Help us improve this new community - share your ideas and feedback💡

Matt_NI

Your beloved NI community (forum) has a new look and we're excited for everyone to see what we've been working on in the past few months.

How did we get here?

Throughout the past few months, we captured the needs of thousands of users, listened to ideas from a smaller group of active members and asked internal teams what they'd like to see ... then we went to work.

The launch is only the first step in this new journey and we can't wait to shape this new online community with you all.

Please use this thread to share your feedback, discuss suggestions or simply ask us questions about the new community.

This thread is now closed. Please check our latest comment to hear more about what are our next steps 🚀

Tony Jones

First impression, it all looks very new and I think the styling works. I was a little perplexed as to where to go, then realised it's because I wasn't here to post anything in particular. On the old forum I tend to read and only make the odd comment when I feel I know something.

Navigation threw me. The front page has lovely graphics and most lower parts have the very specific search bar. By the time I get to actually leaving this comment the banner has gone and the main site bar seems to be part of the forum if I don't look hard. I once clicked on it by mistake. The right hand navigation will need getting used to.

I'm using and iMac, not sure how it will all look on my iPad, will have a look.

Back on Navigation, I see you've avoided lots of sub-forums. A busy forum I helped admin went through the culture shock of me deleting lots of empty sub-topics where someone had copied the structure of a previous setup with 1000s of old posts. We were in danger of having lots of boards with only one post, and it took two years before we finally did some rearranging. I think I'm pro keeping it simple, but expect noise around 'where's the FM8 sub-forum?' and 'what's the approved tag for Monark?'

So far it looks slick, I'll play with the style options at some point and it does feel fresh.

Matt_NI

@Tony Jones Thanks for the detailed first impression. I'd love to hear what is the experience on your iPad 😊

Regarding sub-forums, we're pretty flexible and we will definitely adapt things as we move along. The idea was to start small and build what is really necessary instead of having a ton of sub-category right at the launch. We'll be looking at everyone's posting and categorisation behavior closely.

As for tags, you're totally right. There is a bunch missing but I'm adding everything before the official launch next week. Monark and other Reaktor/Kontakt based instruments will be there.

Tony Jones

Just tried to update my profile (OS / NI hardware...); it's all blank, despite being asked the same when I started up. I filled in the boxes, but couldn't update.

Tony Jones

When I navigate, I'm used to looking at Recent Post / Unread — I can't see how to do the same

Matt_NI

@Tony Jones Everything you see on the homepage would be recent discussions. It's hard to understand now because there isn't much content across the platform but new posts would pop up on top and marked in bold. We're going to introduce more sorting and filtering options in Q1. For the issue you highlighted, I'm sending you a PM now to get a couple more info :)

Tony Jones

I can’t reproduce my problem and have replied to the message. I’m on my iPad and while it looks good, font size is possibly a challenge! I’m on a small iPad. Functionality all seems OK. Are their accessibility options?

Tony Jones

Is the idea to open the floodgates to users on the 11th? Is it worth getting some more topics ready to avoid some chaos? I'm thinking about maybe somewhere to request links to old forum topics so they can be considered to be moved across. If not I can see dozens of people all grabbing bits of important threads and strewing them across the forum, making work for mods.

If you had a couple of dozen early adopters it might make the forum feel more alive. Surprised how few people jumped at the chance to have a look round

Matt_NI

@Tony Jones We've been trying to do just that but it seems users are shying away from creating threads because it's a bit empty. We're adding more as we go but it might be a bit chaotic at first. Our plan was to actually share the link on our thread in the forum but we have a couple of critical issues (sign-in, quoting ...) which are still pending a fix.

We can't move posts other than simply creating them again here from scratch and we're actually hoping users will do that whenever they see interesting topics to be discussed again. We have a list of threads we'll be doing ourselves as well. It will be a bit of work for the whole team at first that's for sure.

Tony Jones

Just tried to quote you and got an error message! I had hoped it would go into this comment but didn't!

Anyway, as long as you're prepared for some chaos!

Matt_NI

@Tony Jones Yes, I added a note in the original post with some known issues. This will be fixed this week by our provider 🙌

D2Lover

Will we be getting different catagories for each Hardware type within the Traktor area or will it be just everything Trakor under the one Software/Hardware roof ?

Matt_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/39#Comment_39

This is going to be kinda wait and see. We don't really want to go back to this habit of creating endless sub-categories, especially as you can now tag your posts with whatever hardware/software needed. We're also going to introducing more filtering and sorting options (including tags) directly from discussion pages.

More categories will be added only if really useful to both navigation / classification.

darecordbreakaz

Will the Reaktor channel have a way to download new/updated ensembles?

Matt_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/42#Comment_42

Do you mean the Reaktor user library ? We could make the sharing of ensembles more easy here directly but the Reaktor user library wasn't part of our scope this time around. Feel free to create a new thread in the Reaktor category here though if you have some suggestion 😊

c0nsul

The new forum looks nice and modern. I'm still trying to get orientation, because I'm used to the old forum.

I haven't found something like a signature. I found the part in the profile w/ operating system, processor and NI hardware. But these details could be more specific: version of the OS, version of NI software, amount of RAM, controller, sound interfaces, etc.. I think it's handy to have all your detailed hardware/software specs under each post (signature). This makes it easy/faster to help users troubleshooting.