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Re: Changes to Community Functionality

LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

AnnouncementBanner.png

 

The next phase of our ongoing community renovations is quickly approaching! In November, we'll be performing the migration of the NI User Group Community onto the platform currently used to host the NI Discussion Forums. See the timeline here for more details.

This is a major change that will affect all users and we want to ensure everyone is prepared. Below we have provided some quick updates regarding changes to features and functionality within the NI Community.

 

User Profile

How does the migration affect my user profile?

  • If you are currently active on the NI User Group Community, your account will automatically be generated in the NI Discussion Forums or merged with your existing account on the forums.
  • Users who have been inactive for multiple years and never contributed content will need to log in to the community post-migration in order to regenerate their profile.
  • Your avatar from the NI User Group Community will not be migrated over. If you do not already have an account on the forums, you will be given a default avatar. If you do have an account on the forums, you will keep the avatar you have now.
  • Your sent and received private messages will not be migrated over.

 

Subscriptions, Bookmarks, and Email Notifications

How does the migration affect my subscriptions and bookmarks from the NI User Group Community?

  • Subscriptions and bookmarks will not be migrated over.
  • You will need to subscribe again to groups or content within groups for which you want to receive notifications. You can find a list of the groups you are a member of in the My Groups component on the community homepage.
  • You will need to bookmark content which you would like to be available on the My Bookmarks page within the community.
    • You can find the bookmark option in the Options menu on any piece of content.
  • If you had bookmarks saved to your web browser, the URLs will redirect to the new location.

How does the migration affect my email notifications?

  • If you are did not previously have a forums account, you may want to setup your email notifications within the forums. To do this, go to My Settings > Subscriptions & Notifications > Notification Settings. You may also want to review your subscriptions and email format settings.

 

User Groups

How does the migration affect user groups?

  • Groups will either be open (content is visible to the entire community) or closed (only group members may view content). During the migration, your group privacy options will be respected, and all of your members and content will be migrated over with your group.
  • Groups will be segmented into different categories such as Local User Groups, Product User Groups, Special Interest Groups, and Partner Groups.
  • Groups can be found via the community navigation. Group names cannot be searched for, but you can search for content within open groups or closed groups that you are a member of.
  • Closed groups will not be accessible in the community navigation unless you are already a member.
  • You can find groups that you're a member of in the My Groups component on the community homepage.
  • GroupAdmins will be able to invite members directly from within the user group.
    • This function is currently not working as epexcted for closed groups, but will be available in our next release. Until then, you will need to send the user a direct link to the group and the user can then request to join.
  • The group overview page layout will be standardized across all groups. The layout includes a component which features the group avatar and group description, and an HTML component that can be used for whatever content a Group Admin chooses to add.
    • GroupAdmins will need to recreate your group overview page (including your group avatar and description) after the migration is complete. Please take any screenshots or save any HTML that you may need prior to November 11th. If requested, we can provide a screenshot of the overview page and a copy of the HTML after the migration.
  • Groups now only contain threaded topics. There are no documents, blogs, or projects within a group.
    • Any documents, blog posts, or content within a project will be converted into the topic format within the group during the migration.
  • The URL to your group will redirect to the new location after the migration is complete.
  • Links to projects will not redirect. You will be able to locate the content from projects within the user group that the project previously exisited within.
  • New user group creation is limited to Community Managers. To avoid the duplication of groups, each group will pass through an approval process to certify that available groups are distinct and helpful in their own respective ways. Community Managers will work with you to identify the best fit for your group.

For more general information on user groups, see Using Groups in the NI Community.

If you have questions or feedback, please post here User Groups - Questions and Feedback.

 

Documents

How does the migration affect documents?

  • Documents do not exist within user groups. Documents will be found in their respective areas such as Example Programs, Reference Designs, Sample Exercises, etc.
  • For documents that previously existed within a user group, the documents will be migrated over and converted to topics within the user group.
  • For documents that were not located within groups and that were not categorized, the documents will be moved them to an "Additional Documents" category within the community.
  • There will be templates available to chose from when creating a new document.
  • Saved drafts for documents are visible to any community user within the Documents Dashboard.
  • Published documents can be edited and collaborated on by any community user.
    • There are options to restrict edits (anyone can edit but only the author can publish changes) or block edits (only the author can edit and publish changes) on documents.
  • Some categories will require special permissions for creating or editing documents.
  • Documents can have pre-defined labels added to act as a type of sub-categorization.
  • Tags can be added after a document has been published.
  • Documents being migrated over will display the original publish date but not the last edited date.
    • The last edited date will update once a document is edited post-migration.
  • The version history available for a document will start with the most recently published version. Versions from before the migration will no longer be available.
  • Personal documents and drafts will not be migrated over.

For more information on documents, see Using Documents in the NI Community.

If you have questions or feedback, please post here Documents - Questions and Feedback.

 

Example Programs

How does the migration affect example programs?

  • If the documents were within a user group, the documents were brought over within that group and became discussion topics within the user group. For documents that were not located within groups and that were not categorized, we moved them to a "Additional Documents" section. Example Code located within the "Additional Documents" section are being reviewed and tagged by content curators.
  • To ensure that the code submitted to the site via Code Exchange is of the highest quality, there will be an approval process after the document has been submitted for review. The document will be reviewed by tenured and expert NI employees, and you may receive feedback on your document prior to publication.

For more information, see Example Programs Submission Process.

If you have questions or feedback, please post here Example Programs - Questions and Feedback.

 

Blogs

How does the migration affect blogs?

  • Blogs do not exist within user groups. Blogs can be found in their own area of the community.
  • Blog post creation is limited to the authors assigned to a blog.
  • Blog posts can have pre-defined labels added to act as a type of sub-categorization.
  • New blog creation is limited to Community Managers. Requests for a new blog will go through an approval process to ensure that the available blogs will be regularly contributed to by dedicated authors.

For more information, see Using Blogs in the NI Community.

If you have questions or feedback, please post here Blogs - Questions and Feedback.

 

More announcements will be made over the upcoming weeks as we prepare for the migration. Please stay tuned and let us know if you have any questions.

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Comments
PrimaryKey
NI Employee (retired)

I cannot start a topic in user groups. In any user group the new topic button is grayed out and disabled. I also dont see any option to join these groups. Whats wrong?

Piotr Kruczkowski
Certified TestStand Architect
Certified LabVIEW Architect
LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

PrimaryKey - I sent you a private message regarding your question. Thanks!

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RER
NI Employee (retired)

Hi Community Team! I have just tried to publish my first post on the shiney, new community pages! I wanted to publish (what I hope is) a compelling, informative maker project...

 

myLightGrid: Visualisation using Illumination

 

Unfortunately, it will not allow me to attach the source code, as it exceeds 6MB. 

 

Capture.JPG

 

6MB seems like a very harsh limit to set on the code sharing community. My project is not what most developers would regard as a big project. However, because it is a RIO application, the attached bitfile naturally bump-up the file size.

 

I guess, my only option is to head off ni.com to a cloud service like drop box. Seems like a shame.

 

What are you thoughts guys?

Rich Roberts
Senior Marketing Engineer, National Instruments
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-roberts-4176a27b/
LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

Hi RER - Thanks for the feedback! We have increased the max attachment file size to 10 MB.

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masteen
Member

I have a simple question, how do I find a list of my uploaded documents?

X.
Trusted Enthusiast
Trusted Enthusiast

That's the WHOLE IDEA of the migration: no more "personal" documents or page, it's all put in a few bags (academic, code exchange, more, etc).

You could do an advanced search for "community documents" by "you" and if you haven't commented much on anyone else's documents,, they should pop up.

I am talking about PUBLISHED documents. For document drafts (which you hadn't published), contact the moderator of this thread (Options>>Report to Moderator).

As for the rest (polls, and whatever else there was on the previous site), I have no clue...

LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

masteen wrote: I have a simple question, how do I find a list of my uploaded documents?

Hi masteen - new documents that you author can be found on your user profile page towards the bottom under the section My Document Contributions. However, due to a bug, you will not see documents that were migrated from the old user group community. We are working to resolve this. Please refer to Known Issues with Migration for updates.

 

Please note that if the document was a "personal" document in the user group community -- meaning it was not contributed to the example programs space or part of a user group -- it was not migrated over. You can send us a request if you are missing any documents like that. All documents that were part of a user group or other space were migrated over accordingly.

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X.
Trusted Enthusiast
Trusted Enthusiast

Thanks for the clarification on "old" personal documents.

Can we lookup a user and see what documents he/she has contributed?

Can we go to a document category and sort documents by by date created? revised?

LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

Yes, you can go to a user's profile and see a full list of documents they have authored or contributed to post-migration. As mentioned above, you'll see documents a user had previously authored once the bug is addressed.

You can also do a search by author and set type of post to document to see a list of documents the user has authored or commented on.

 

If you go to a document category, you cannot sort by date. The list is sorted by latest activity, similar to what you would find in a discussion board. If you do a search, you can choose a specific document category and a few date options.

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Bob_Schor
Knight of NI

What happened?  This afternoon, the Community had its "New Look", well-designed for a PC, fairly large fonts, topics laid out so that most entries (when searching by topics) were 2-3 lines of text.  Now, two hours later, it is a disaster!  This site isn't so bad, as the "Headings" part is pretty minimal, but looking at the LabVIEW Forum is torture!  There are four equal-width columns:  one holds the User's Avatar (and needs about a quarter of the width), the second is the "meat" of the entry, Title, Who, When, Replies, Kudos, etc., now requiring about twice as many (short) lines, making it much harder to read, then a column that says "n Replies" (with no header, but I can guess this is the number of Replies), while the final column says "2New" (with no space following the number, and no heading to say what this means).  The last two columns need about half their width.  So if we "borrow" 3/4 column from Column 1, 1/2 column from Columns 3 and 4, we can make the important Column 2 2-3 times the width, making it much easier to read.

 

Does anyone with a little bit of Graphics training look at this?  Let's optimize it for the PC, people ...

 

Bob "Curmudgeon" Schor

LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

Hi Bob - there have been no updates today on our end. Everything appears normal to me in Firefox 50.1.0 and Chrome on Win 7. Can you check your browser settings, clear cache/cookies and try again?

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LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

Update: Bob, I was able to reproduce the issue in Edge on Win 10. We are investigating the issue and will post when we have an update. In the meantime, you may want to try using a different browser.

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LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

The issue you were seeing should be resolved now. Thanks!

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Bob_Schor
Knight of NI

Lili,

     Thanks.  Sorry to go all Freaky on you -- a little short of sleep following flying half-way around the world yesterday (a little sleep-deprived).  Anyway, I was using Win 10 + Chrome (I avoid Edge), and I can verify that now, on exactly the same PC, it looks fine.  [When I started Chrome, the thumbnail of "recently-viewed" pages showed the "Bad Old" form, then segued into the "Good Old" form.  Thanks once more.

 

Bob Schor