We just uploaded a completely redesigned Friends page. It replaces the previous Community page. You can see that you can now flip between Activities, Blogs and Rankings and filter these results by country, study language or group (Friends, All members). We’ve also added a search box to allow you to search just your friends. These changes make it much easier to find and follow your friends while at the same time seeing what the rest of the community is up to and how you compare.
You will also notice a change to the navigation. The old Home tab is now called Lessons and has a submenu containing Library, My Lessons (the old Lessons page), Vocabulary, Write, Speak and Import. We decided to group all of these pages under Lessons. This was done partly to make navigation easier and to make the site cleaner. It also made sense after we removed the Friends’ Activity from the Home page. The Community tab is now called Friends and shows the new Friends page, of course. In the submenu you will find Profile, Invite, Referrals and we have given the Forum its own tab as the third pillar of the site.
We have made a number of changes to the site to help speed things up. Some of these things have been done over the last few weeks and have sped things up significantly. In addition, in this update, Friends Activities have been removed from the new Lessons page, New Words numbers are no longer calculated automatically on the Library search page. These changes were made to improve the speed of the site. However, you are able to manually calculate New Words numbers at any time and we have added the ability to sort by New Words Number and New Words Percentage to the Library search page. This is something many of you have been asking for.
We hope you like the changes. Of course, we look forward to your feedback!
After all of our efforts to improve the speed, the Friends page does seem very slow at the moment. We are trying to figure out why that is… bear with us.
When I clicked on the friends page, it took quite a while to load, since I think the default was to display the activities of everyone. I then went to the right to filter to see the activities for only my friends and I got an unhandled exception. I then switched back to filter by all, then back again to only my friends, and it worked this time, so I don’t know if it only happened the one time.
There do seem to be some wrinkles to iron out. Of course, it worked fine in our test environment but it’s a little different on the live site! It will be neat when the bugs are worked out.
As usual there will be a few wrinkles to iron out. Not everything that works on the QA server works on the production server. Your help, attentiveness and patience are appreciated.
Hi Mark!
The speed is better, the new navigation looks good. Thanks for the effort.
I checked Freinds - Rankings. I used the filter of learning language (English) and tried to find my name on the list, but I couldn’t find my name. I tried another filter of country (Japan), but I couldn’t find my name.
I like a feature that I think is new! Again, I am only “back” for about a week, but I think this is new: when you hover over the LingQ logo, you see your screen name appear. You can click this area to go to your profile, and see your progress. Very handy! This is better and involves less steps than going through the community page, which is how I did it before. I am still working through the various new parts of the layout. So far all is looking very nice!
I miss the community page. It was the start page in my browser because with one sight I could see what happened in the last hours on Link: Forum, Friends Activity, Blogs, Ranking. Now I have to click on a lot of pages.
It was slow but acceptable with all the friends that I’ve (Only for one week when the server had huge problems it was really too slow)
Vera, please click on Friend in the top menu bar and you will find the expanded Community page. You can use the filters on the right to view activities and blogs. As I said on another thread, it may be possible to make the friends view the default view.
One thing though: if you filter your friends’ activity scores by language, shouldn’t you only get their activity scores for that language? I was just about the send the boys round to give Jeff Lindqvist a going over, then I realised that the score shown was his total. Looking at his profile page, he’s actually been LESS active in Russian than me. Jeff you are safe…for now.
I opened a new computer, and found a significant improvement in the LingQ speed with some great social functions added. (Begrudgingly): Finally, they learned to build good computers!
