UK Community Update

[katie@ebay]

Hi Everyone!

Today we launch the updated eBay community in the UK. 

As you will have noticed, the eBay community looks different. We have launched the updated design of the community with a few new features:

• Mobile experience enhanced
• Reduced load time
• Quicker navigation through the site

Of course, all your previous posts, messages and comments are still where they were before. The changes to the community are focused on the look and feel, to enhance your experience and allow mobile users to fully utilise the community, too.

If you have any questions about the new eBay community, feel free to ask below in this discussion board.

[cee-dee]

Obviously I won't know if anyone "in authority" will ever read or take note of what I say..... But I'm gonna say it anyway.

First of all, I've been a poster for.... quite a long time, so long, I forget, 17 - 18 years since I first posted on the Q & A board, now defunct of course. I mostly post on the Round Table and I've seen Community Managers come and go, often each imposing their own ideas about posting, some good, mostly unpopular. I (and the rest of us) have no idea who came up with this latest "improvement" but it will prove to be the death of the boards!

I remember years back when Paypal was in it's infancy saying to the then Community Manager that I expected PP to be made compulsory and the reply was "We would never do that".  At that time I was using direct card payments as it was the quickest, cheapest option for everyone.

As to the boards, please change the following to try to save them. I'm concerned about the discussion boards, at the moment there is no discussions!

1/ Make the threads with the last post (not the last thread posted) appear at the top of the board.

2/ Bring back the post count to each thread.

3/ Clearly show that a thread has been updated.

That'll do for a start, more tweaks will be needed later?

[bravergrace]

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@cee-dee wrote:

I (and the rest of us) have no idea who came up with this latest "improvement" but it will prove to be the death of the boards!

---

As a relative newcomer to the community boards, I must say that during my time here, every new board tweak has been unpopular with the existing users.

And only two (as far as I recall) were reversed pretty promptly.

[One being the automatic banning of posts including the word "end".

And the other being the ability of all users to add anonymous tags to posts, an entertaining diversion but one not appreciated by the Community Managers when they saw their posts tagged with words that reflected the community users' actual views.]

But although these repeated improvements clearly did not lead to the immediate death of the boards as many of us feared, they certainly contributed to their decline from their heyday when "HELP!" posts from new members would elicit a dozen accurate and helpful replies within 5 minutes, to their present parlous state when a post entitled "My dog toy broke after 15 weeks' use" will produce 3 replies, 1 of them wildly inaccurate because the author didn't notice the timescale, 1 advocating the fraudulent use of the unauthorised transaction chargeback system, and the other berating the OP for keeping living creatures in captivity.

With this new format, I think that any post that drops of the truncated first page will be lost within a couple of hours.

It would be interesting to know how many of the contributors to THIS thread actually found it in the proper way.  It's hidden.  There's no obvious way of finding it or stumbling across it unless you already happen to be browsing in the "CAFE" board when it arrives.  I couldn't find it, even after I knew the thread existed, until I followed someone else's link.  Even with a list of eBay boards on my screen, there's no obvious way of discovering it unless you happen to know that the proper place for a general staff post discussing the new board format will be hidden under "eBay Cafe > Community Updates".  And apart from the community manager, I don't suppose anyone else would think of finding it there.

I hope the OP of this thread doesn't think that the small number of replies means that everyone else is happy.  It just means they can't find the thread.

[theelench]

I'm (more or less) managing to follow three threads ATM.  Only because they are all getting new replies / kudos and I can track them through Notifications.  Although several times I've been notified that there have been (x) replies and I couldn't find all of them.

[i_failed_my_dna_test]

Katie , will any points raised after 9;17 am be passed on ?

Perhaps you really should pass this thought on .

Right now there are a number of people who are having massive problems with Managed Payments. The answers to some of their problems are on the boards , but the new boards make it almost impossible to find the answer . And thats if they can find the boards .

To change the set up during a massive change to the way ebay operates is almost criminal , it suggests that management do not want anyone to know that there are problems with managed payments .

[pixiesen2012]

just noticed that on threads that I have not  opened the title is in bold and ones that I have opened are in normal type, a very subtle difference but it is there

can you spot the difference?:-

[pixiesen2012]

scrub that, just went back to look and a post I had replied to was back in bold type, so that doesn't work

[magicdragon1]

Pixie , after you posted about bold and normal I checked and they just seemed to alternate . Or maybe my screen is protesting about all the scrolling required .

[katie@ebay]

Hi Everyone,

I have an update earlier than Monday so wanted to share here.

• We have added a darker colour to the text you see in the body of a post.
• The latest activity section on the home page will now show 15 instead of 5 to show more posts to you.
• The jump to top button will now float on the bottom right of the page as you scroll so you can return to the top at any point.

I will continue to gather your feedback and update you here.

Have a great weekend! 

Many thanks,

Katie 

[guru-banana]

I Well I know it's not your doing but Whoopie-Doo, perhaps we could now sue eBay for repetitive strain injury on the scrolling finger, clearly not going to go back and will be just as unusable I'm afraid seeing 3-4 posts on a screen and scrolling down or up to find anything.

As I and many have said, This is an improvement?

The only improvement would be to return to a forum not this unscalable mountain of space.

[pixiesen2012]

thank you Katie, I just noticed the back to top was back and came here to let others know, how soon can you sort out the being able to see what posts have been opened? I thought I had worked it out, but that wasn't to be

[cee-dee]

The floating to the top icon is a good thing but we used to have "Message listing" which took us off the thread to the start of the board. Now we have to go back to the top and click the board title?

So many so-called "improvements" involve changing a simple one click in to two or three clicks and/or a lot of scrolling. It seems to me that whoever thinks these things up can't do things in a simple way because they must have something to fiddle about with?

[robmar0se]

I appreciate ity isn't yr call Katie, but this sounds like tinkering round the edges, fiddling while Rome Burns!

I would suggest that Ebay reverts to the original until such time that you have time to consider feedback, allbeit over a very short time.  The precedent was set a few years back over the Buyers Purchase listing page which was reverted at the Buyers option.

I note also I tried to insert a pic in this post to demonstrate the huge waste of space, but the page froze - does it work?  In this reply I can only get 4 lines  (in pagination, new para lose a line!)  to view in a whole screen, incredibly annoying, a huge waste of space.  Grrr

Please try and prevail

[pixiesen2012]

I've worked it out, if you open a thread the type goes to normal, if someone else replies on that post it goes back to bold

[bravergrace]

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katie@ebay wrote:

• We have added a darker colour to the text you see in the body of a post.

---

Thank you, Katie.  That may seem trivial to the programmers and designers, but for someone of mature years, it makes SUCH a difference to being able to read the text!

[lipstickandmusic]

The new design is rubbish.

[Anonymous]

What Katie means is quite simply that "slow to load" is the only thing they might eventually get to sort out - the fact that so far 100% of forum users who expressed a preference said they'd rather have Whiskas is irrelevant to Ebay, as this conforms to the rest of the so-called site improvements, in that it's in big letters, huge blue blobs in acres of wasted white space, and is designed to visually appeal to people with the attention span of a woodpecker, who pop in, then pop out again without doing anything or reading anything (like a lot of buyers who never get past the pictures).

[the_book_seekers]

While I its good that work is being done to rectify a few of the problems with these boards. I can't help wishing that the same kind of notice  be taken of issues raised with regards to the main site and the same speed of repair applied there.  As a very basic example I've been getting a server down message for about three weeks now when trying to do some basic things in my seller hub with no word of explanation - as is the norm. Just one of a whole host of current issues. Given the choice between new glitzy community boards and a properly working seller platform I'm afraid these boards wouldn't get a look in. 

[theelench]

A baby-step towards correcting things  --  they've put the "To Top Of Page" button back in the right place. 😲  Only the other 99%  to go😡😢

[*guinevere*]

As a regular on here for some years I had no idea this thread was here and only found it through Pixie's link on another thread, so yep. It's been hidden as far as I'm concerned. 

However I have made my views known on various other threads on the boards, which is that the new layout IS DREADFUL!

[scaniatcab]

Probably did this new outlook as its harder to find the notes of the true issues of eBay Which eBay dont want anyone to hear or read about by community sellers/buyers .

eBay stopped listening to sellers years ago, and this newer page makes it hard to navigate site & puts the lid on things, another **bleep** re-write of a topic page which was perfect as it was, when are they going to relise, if there is nothing wrong with the sellers discusion boards leave them alone, IT DOES NOT NEED FIXING...as he says falling on DEAF ears..