Give us your thoughts, feedback and questions on the new Sophos Community

Hescominsoon rfcat_vk Appreciate the comments and recognize that the two are not alike - some things will be better, some things will need improvement. We'd really like to understand what you'd like to see. Have you tried using the advance search to narrow your search criteria to a specific board or knowledgebase article? community.sophos.com/search
We haven't yet transferred any forums from Astaro so try Endpoint.

Billybob This new Sophos Community is in a beta state and we want to continue to improve on it with the communities' help. We haven't started a UTM 9.x forum yet. Maybe we a suggestion is we can migrate or start 1 new forum for the community and see how things progress. That way you can experience the search capabilities, forum moderation etc...

To anyone else coming from Astaro.org, please do let us know of improvements that you'd like to see or if you have questions on how to use Sophos Community.

Hi rfcat_vk,

The community is split by groups into the main product area and they are selectable from the drop-down menu in the header of any page...

There is a UTM group...

https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/

...which is the only group that doesn't currently have any forums in it because we haven't created any yet as we finalize the plan for migrating the Astaro.org boards.

If you want to explore a group with one forum, check out the Cloud group or for a group with multiple forums look at Server protection & integration.

Hi Hescominsoon,

Unknown said:

this is so disjointed.

How so?  Can you explain?

Unknown said:

I cannot put into words the jarring experience this is

It would be good if you could - we can't improve it without some words.

Unknown said:

This simply doesn't have the feature set of vbull in any form that i can see.

What features are missing?

Unknown said:

I can't even figure out how to post correctly without posting under someone else's post which in most forums mean that you are replying to that one person.

To help explain the structure and get you started I've provide a whistle-stop tour of the community in the video below.  Let me know if it helps and what you would like to see improved.

Hello Community Team,

first and foremost the general gripe: Not only is the design "mobile-centric" with its (mostly) large buttons, the layout's (almost exclusive) portrait orientation wastes much estate on a standard monitor, however it doesn't fit the window vertically and it's unclear, confusing and makes it all but impossible to take in the actual information at a glance. It might be ideal for the occasional or one-time visitor with a mobile but for a technical forum it's IMO annoying. It also doesn't permit multi-tab/multi-window access (perhaps one can use different browsers but I doubt this). 
There are obviously respectable motives for all the nifty features. But forums are trying to solve the "same-question-asked-over-and-over-again" problem since their inception - in vain. No suggestion, no "related" pop-up, no FAQ can keep the dedicated poster from asking a question for the umpteenth time (remember the Shh/Updater flood). Algorithms undoubtedly get better but results are still pathetic if what you're looking for is neither "popular" nor identifiable with specific terms. At least I'd like an option to turn suggestions off.

So much for a start, more later

Christian

Navigation

From the Home screen

The chronological (expandable) list of the latest posts is nice (apart from the already mentioned layout). This is definitely an improvement over SophosTalk. I've still not figured out though how to get directly to these posts - if it's possible at all.  There's also no read/unread indicator (only a "new" bar for added content while you have the Community open in the browser) - but maybe I'm blocking some domain  which serves a required script.
To access a forum you have to go to its group first (unless there's a way I've not yet discovered) - what could be the benefit of this detour?

thread/topic navigation

Is the current thread display the only one that will be available in the final version? Did I say it wastes space? And that you have to scroll through already read posts to get to the last one (and worse, to get to the Next button) is a real pain. An optional newest first order would be a big improvement. At least the Related Content pop-up (is it really that helpful?) stays on the right on desktop displays. 

navigation from pop-ups/overlays

with "heavily scripted" designs one should generally avoid the browser' Back button -  can never be sure that it's safe unless you're told so. It's also not obvious which actions will save your input on the page you're coming from (say a partial post/reply) and which won't.
If you use  Ask  and decide to select one of the suggestions it seems that Back is your only option to return - but then your input is gone. You'll probably never look at one of the suggestions again (unless perhaps the two lines of text - here the layout is better and more efficient - are already helpful)

Settings and features

Settings

The Share bookmarks setting always reverts to ticked/enabled. I understand that this part is rudimentary and the feature not yet available. Still I expect that the values I can set stick. BTW -  the value Enhanced for the Content Editor setting ignored, I always have to set it explicitly when posting.

Notifications

There are no email notifications yet, are there? For the Live Alert settings I think subscribed refers to group membership (BTW - how can you unsubscribe from a group?). If you are interested in the activity on a certain forum you'll also get notifications from the sibling fora in the same group - quite annoying and confusing. Speaking of annoying: I'd rather see the Unread notifications as default - and an additional content read indication would be very helpful (and anyway it's hard to tell the light-blue unread background apart from the read one). My notifications counter, BTW, shows one unread notification - there's none in the menu and Mark as read doesn't help.

Live

The constant polling is irritating as it apparently interferes typing (sometimes several characters are lost). Might be my configuration (hard- and software), wonder if others also have this problem. Surprisingly even with the frequent polling the display is not always current and the notification counter updates only on some action.

Christian

Hi QC,

Thanks for the feedback.

Glad you like the activity stream and you can access posts in there by clicking on the post's title...

You're right about the indicator for read/unread messages. There is no indicator, but there is the ability to filter to just unread posts on the thread views...

Forums sit inside groups and groups have a page where we put all the notifications and key information. Hence making the journey go to the group page first should head off repeat posts.

I've created a poll to decide the fate of the 'Related Content' pop up: https://community.sophos.com/general/f/2/t/9972 - have your say.

I've also created a page showing all the latest threads across the site: https://community.sophos.com/p/latestthreads. Consider it currently temporary and just to demo the idea of a global list of threads. It's defaulted to filter out read questions so read a couple and check it's knocked them off the list.  Does this page help in anyway?

Email alerting will be switched on shortly. As a security company we just have to go a bit further to dot the i's and cross the t's. Sorry for the delay on this.

Hello ruckus,

groups have a page where we put all the notifications and key information
the page we see now or will there be any additions? Right now there are the forum summaries and the last five OPs (BTW, the roll-over pop-up extends the page and you have to scroll to see the full pop-up) but no thread subjects/titles.
filter to just unread posts
filtering works as far as I can see. It's not obvious though when the forum considers a post as read. In SophosTalk you could mark a thread or all the board as read - very handy for threads you are not interested in. I've not found a similar function. 

A fast path to a specific forum would be nice. The page is anyway script-heavy, the menu left of the the search field could perhaps be two-level.

activity stream
the "timestamp" (clock with n days ago at the bottom of an activity item) is not intuitive as it counts from the date of the initial post (FP) but takes you to the activity of the date in the stream (which is the reasonable behaviour). It seems though that you can't navigate the thread other than going to the FP (e.g. the previous day or previous posts). IMO it would be better if the clock were on the User in Forum line and took you to the FP and similarly the timestamp were added to User replied.

Latest Threads
should include the forum, otherwise it's very helpful

I understand that the Community is (or shall) be much more than a bunch of forums. The Getting started with the Quick reference (BTW, the links under New users and Explore open in the same window/tab, the quick in a new) is promising (Explore doesn't make it obvious that by clicking on one of the three articles you can indeed explore the Knowledge Base). One size fits all is probably not possible. Naturally the Community should primarily make it as easy as possible for new users to get information. Frequent visitors, advisors and the ilk shouldn't be required to follow the same trodden paths over and over again - this can easily get alienating. Dunno how hard it would be to implement different modes of the UI - one for novices and occasional visitors and the other for hard-core members.

Christian   

not sure this site qualifies as a forum any longer... at least in any traditional sense. was this the result of some ones idea to be more "user experience" friendly? terrible idea.. i'm sure participation will drop significantly.

I like the idea of the sorted global list. Just add the ability to filter by Group and you've got a winner!

Cheers - Bob