Welcome to the New Car Talk Community!

The Show
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We've now completed the migration to our new home. During the coming days and weeks, we'll be addressing those inevitable, niggling issues that occur with the move to a new residence. In the case of the community, that means getting URL redirects in place, fixing broken links within discussions, learning new moderation tools, figuring out user profiles, new features and other functionality. It'll take time for all of us to get used to this new home.

For those of you who were wondering, "Why the change?" The simple answer is, our former discussion forums were being discontinued and were no longer supported after today. We reviewed all your many comments, and did our best to find the right discussion application to meet our Car Talk Community needs.

Feel free to share your comments here. All we ask is that you give the few of us light-starved lackeys your patience. As always, there are just a few of us here -- and we have the full Car Talk site to manage, update, and generally keep alive and thriving. As time, our abilities and the functionality of the new forums allow, we'll do our very best to address any outstanding issues.

Our Czarina for all things Car Talk Community, Carolyn, will be updating this discussion thread from time to time.

Best,

Doug Mayer
Senior Web Lackey

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I don’t think it’s possible to advance to new pages using the device at the bottom of the page under this topic. If I select Page 2, for example, or use the greater-than sign at the right of the list of pages, Page 1 is still displayed for me.

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It is early, but so far I believe it is working better than I would have expected for a new program. I usually hate any such change, but this one seems to be close to what I am accustomed to.

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Yes, it does seem to be functional, but the first thing I noticed is that the “tags” are gone.
Now, we will once again have to tease information out of many posters in order to find out the make, model, and other important details.
Back to the future?

Also–there appears to be no way to edit a response after it is posted. Can’t this function be added?

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I join VDC in wondering about the tags. That was one of the software subjects from long ago that was requested by us so as not to need to babysit the O.P.s to extract information but to have it as a required field that gets filled in prior to ones original question/comment.
– Another thing I’ve noticed that makes it harder to read is the lack of comment links to each other. For example when someone makes a comment to a comment within the string overall, it’s now impossible to tell that a midway post is directly commenting to someones post. The new way just puts them in a string and coherency is lost when the comment to a post is six down from it’s intended mate.

  • VDC, I see a small word “edit” just to the right of the date beside my name above my post . Is yours there ?
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“VDC, I see a small word “edit” just to the right of the time beside my name above my post . Is yours there ?”

Whoops! There it is!
I guess that I was expecting something akin to the pencil icon from the previous version of this forum. At least I now know that I can edit my post if I later realize that I was having a brain fart when I first posted.

Now–how about HTML formatting? I tried, but it doesn’t seem to work.
Or, am I overlooking something again?

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Will a “Search” function be available? At least on my monitor, the “Submit a Car Question” link needs a little more contrast. It appears to be white lettering on an off-white background. Is there a way to flap inappropriate posts, especially spam?

Ed B.

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Similar, I suppose, to the concerns about the tags, there is still nothing to help straighten people out when they post a question. E.g. it doesn’t say anything like “This will post a topic/issue/question for discussion among other visitors to the CarTalk discussion boards” and/or anything like “provide as much information as you can about the car/symptoms etc…”

Simple stuff like that would help reduce those crazy posts such as having “Wheel Studs” in the subject line with “how to remove” as the entire text. Or those other crazy posts where someone shows up and blurts out “YOU IDIOTS!” and thinks that they’re sending a message to the brothers.

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Might want to check the activity screen - Generally regular users should not have access to admin/mod logs. For instance, we should not be able to see that Jeff Adams changed a bunch of people’s accounts to admin, if for no other reason than that gives the hacker the list of all-access accounts to try and crack.

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is the Recent Discussions tab supposed to be the new topic/post view? Is there anyway to mark all forums read so we don 't have to see the yellow alert everytime we browse?

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How to post a picture/attachment?

Need a “quote” button so one can respond to another post further up the page.

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Is the top 250 rating a thing of the past?

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These editing windows are terrible. They’re very narrow and once the text hits the bottom of the edit window the window doesn’t scroll with the text. The cursor disappears off of the bottom of the window. The text is still going in but you can’t see what you are typing. I have to use the down arrow to manually scroll and have to do this at the end of every line of text. The scrolling wheel on my mouse also doesn’t do anything, so I have to use the up/down arrows to move up & down in the edit box.

This could vary by browser. I assume the lackeys are following these responses - I’m on Firefox 3.6.17

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I would suggest that you make the default font size a little bigger, especially on the list of threads in each topic (show, discussion, repairs). Yes, I know how to make them bigger, but a lot of people here are from the Greatest Generation.

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I am getting a playlist crossdomain policy error when trying to listen to the latest show. (UK listener). I’m running windows xp, get the same on Chrome and Explorer.

From a bit of googling you may need a crossdomain.xml file on your server.

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@cigroller I had the same problem in Firefox (my version is slightly older) but no problem in chrome or safari. (just so the lackeys know!)

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The lack of nested subtopics is a big step backward. Is that an option on this new software? (If not, I hope you didn’t pay for it, since there’s free forum software out there that does it natively).

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Hello,

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks again for your bearing with us during the move. It was a big undertaking – we moved almost 500,000 posts and over 80,000 users from one system to another in a relatively short time. We’re also getting used to the new digs, and we’re trying to create a prioritized list of items we’ve got to fix. The first order of business is to fix what’s broken, and to ensure that what is in place works properly, and then we will move on to incorporating more enhancements.

I just wanted to respond directly to some of your comments, and include some topics from the other threads.

Search function: We’re in touch with the developers to investigate our options for a search, and we hope to have it in place soon.

No scrolling in the text fields in Firefox: I’m having the same problem, and I forwarded it on to the tech gurus. I’ll let you know when I hear something. Thanks for the feedback about Chrome, etc. That’s also useful data.

Tagging: We’re working on this. I know this has been an issue that’s been requested time and time again. In the long run, we hope to implement make/model pulldowns to require the info when an OP asks a question, but it requires some specific coding that we haven’t been able to tackle yet. This was how the My Car Talk feature was developed in the last system, but it has not been pulled into the new system.

Nesting comment replies: Again, this has gone on the list of items to be addressed by the developers. The platform we’re using is highly customizable, but we still have to work with developers to have it adapt to our specific needs. We lackeys are also still getting used to the new system, and in the meantime, we humbly request your patience as we continue to try to work out the kinks. In the meantime, as primitive as it may seem, try to refer in your reply to the comment you’re replying to.

HTML tagging: I’ve been using HTML tags in my posts so far, and it’s been working for me. (I think.) Are you still having trouble?

Top 20/Top 250 Rankings: We’re also going to find out what are options are under Vanilla to restore recognition of our top posters.

Sticky Posts: This option does exist, and it’s helpful for us admins. (I know I’m excited!)

Again, thank you for your patience, and I will stay in touch. Please keep your comments coming.

Carolyn

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To be honest, and I know this has been alluded to elsewhere, and it wasn’t great before but is especially bad now: The color scheme is making my eyes bleed. BRIGHT red surrounding BRIGHT white filled with BRIGHT yellow “new” tags. It looks like a McDonalds exploded on the forum. Any way this could be toned down a bit?

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Shadowfax, I guess you won’t be playing the blind card anymore. :wink:

I don’t understand how you buy a product without the most basic questions being already answered.

I don’t understand you someone builds a discussion board that doesn’t thread replies.

So far, epic fail.