Over the next few days, we will be switching our forum technology. We will be migrating from our in-house forum tool to a third party forum and messaging technology built on the Discourse platform https://discourse.org.
Please bear with us as we make this switch. We will be trying to make sure all existing posts and threads are properly migrated but there may be some bumps in the road as the new software does not allow for an exact “apples to apples” match.
Over this period, we will be blocking all comments and new threads in the forum to make sure nothing gets lost in the migration. The only active thread will be this thread here.
We will post updates on the progress of the migration and would ask for any feedback to be posted here too.
If you have any other issues, support or otherwise, during this period, also feel free to mention those issues here so we can help you out.
Thanks for your patience and we look forward to the new technology and benefits it will bring us.
We hope to have it fully functional by Monday morning. Have a good weekend!
Have a great weekend!
fingers crossed everybody
The new forum is launched everyone. Give it a look and let us know if anything is not working as it should. We are working out some rough edges as we speak but hope everything will be working properly by tomorrow.
I am replying to this thread to see how it looks.
I am getting a 404 when I try to view my profile/summary. This 404 seems to carry over to other pages like Badges, the page appears and then disappears after after a few seconds. I only get this behavior in a tab where I tried to view my profile.
Non-glitch feedback, I wish it was a little easier to get out of the forum sub-domain or that the user profiles would show some/all of the content you see on “normal” profile.
I also get a 404 error when clicking on ‘inbox’.
Furthermore, how do I leave the forum to go back to the LingQ main website to the Lessons section, etc.?
EDIT: Forums notifications don’t show up on the main website.
I’m gonna be honest, because you’re not a bunch of kids who’re trying to do something for the first time and need encouragement.
This looks and feels like shit. Simple link to a discord server would’ve done better than this.
Just testing for now, to see how it works.
I just noticed we can get back to the main site by clicking the LingQ icon in the top right near the search bar instead of the icon in the top left. It does look like you need to be completely scrolled to the top of the page though, otherwise the header is replaced with the title of the thread you’re currently reading.
EDIT: Looks like they added the normal menu buttons to the top right to get back to the main site (Lessons, Tutors, etc.)
right… why fix what isn’t broken?
People have complained about the forums for years. Not easy to search, impossible to follow very long threads being amongst the biggest issues. So I’m interested to see how the new forum functions.
Discord is not the answer to replacing “forums” in my opinion as that is more of a “chat”. When you have a variety of topics going on that will be super chaotic imo and doesn’t replace the functionality of a message board.
As for how things “look”…eh. Could be better…but I also assume they threw something together quickly in order to get the basic functionality of the new message board out there so people could start writing message again and may tweak the look later. Either way, if it functions better, I don’t personally care how it looks.
I meant that this solution isn’t the answer almost as much as Discord. Following sub-threads hasn’t became more clear, the main listing of threads is a mess, UX is 10x worse than it was. Redundant functionality inside threads, all these dates, calendars, stats of links, likes, views etc.
I just don’t see the idea behind this change. Problems haven’t been solved. If they’re going to tweak it later, how am I supposed to rate these changes and, besides, isn’t this another LingQ beta test, where premium members are supposed to be free beta testers.
The old forums were questionable, but still better than this. Let’s hope the reader and dictionaries are not gonna be moved to the Google Collab platform.
@S.I @ericb100 The problem that Eric was mentioning is real. Long interesting threads were almost impossible to follow. However, I admit I know nothing about this platform, so I have no idea if this is going to fix or not that problem.
At the moment, one thing I like is the possibility to mention people. So, in this case, I can mention both of you at the same time.
Although, I have to say @S.I is right, Premium users shouldn’t really be beta testers but we usually are. It is what it is. I would be definitely happier with a lot less bugs but my hope is that all this beta testing will end up in something finally stable and better.
@mark : for your reference, I was trying to upload a screenshot just to test the forum but apparently it gives error. I tried with both .png and .jpg.
This is the message that appears on the field when uploading.
Uploading: filename.jpg…
There is also at the bottom: uploading 100%.
Then a pop-up window opens mentioning an error during the upload.
Some valid points S.I. I frankly don’t know the state of the universe of message boards anymore. For the most part I only frequent the LingQ message board. This “new” one seems like others that I’ve been on which tend to work fine (to me) in regards to subthreads…the subthreads typically being just a reply to a previous post someone has made, which they can simply quote that person’s text if they desire. And if not, I can click the link the points to the post being replied to if I need context. Not sure if this software has a “threaded” view vs. chronological, or whether that would satisfy your concern? Do you have an example of something? To me this solves my issue mostly…because all I ever cared about was the latest posts, which will now be chronological. I can refer back to whom they are replying to and the post they are replying to. You could never find the latest ones in the old forum. Once it gets to that point I just bail on the thread altogether.
I did try the search function here. Doesn’t seem to quite be working in all cases, but maybe a recent post you made wasn’t “indexed” yet (I tried searching for some text from your previous post).
Those were my two hangups from the old forums. Hopefully things will shape up for everyone’s concerns.
You’re writing on it. lol
I find it interesting that I can see someone ( @ericb100 ) is writing a response as I type this. Also, I feel like this has some unintended consequences of being able to more directly “Question Steve” in any thread regardless of his participation beforehand.
I can honestly say that post-reddit (like 2011 when I fully adopted it), I have more or less never used site forums. LingQ was one of the few exceptions. This new interface does seem snappier and easier to use. I looked at a few of the longer threads from before, but, because some things didn’t really migrate, it is a little hard to tell how much easier they are to follow in this app. Time will tell.
I just want it to be a little more fully “integrated” with the rest of LingQ, but I don’t have a clear definition as to what that means. Like what if I want to import a text from a user? Some users, e.g. @PeterBormann, have a habit of writing a non-fiction textbooks worth of text. Certainly someone was importing those into LingQ 
.
Thanks, we are looking into this!
The reality is that the old forum had performance issues as mentioned here by @ericb100 . The advantage to this new approach is that this software is developed and maintained as dedicated forum software and should therefore perform better and have better features currently and long term. By outsourcing the forum infrastructure, this should allow us to focus on the unique core functionality of the LingQ app and leave the forum functionality to an app specializing in that functionality alone.
I think that once the dust settles this will be the case. Although, the old forum did allow us to integrate our user information better which will likely not be possible here now.
At any rate, this had to happen as the alternative of rebuilding our forum ourselves was just not appealing given all the other things we would like to be working on instead.
Ha! I saw you typing as well! And I’m in the same boat as you. I just never use message boards other than LingQ. Don’t have time to look anywhere else mostly.
Good question on importing of posts into LingQ. Not something I’ve typically used personally, but I assume there may be many people who do. Would be nice to have a way to have that be more direct.
By the way, I did find a cool thing (to me)…you can bookmark posts/threads which will come in handy to refer back to some posts. In fact, just bookmarked the post related to your video you did for LingQ some time ago.