We are planning a cosmetic change to College Confidential that should be live on Monday, February 22. I’ll have more details at that point, but the bottom line is the functionality of the forums will be unchanged. One goal of these changes is to prepare for improvements on other parts of the site:
Those portions of the site will also be updated next week.
Having been involved in many site design updates, I’ve learned that:
Most changes are a shock for a week or two before becoming the new normal.
Professional designers put a lot of thought and expertise into their work. They care about how the site looks, obviously, but they also consider how it functions for a wide range of users.
Community feedback is most useful for edge cases that designers might not have noticed.
Again, I’ll have more details next week. I’m excited about the change, but I also know it could be surprising, which is why I’m letting you all know early.
Yes, we’re planning a big banner for Monday. I put up this notice here for people who do read this part of the site. I’m hoping we’ll get more people in the habit of looking here over time.
Is there a way to filter out only the colleges I am interested in, so that I do not have to scroll through the entire school list when navigating between the school forum and school list?
@CC_Jon Seriously? The last time we were supposed to be down for a few hours for an improvement it stretched to days of being dark, and then weeks of really poor functionality. I am still operating under light mode on my chromebook because the regular mode doesn’t work. I still use an adblocker, thanks to the last change and the prolonged problems with the ads here. Messages took FOREVER to get moved, and still aren’t right.
I actually like the new format, but the transition was horribly mismanaged, there is no sugarcoating it. If there was a good competitor, it would have killed these boards completely. That was the kind of transition where in many if not most businesses jobs would have been lost as a result.
It feels tone deaf to be making a change again when things are just getting working. If you had a history of pulling this off seamlessly it would be different. But the history is horrible, including the most recent change. At least this time you were responsive to problems, but clearly you were not prepared for the scope of the change.
BTW, having a scrolling problem on my iPhone again tonight. Maybe instead of diverting resources to cosmetic changes CC could fix the existing problems from the last change. Or have you quit trying and decided we’re going to have to live with a glitchy site?
Yes I’m chippy tonight and it probably isn’t your call personally. But it seems crazy that these issues still exist. I would have expected to have been fired a while ago if I was in charge.
On mobile products, like my iPhone or iPad, I’ll click to see new posts in threads that interest me, like the Class of 2021 thread and when I touch the screen to see the post because it’s not in the shot, the site scrolls up like 20 posts.
Functional issues should be fixed before cosmetic issues. Did users complain about the cosmetics? What group of people at CC decided this needed to be done?
goodness. something just switched on my desktop, and the site’s fonts in all of the forums is in gray and uncomfortable/hard for me to read. is this part of the changes? or maybe settings on my system?
No users didn’t complain about cosmetics. Changing things only if users complain isn’t a good strategy when it comes to community web sites. In particular, the brand is used when discussing the site with potential sponsors who, in turn, support the site with advertising. Without that revenue, we won’t have the budget to maintain the site.
For the most part, a cosmetic change like this doesn’t take resources away from addressing functional issues. It’s different skill sets.
