It’s Impossible to live with this!

[Lindy]

On 6/30/2016 at 0:31 AM, Chris Bell said:

i appreciated any feedback on this matter as my aim is to improve all of our experience as a whole (not just my personal),
i don't think i speak out of my ass  http://www.joesdata.com/executive/Chris_Bell_789222880.html

 

On 7/2/2016 at 6:33 AM, Chris Bell said:

at the same time you cannot ignore that this isn't the most comfortable area to manage volume email or encourage communications,
Atari and myself both suggested an adjustable vertical divider, anything to be able to mange emails efficiently outside of this restricted view,
 

I like you and Al (AtariAge) knows I like him, but he likes Atari and you like Myspace.  Both respectively cool in their heyday and cool for the throwback enthusiasts (I still like Atari), but if you're into social media, you use Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram. If you're into gaming consoles, you're into Wii, PS or Xbox. Not staying modern, competitive and adapting to the masses is what makes you yesterday's news. 

I'm not quite sure why you're using the messenger to manage large numbers of "emails" as it's a messenger, not an e-mail client. There's several other options if you need mass communication options. You could use the support module of Commerce (and this topic has prompted an idea I'll log for better community support contact options) for tickets or you could use the forums and set permissions so members can only see topics they've created. 

It's like complaints about the robustness of the attachment system in forum posts. There's a Gallery product - we, as the developers of the product, don't intend for you to turn a forum post into a comprehensive gallery management system. There's an app for that!™ Right tool for the right job; that kind of thing. 

6 hours ago, Chris Bell said:

what are you suggesting; that Lindy doesn't care?
he explained their decision selecting the model they modeled after; that doesn't imply he is set in his ways or mind!
he advised they are making some changes that may improve the situation; as well as asked for suggestions for improvements,

yes i am harping on this topic; i have no intention of letting go anytime soon, if needed i will contact other site owners and ask them to chime in as well,
instead of getting frustrated every day, other advanced elements can take a back seat while basic daily necessity is properly resolved first,
i intend to do everything in my power to overturn this or see that a proper solution is provided once and for all,

did you ever hear the sentence "The squeaky wheel gets the greased"?
Squeak, Squeak , Squeak!

Actually, squeaky wheels annoy me... In modern terms (again), I just replace the whole hub assembly and wheel bearing, sometimes even take a cutting torch and angle grinder to it; it's more expensive initially, but oiling it only provides short-term relief until it starts squeaking again and causing more stress a short while down the line. 

Seriously though, as difficult as it may be to believe, we don't decide to do things on a whim and our decisions are based largely on multiple avenues of feedback -- including outside of this community. In fact, the 4.1.13 PM changes were born largely of feedback from a few enterprise clients who otherwise like the current messenger functionality. There is no incentive to holding things back on the sole premise that's how we feel they should be. That doesn't mean we're going to overhaul the PM system because you get a few people to rally behind you, but if our global perception was people preferred something different, we would consider. That's not the reality here. 

That said, in using the 4.1.13 changes for a bit, I still see some more room for improvement - particularly with searching and scrolling the sidebar list, so I'll make a note to look into that. Beyond that, we need to move on. 

[Chris Bell]

@Lindy
i was literally laughing out loud reading your response
i enjoy conversing with you very much, even though some of the content is controversial; you're always graceful in your ways
this alone is merits in my eyes to not wanting to find a new solution; rather influence and see IPS maintain its core integrity we all got used to and trust for many years,

im very proud of our achievements in MySpace, im very grateful for the opportunity to take part in helping shape the future, just as Atari was ahead of its time and a model to follow;  so was MySpace,
our struggle then was accommodating hundreds of million users simultaneously; this is over 12 years ago using hardware and software that couldn't keep up at the time,
we had to reinvent everything! from software developers (MS and Linux) to hardware manufacturers (Dell and HP) custom building for us as we couldn't slowdown growth,

now to they key element of this industry; we weren't a private community! we were social for monetary reasons; private is not social, (pending usage )
behind the free everything and all this MySpace hype there was a bigger monster, our AI engine we perfected for  many years,
technically the AI engine was more important then the front end application because it was responsible for generating 5-6 billion dollars a year!

thats where social engineering and complex algorithms comes into play; we used this information to generate revenues, redirecting potential customers to the right vendors and grow our business this way,
we monetized the $h!.. out of every real-estate we could think of; since you cannot display ads in private email area; the messenger approach was adopted instead of an official inbox,
this layer of considerations don't exist in our private communities nor we need to consider any of these elements by default just because they are part of a popular application, (TODAY!)

im not suggesting that there was no feedback (yes i did ) used or the application is badly designed; but i do feel the model used is somewhat flawed, 
especially when you force fit/integrate every element even if it doesn't belong; i believe you can integrate familiar elements without loosing IPS's identity and purpose,

my parents are among those who can interact with the internet world through their phones today, (it wasn't easy; and it still isn't! but they made it)
still they cannot operate a PC or understand further then turning it on, they will never ever post on any of our private forum accept Facebook, twitter and such base applications,
this is also a temporary gap imo as the following generation will not be computer illiterate unless this dumb it down momentum continues (win10 and such annoyances),

before i forget one last thing...
Squeak, Inbox wheel, Squeak (from the axle damn! )

[BIgnat]

I upgrade my forum to IPS 4 last week. I like everything, but I really hate the messenger.... It doesn't need to be like FaceBook one, because it isn't a chat, it's more like an email client... I have more than 2500 PM on my inbox. Now, there's a little hell when I'm trying to find the right message. It sounds crazy, but I have to use the PM Viewer app to find a message I need, then I copy an ID... It's very crazy and annoying. I don't need to messenger like a Facebook for chatting, I need one like Gmail. So, I just have to pay money for a developer to have an app to replace this absolutely rubbish messenger in IPS4. Why I need to pay to a developer? Because I really can't work now. Thanks IPS.

[CheersnGears]

 

[RPG-support]

On 14.06.2016 at 1:16 AM, Chris Bell said:

yet I only now come forward and express how I’m unhappy with it

Please, stop being unhappy. People are being killed everyday. Even children. So, your problems are insignificant. 

And... 

On 14.06.2016 at 0:24 AM, Lindy said:

Hope all is well, Chris. 

 

[BIgnat]

12 hours ago, RPG-support said:

Please, stop being unhappy. People are being killed everyday. Even children. So, your problems are insignificant. 

Don't distort the facts, please. The new messenger is very different and it's good for someone, who has just a few conversations. I have a lot of them... I could see 20 conversations on the screen, but now I can see just five. So, it's really bad for work, cause I need to scroll all time. It's really drive me crazy...

[MADMAN32395]

1 hour ago, BIgnat said:

but now I can see just five.

that must be a you thing... i have lots of messages, and im on the latest release. and i can just keep scrolling my message list and see all of my messages just fine.

[BIgnat]

8 minutes ago, MADMAN32395 said:

that must be a you thing... i have lots of messages, and im on the latest release. and i can just keep scrolling my message list and see all of my messages just fine.

You're right )) I could see 20 private messages without scrolling in IPB 3.4, but now just 5, so I have to scroll. It's very, very annoying when you have about 20-30 new PM during the day.

[RPG-support]

10 hours ago, BIgnat said:

You're right )) I could see 20 private messages without scrolling in IPB 3.4, but now just 5, so I have to scroll. It's very, very annoying when you have about 20-30 new PM during the day.

Hey man. I think you are expert in css and can ajust simple things in custom.css:

.ipsColumn_veryWide {
	width: 100%;
}

#elMessageList {
    overflow-y: auto;
    max-height: 800px;
    min-height: 800px;
}

 

[TDBF]

I'm sorry, but I am in the camp of 'I see this was change just for change sake', let's copy Facebook or Twitter because it's the in thing to do. Sorry, just because Facebook does it, doesn't always mean that it is correct or the right thing to do. Personally, I despise just about everything to do with Facebook.

Now that my rant is over about Facebook . There are three reasons why I dislike the new private message system:

1. GUI: The GUI has design flaws in that you can or could be two clicks away or constantly scrolling to get where you need to be. Everything that is important for the user has now squeezed into the left-hand side of the screen. When you are dealing with many private messages, having them all in a scroll box means one or two things, you cannot see the bigger picture and you are constantly scrolling (see below). Then, to make things worse, you leave 80% of the real estate empty on the off chance that a user wants to read a private message. Believe it or not, I don't always go into the private messages system to read my messages, but much of my time will be spent doing housework and the way it is designed right now, I will spend more time scrolling and looking around to get to where I want to be. If you wanted to keep everything on one page, why not use a modal box to display and send emails?
2. Accessibility and Disabilities: As I said previously, not everything is readily available and accessible due to the nature of the GUI and that is due to the way it has been designed (because you want this 80% real-estate free to display the private message). When designing a GUI, I always try and keep all important (if not all features) one click away for the user, this is to prevent constant clicking and wheel scrolling. Prolonged, this will cause people to end up having repetitive strain injuries, muscle and bone damage in the fingers and wrist. You also have to take into account there will be people with disabilities that do use this forum, and the current GUI IMO doesn't take this into consideration.
3. Purpose: You are under the assumption that everyone uses this feature as a glorified messaging system, when in fact, a lot of people tend to use this more as they would as their email accounts. My workflow is very important to me, my folders and options are in blocks on the left-hand side and my email/messages are listed on the right in a number of 20.40,100 (of my choosing) set by page navigation (without the need to be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling) and when I click to read a message, it is either displayed in a preview pane, popup or new window. This to me makes sense and makes it easy for me to look over the message list and find what I want very quickly, the current solution prevents me from doing that.

[BN_IT_Support]

Having switched my main site to V4 a couple of weeks ago I have to agree the the messenger inbox could do with some improvement.  Having a short list of messages may work okay on a mobile app where you can easily flick left or right to delete or pin, but on a webpage it feels really clunky.  For example having to mark a little checkbox to flag something for deletion and then needing to click the delete button somewhere else on the screen is not a very easy user activity.  Having now used the system for a few weeks I agree that a decent full-screen view of the folders and folder contents with the ability to drag and drop messages onto folders, including a trash can, would be really great please.

[BIgnat]

On 27 июля 2016 г. at 11:29 PM, RPG-support said:

Hey man. I think you are expert in css and can ajust simple things in custom.css:

 

Спасибо! :))))) Thank you so much!!! It's very useful tip! Now it's really better)) 

[The Jimmo]

On 8/4/2016 at 1:38 AM, Edward Shephard said:

For example having to mark a little checkbox to flag something for deletion and then needing to click the delete button somewhere else on the screen is not a very easy user activity.

This is a very common way to delete things...

[BN_IT_Support]

8 minutes ago, The Jimmo said:

This is a very common way to delete things...

I agree and this would be fine if you could see the whole list or 'shift click' a batch of them; but having to click a few, then scroll a bit, then click a few more is just a pain.

A far better system (IMHO) would be to have a 'deleted conversations' folder and have a bin icon against each conversation like we have with editor attachments.  For each message you could then just click the bin icon and then empty the deleted items folder when you're ready.

[Aiwa]

I'm sure part of the idea here is to have two concurrent actions to delete something. Check-Delete. 

Web interfaces are different than a native app/client. There will be functional / usability differences. 

[Heyhoe]

Dear IPS,

If such a small matter is this users biggest problem and can cause 4 pages of discussion then you must be doing something right! Well done

[crabpaws]

BTW, the Facebook message list, which apparently IPS is using as a model, while narrow contains more text than the IPB message list window.

It's odd to me that Facebook is considered to be the standard. Facebook changes their designs all the time! (Facebook bought a UX company, Bolt Peters, that specialized in remote user testing. Even so, there's a lot of broken UX on Facebook.)

Because of the way it's designed, I don't believe that Facebook believes any particular piece of content, including personal messages, has any enduring value. The bubble design indicates it thinks of personal messages as evanescent, like most texts. A further indication is that there are no real retrieval tools for Facebook personal messages.

Does IPB as a product think of personal messages the same way, as of value only for a moment? Does that satisfy the needs of the range of IPB customers?

On my site, perhaps like Chris Bell, communications with my members are important. I delete a lot of them, but I need to preserve some of them,  for many purposes: To maintain history on a particular member, to carry on a long-term discussion, to keep a record of agreements, for legal reasons, etc. Therefore, functions like content preview, deleting, archiving in folders, and download of personal messages are important to me. The design of these functions in 4.x falls short of the fairly rudimentary design of 3.x.

(The content of the forums is also important, we moderate so old topics are continually updated. It's important to our members to maintain group memory, as it were.)

I have also found the difficulties Chris Bell and Atari Age describe in using IPB's personal messaging, and I agree with their reasoning about designing for ease of use. Forum members are the end users, but administrators are also users, and IPS customers as well. The field of user experience (UX) has ways of integrating requirements from end users, customers, and other stakeholders. This informs educated guesses.

The problem with the message list window being too narrow could be solved by making it elastic horizontally, as most Apple software is designed, so individuals can set the width to their preference.