Hey Leo - first of all, thank you for putting your blogs together… they have been a great place for everyone to connect on thoughts, opinions and ideas for Raleigh. However… no offense… I’m not a huge fan of this new forum. Is there a reason why you took it from the old location to this one?
Hey TheNightHawk. I moved your comment into a new topic, a place for feedback. I VERY much welcome feedback.
I’m sorry you’re not enjoying this forum. Maybe I can help in some way?
From my point-of-view, I had been using the bare bones Wordpress commenting system on the blog and it wasn’t enough for the kind of activity we all were seeing there. Comments were not organized, the community wasn’t growing, and conversations were all over the place. It wasn’t easy for someone to come in, introduce a new topic without also derailing an already ongoing topic.
I tried managing the comments but it wasn’t easy and the community was too active for me to keep up. Users were also limited from a technology POV. Multiple links always were flagged as spam, images/videos could not be embedded, and it was hard to share google maps.
From an admin POV, we got A LOT of spam. I successfully blocked pretty much all of it but there are thousands of spam comments that you don’t see. It would be nice to move away from that.
So here we are, with a more open format and a way, I feel, keeps the topics on target and focused.
I’d love specifics on what you don’t like and perhaps it’s just a few tweaks I can make. If not, I expected that not everyone would easily migrate and if you choose not to participate, I’m truly sorry and hope you can stay in touch another way.
4 Likes
Hey Leo - thank you for your response. Yes, I completely understand all that you have said. There are definitely a lot of great aspects to the new format. I believe its just something new to get used to. After looking through it quite a bit more, it certainly makes more sense.
Feedback - I enjoyed going to the old page and seeing the most recent comments to the right. Maybe if you had on the main page a scrolling new comments section. That way, when someone goes to the home page, they can quickly see the most recent comment on certain topics and maybe want to respond or add. I know you have a section for “new”… but just a thought to have that vs clicking into something.
Thanks for all the work on this, and I hope it continues to do well!
I looked briefly around to see if there was a way to present a “feed” of postings by everyone, across all topics, and it doesn’t look like there is a way to do that easily. I’ll keep checking to see if there might be some way to see a everything in one place.
The current “workflow” would be to log in, click the latest unread, catch up, and then click into the next topic. I like the flow as I can continue to scroll down and never up while seeing which topic I want to read about.
My long-term (very long-term) goal is to have this community very active that having topics broken up is almost necessary.
Thanks for the feedback.
1 Like
I love the way you can add say “Watching” and how the statement that I go to read is in a “color”. I think it is green, way cool!
Or blue…Lol
1 Like
I think the new forum is great. It’s more complicated, or feature rich, depending on your mindset. I lean toward feature rich. 
4 Likes
I also really enjoy the forum, as I find it far more organized than the blog comments ever were. It seemed as though the discussion following every post eventually turned to a completely different topic. This lets us have specific discussions reserved for specific topics, and I like that. I also like that we have a dedicated profile rather than just entering our name and email into a form for every comment.
2 Likes
Change is often difficult, but a well thought out change almost always yields a better experience on the back end of it. That said, guidance to help us understand the change better is always a good thing.
My ask, Leo, would be that you provide us with some specific and simple instructions/tutorials in this General Feedback thread to help us understand some of the more powerful features that the community provides. This is especially true of some of less obvious capabilities. I ask out of selfishness because navigating something new like this usually takes me more time than the typical Joe to understand.
I have high hopes for this new format and appreciate your efforts! 
One specific request: is it possible to link the comment section of a blog post directly to a topic in the community? Then, if someone wants to immediately comment on it or read others, a one click action would take us there.
Change is always hard at first, but I very much like having things split into topics vs all the sidebars unrelated to an original blog post.
That’s good feedback. I should post more about how to do common things on this platform. I am also learning too. I’ll work on that.
I have a plan to better integrate this forum with the blog posts. Rather than wait until it’s fully baked, I just installed and started hoping people would roll with it with me. 
Let me know your biggest frustrations so I can work to ease those! You won’t hurt my feelings with your criticisms all! Keep them coming, I take it all constructuvely. 
2 Likes
Actually I love the forums.
This site is great. Part of it is Leo’s articles, but another huge part is the community here. There are so many people with connections and inside information.
The problem was always the organization. For example, you’d have a post about some new building on Glenwood South that would turn into a discussion about the MLS bid.
With the forum you can really organize conversation and create threads that are easy to find, and can go on for a really long time.
2 Likes
Love the forum, Leo. I do have a question. What is the maximum size of an uploaded file? I tried to upload a pdf file a couple of weeks ago and it was too large.
3 Megs is the limit. I wanted to keep it that way unless it’s really becoming a hindrance to folks.
If the pdf lives somewhere, you can simply link to it here.
I’m happy to consider bumping it up though. How large we talking?
I should find a way for easy file hosting and then linking here.
About 4 - 6 mb I believe. I worked around it, so no big deal. I just wanted to know for future uploads.
1 Like
Leo - FYI, the more I use this site the more I enjoy it. Great job!
I have a question - I unfollowed the amazon hq2 thread with the intent of not receiving emails. Now I can’t see it anymore as long as I am logged in. Any chance I can undo?
Thanks for your help
@niko I bet what you did is mute the topic. This makes it basically go away as you’ve noticed.
To find it again, click on your profile icon and go to preferences (the gear). Go to Categories and you’ll see a link to see your muted categories. You should then see it there.
If you’d like to unmute it again, go to the topic and click this little X icon in the right sidebar.
Here’s the Amazon topic: Amazon HQ2 Downtown?
and here’s the X icon.
1 Like
@niko I don’t think I quite answered your original case. I don’t see a way to filter a topic just out of emails. It’s either muted (emails and site) or not.
1 Like
Hey, has anyone else been seeing a strange page when they try to access the main blog, dtraleigh.com?
I’ve seen it twice, and it looks like this:
But when I navigate to the site from a Google search, I don’t see that message. @dtraleigh, do you know anything about this?
1 Like
@Christopher Thanks for sharing. I was tweaking some security settings this weekend. On my end everything seems ok. Can you try both of these links and tell me if one always doesn’t load over the other?
Http
http://dtraleigh.com
Https
https://dtraleigh.com
Maybe I overlooked something. Thanks again for the feedback.