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.

[triple512]

Probably has responded but we can't find the post lol.

[fargvs]

I feel the pain and have been trying to lose some of the totally unnecessary hype/dross that clutters the Home page ... this link should bypass it and take you straight to a cleaner  'All Topics' page ... although the back arrow/button often attempts a return to the Home page ... may help ? > 

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/forums/recentpostspage/post-type/thread

[margaret*e]

In my varied experience of different CS they rarely call back with the promised reply,/ or when I phone them I'm on hold so long that I've forgotten what I phoned about by the time they answer.😁

[the_book_seekers]

It reminds me of my last employers. Every time I got a new boss with them came the new, bright, wonderful way of working which never improved my working enviroment, but was designed to get the new boss 'noticed'. My colleagues and I were expected to get the new idea off the ground and make it work. Eighteen months later our boss would be moved on to 'improve' another area and we'd get - you guessed it - someone with a new, bright, wonderful way of working. Somewhere in ebay there is an employee who thought this would be a good idea - unfortunately the reality is something different. 

[the_book_seekers]

Katie has probably been told to give it a few days and let us blow ourselves out before coming back. I think the issues have some way to go yet. 

[theelench]

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@the_book_seekers wrote:

It reminds me of my last employers. Every time I got a new boss with them came the new, bright, wonderful way of working which never improved my working enviroment, but was designed to get the new boss 'noticed'. My colleagues and I were expected to get the new idea off the ground and make it work. Eighteen months later our boss would be moved on to 'improve' another area and we'd get - you guessed it - someone with a new, bright, wonderful way of working. Somewhere in ebay there is an employee who thought this would be a good idea - unfortunately the reality is something different. 

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No offence to the-book-seeekers.

  How the hell can this reply dated 22/2 at 9:35 be message 29 of 144??

Adding consecutive numbers to chaotic, randomised replies DOES NOT solve the problem.   Even accepting that the tech. team is so incompetant that it cannot produce anything as near to perfect as their predeccessors who constructed what they have just destroyed.

  One would expect that they would have at least enough of a grasp of basic English to understand that.  If they had the slightest pride in their work, or any respect for the work of their predessors they must feel deeply ashamed of this vandalism.

[theelench]

Good grief, my reply (no. 31)  immediately follows no.29.!!

[cee-dee]

I note that the post numbers are showing up as links now? Perhaps some if the things in my list at:-

What would we like to have? - The eBay Community

Are now being considered for implementation?

[theelench]

They must be insane to even think this is acceptable.

My reply to post# 29, immediately following it is no. 31 of 146.

[theelench]

What is going on now I wonder.  My two previous posts got error messages and wouldn't load.  Now I see they have.??

[fon3s]

You may see the user online sometimes in this forum . And compare it with previous design. It's that much worth that can't stay here for longer as it's really hard and not easy to find how to navigate properly.

personally myself each time entering this forum can't stay for more then 1 minutes. As it's not easy to find . Please see the comments here can't see anyone here left positive comments everyone complaining about new design. If your costumer are important for you , you should take the notice what they like . 

[m25jet]

katie@ebay,

You told us that you would have an update by Monday, although you replied prior to that with a post that gave next to no indication as to what eBay are actually doing - if anything - to resolve this awful mess that is the new "improved" layout of the eBay Community Forums and sort the problem out once and for all.

Judging by the sheer quantity of replies on this thread from people openly expressing their dislike of the new version of the eBay Community Forums I would say that there is an extremely strong case for revoking this new "improved" layout and reinstating the old version of the eBay Community Forums.  The old version of the layout look professional, it was very well laid out, it was easy to navigate the forums and it was extremely straightforward to use.  This new layout is none of those things.  The new layout looks as though it was designed by a child, it is extremely badly laid out and results in a vast expanse of wasted white space right across the screen, it is difficult to navigate and locate various topics, as well as specific replies within a long thread as the option to specifically click on page 1, 2, 3, etc, has now been done away with in its entirety, thus making skipping pages to get to more recent posts more laborious as a result, and it is extremely cumbersome and is very much a massive step backwards with regards to making the forums a more enjoyable experience is concerned.

So far we have heard next to nothing with regards to how eBay intends to put right the mess they have created.  However, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who have posted on this thread - and also on other threads elsewhere on the forums in relation to this matter - would appear to think that this new layout is absolutely dreadful, could you please pass these comments on to the relevant people who are responsible for altering the layout of the forums and ask them to reinstate the old version of the eBay Community Forums?  The old version was far more popuar and with a bit of tweaking I am certain that it would be possible to alter the old version of the eBay Community Forums in such a way that it is suitable for use on computers, laptops and mobile devices.

At the end of the day eBay need to take a step back and consider what is likely to be popular with their customers and what is not.  A good way of ascertaining whether or not a proposed idea would be a good one to implement would be to actually ask your customers - if you wish to implement a completely different layout then to start with try offering people a link to click on the access the proposed version and then ask for feedback from those who have had a look at it.  Make a point of listening to what your customers are telling you.  If there is an overwhelming majority of people saying "Yes, I like this - could these changes be implemented?" then all well and good - go ahead and implement them.  If, on the other hand, the vast majority of people respond with comments like "This is absolute rubbish - it is not a patch on the old system" then leave it alone and let the old system remain in place!  Why on Earth do eBay insist upon changing various aspects of the site and ruining what was once a good site, as opposed to spending their time on focusing on putting right the various longstanding site glitches that have been causing problems for ages but which have never actually been resolved?

At the end of the day the team of individuals who decided to implement this new version of the eBay Community Forums should all be sacked and replaced with people who can actually programme a website properly and bring about the kind of changes that vastly improve the site and enhance users' experience of the site, as opposed to retaining site developers who clearly are not fit for the job and only serve to continually mess up the site even further with every change they make.

I doubt very much if you'll grace us with a response to any of the points raised here, but if indeed you do have some answers and can provide us with some positive news with regards to what is being done to put this mess right then I - and I suspect many other people besides myself - would be very interested in hearing what you have got to say.

[cee-dee]

At the moment, as there is no way of going straight to the current page of a long thread, the only way I can do it is to add that page to favourites. For me, this is now page 4. If page 4 eventually moves on to page 5, I'll do what I did with the other pages, I'll delete that favourite and replace it with one for page 5.

OK, that may be a crazy way of doing things but in the present state of the board, is there any other way?

[robmar0se]

Well thought out and well argued.

The only thing I would add going back to Ebay's  supposed objectives, the one with any credibility is to make the forum smartphone friendly.

By all means do so, but for a minute just think who are youir major customers, regular buyers sellers, who through the volume of activity will probably use a PC, or the random occasional user who may use a smartphone.  Ask yourself who contributes most to ebay profits?

I woud put it to you that its profits that should drive all you do,  by all means change things but please revisit your key objectives, and who yr key users are.  Important to LISTEN!

Lastly functionality is 100 times more important tahn how pretty it is.

[cee-dee]

Ha ha, it's all crazy, after I posted #153 it showed that it was "Message 153 of 152"..... After seeing that, I refreshed the page and now it's correctly shown as "Message 153 of 153".

In the unlikely event of any developer seeing this, for goodness sake remove the "Posted in Community Updates" from below every thread and put it back alongside the Message numbers so we can go straight back to the forum front page.

Do we actually need "Message" with the post number and did we need "Post" replaced by "Reply"?

[guru-banana]

Well apart from the giant size of almost everything apart from the answer box, it does appear to be slowly reverting to the old style just in the awful page type that ebay prefer for most things where the theory seems to be why use 1 page when 10 will do the job, just not as well.

So having directly amswered your post before to find it posting somewhere completely out of place I am doing so again to see if this appears as it should, after post 155. 

Then if the options could be corrected so that the number of posts per page choice worked as before that would for me be as good as it is likely to get. Though most posts will be ignored now as it is too much work to bother viewing or replying to them as it's still almost impossible to see or correct whay you have written as you do it  with the only small box and a non working preview link.

[bravergrace]

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@cee-dee wrote:

Ha ha, it's all crazy, after I posted #153 it showed that it was "Message 153 of 152"..... After seeing that, I refreshed the page and now it's correctly shown as "Message 153 of 153".

---

But when I look at your post, it is Message number #1.

That is because, although the posts have indeed been allocated numbers, these numbers are not  attached to the posts themselves.  They are attached to the reader's page format.

If you change the order of the posts (newest first or oldest first), then the numbering changes.

Thus if I refer you to post #67, you may be looking at an entirely different post from my #67.

[guru-banana]

So the reply you make appears somewhere random with no option to go to any other page, just to view presumably other direct answers to post 1 as looking on other id it appears at the end.

So that's another thing needs correcting.

[katie@ebay]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for your continued feedback on this thread. We are passing on all feedback given and working on the aspects we can change. 

As I sent an early update on Friday afternoon I waited until this morning to share some further updates.

On Friday:

• 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.

Since then we have now:

• Reintroduced spellcheck.
• Ensured the photo icon appears in the text box for to you add images within the text.
• Readded the titles under your username to show level of experience. These are not new to Community UK but we have simplified the titles and readded them.
• The feedback score and link to "View Listings" will now show on the threads under a members username. This also appears on the profile page.
• Message numbers have been re-added and we will be looking into the ordering of this as mentioned in some feedbacks.
• The member to member answer centre board is now restored and members can get support from our Community Experts, even if they arrive via the eBay help pages.

I will continue to share any developments as they arise.

Kind Regards,

Katie 

[theelench]

It's the giant size and huge spacings that make everything so difficult to read.   I once wanted to read part three of a trilogy, the local library only had it in "Large Print" for people with poor vision.   I did manage to finish it, with difficulty.   Reading it gives one eye-strain and eventually a head-ache.

  In an effort to make my posts more easily readable and cut down on the amount of white space, I'm reverting to "old style" indented paragraphs instead of double spacing.