Coming Soon! Our New Car Talk Community

The Show
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We have some exciting news to share— we’re closing in on a new Car Talk Community!

We anticipate launching the community in early January.

The new community features a number of items you’ve requested, including clearer thread navigation, better notification options, improved mobile usability, and — because we’ve eliminated a third party-- no more log-in issues.

For the geeks out there: After researching a variety of platforms, we opted for Discourse, an open-source forum platform from the creators of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network which powers many large-scale communities such as XPRIZE Community, Bad Voltage Community, and Community Leadership Forum forums. Bringing the Car Talk Community in-house will allow for a more consistent and extendable user interface, while also allowing for content cross-pollination— for example, showing related community discussions next to a blog post on the Car Talk web site.

Next, an offer to help us with the final steps before launch— beta testing!

We are extending an invitation here only, to a limited number of you who are interested in participating. We’ll have a written set of steps we want users to take. We’ll ask you to document errors, and anything you found counterintuitive and confusing. We’ll gather that feedback in a structured fashion.

If you’d like to be considered for beta testing, please send along a note with your community user name to checkitout@cartalk.com. If you’re selected, we’ll send along guidelines when testing begins later this month.

We’ll update you again when we get close to launch!

As always, thanks for your time and energy in helping others get useful answers here. Our commitment to you is to make that process as easy as we can, with the resources we have at hand. Thanks for being along for the ride.

All Best,

Doug Mayer
Senior Web Lackey

P.S. Check it out— a few images from the new community. (For those of you on Androids or PCs, sorry it looks like an Apple Ad! :slight_smile: It’s a cleaner design, with an intuitive interface, that’s responsive and will work well across a variety of devices. We’re excited to be getting close to launch!

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Thanks for the update Doug. A few questions about the transition.

  • Will existing users maintain the same name and password, no need to re-register?
  • Will the older threads on this platform remain searchable from the new platform?
  • Will there be a way to arrange search results by date of the post?
  • Will the user’s past history with the Car Talk website be seamlessly transferred over to the new one?
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Know what?there are a couple of forums you could drop and there wouldnt be much outcry,I take it there will be no true “General Discussion” forum,hopefully the new posters will keep you all going,good luck.

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@kmccune
"…I take it there will be no true “General Discussion” forum…"
Where are you getting that information? I don’t see it.
CSA

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Hi Folks,

Some quick answer to your questions…

* Will existing users maintain the same name and password, no need to re-register?
Yes!

* Will the older threads on this platform remain searchable from the new platform?
Absolutely. This is critical.

* Will there be a way to arrange search results by date of the post?
Yes, on the search results page we will be able to sort by latest post, relevance, most liked, and most viewed.

* Will the user’s past history with the Car Talk website be seamlessly transferred over to the new one?
Yes!

The forums will stay the same, with the exception of Distracted Driving, which will be folded in to General, and then tagged with “Distracted Driving.”

All Best,

Doug

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I think it’s a very wise decision to bring forum administration in house. I’ve seen several instances when all you guys could say was basically “We’ll ask Vanilla and hope they fix it for us,” and I’m sure that must have been frustrating.

Discourse seems to have a pretty good, simple design and flow to it. I suspect this will be a good change all around.

Happy to beta test if you need - I’ll shoot an email as instructed.

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I’m pretty sure it wont be a true general discussion forum,did I read correctly when distracted driving will be included with general discussion?

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I volunteered, I am glad the forum is going to continue. If we wish to make comments about the new forum if accepted what is the process?

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Hey Folks,

Thanks for the comments, and thanks to all of you who emailed me to participate in the testing. We are really looking forward to this next iteration of the CTC. It’s a big step forward.

I wanted to update you-- in early beta testing within the staff, we identified a few areas we want to tidy up, and some development work we want to tweak. Because we want to test the new CTC as close to the final version as possible, we’re going to get that work done, first. It might be 2-4 weeks-- we’ll know after some discussions this week. All of you who have signed up to test, I’ll keep you posted via email.

All Best and Happy Holidays!

Doug Mayer

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Hi Folks,

An update, since it’s been a while! We’re obviously delayed here, due to some reasons out of our control on the part of our partners who were handling development. Unfortunately, we’ve had to shift to new partners, which required a number of steps, including a request of proposals, evaluation of the proposals, and selection.

We hope to be back on track shortly. I’ll report more as soon as I have some news to share.

Again, apologies for the delay. No one is more excited than us to get a new Community built and launched!

All Best,

Doug Mayer

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Thanks for the update, Doug. I think most of us understand launch problems (in one way or another) :wink:

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This must be as good a place as any to introduce myself. I’m Victoria, the latest Junior Lackey at Car Talk. I’ll be around the joint, sweeping the floors and emptying the trash cans and doing all the stuff they have us do when I’m not fetching coffee for Doug.

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Welcome Victoria!

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Welcome Victoria! If those trash bags get too heavy just bat your eyes at Doug. I heard that he likes hard labor…or he served hard labor once…something like that!!!

Yosemite

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Welcome Victoria, to the Car Talk Family!

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Welcome Victoria. Don’t believe everything that Doug and Caroline tell you about me.

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Are you an addition to or replacement of cdaquila? Is the test website still in the works?

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Oh, no, @Barkydog: I’m still here. (As far as I know, we are not quite to the testing stage yet on the new community site.)

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@cdaquila Glad you are still here, warm fuzzy feeling! Welcome victoria

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Yes, @barkydog, little by little I will tell Victoria about the milestones in community maintenance, like the great flood that wiped out waterboy and ushered in the era of Barkydog!