions were actually something people had been bugging me for. There was great rejoicing from some when I announced it was coming in 2.1.

Which brings us back to 2.2. I can't say that anything here is stuff people are specifically bugging for, but some of them may help me deliver on things they've asked about (like using Article Forums to create a simple form of blog).
 
Mendalla said:
That's one problem I never had.
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When I moved from vB to XF it was celebrated and I did not receive one complaint, not even minor. There was actually not one "bring this back please" request. It was all "love it, awesome, finally, gotta get used to _____ but wow," etc. However the reactions here to the testing of XF as an end user are expected. We all have different needs for our communities so everyone is trying to shape XF to their own liking. After everyone's say, it will all shake out and we'll be getting one powerhouse of a release.
 
beerForo said:
We all have different needs for our communities so everyone is trying to shape XF to their own liking.
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And so much of XF is flexible in that we can reconfigure it to our needs, whether it's through add-ons, template modifications or styling changes. I've created a couple of minor things to use on our own forums that have been helpful. Sure there are always a couple of things I might want, but it's never a deal killer. Having visited many forum systems over the years, this one has to rank near the top of user-friendliness.
 
beerForo said:
However the reactions here to the testing of XF as an end user are expected.
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That reminds me...I used to develop a long time ago (primarily in the 2000s) and what I felt worked perfectly was sometimes not what my clients or their customers used to think was intuitive. And given anything with human input, I sometimes had to idiot-proof the input even more than I had accounted for. I suppose XF is no different--they develop it, then turn it loose on us here to try to break it so we have no issues when we install it for ourselves.
 
Brogan said:
When it's ready.
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I know the answer is always going to be 'when it's ready', but an unsupported beta soon would be nice so that we can see which of our add ons have compatibility issues that can be resolved, and then minorly tweaked by developers if something more drastic changes, than having to wait on a beta to RCs and even a stable 2.2 release in order to ease the transition like from 1.5 to 2.0 (a major one that is keeping some forums on 1.5) and even 2.0 to 2.1. :)
 

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