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[OT] So...the Forum about the Forum is gone

flowstate

Wanted to post about a new problem I noticed a few weeks ago and discovered the Forum about the Forum is gone.

Guess that means there's zero interest from Garmin in documenting and addressing forum issues.

EDIT: it looks like the threads from the Forum about the Forum have been moved to "Connect IQ App Development Discussion", but since there's so few of them, it's hard to tell that anyone of them exist, except by searching (and you'd have to know what you were looking for in the first place).

e.g.

Original thread:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Since+last+forum+maintenance%252Fupdate+-+unable+to+tag%252Fmention+other+forum+users]

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/forum-about-the-forum/425921/since-last-forum-maintenance-update---unable-to-tag-mention-other-forum-users/1991174]

The above thread URL redirects to this:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/425921/since-last-forum-maintenance-update---unable-to-tag-mention-other-forum-users/1991174]

--

For the record, the new problem is that when you edit an existing post, selecting text using the keyboard (e.g. CTRL-Left Arrow and CTRL-Right Arrow) is extremely slow, to the point of being unusable. I see this on both Windows desktop (i9-9900k) and a MacBook Pro (2021).

When I try to select one character (e.g. CTRL-Left Arrow) or one word at a time (CTRL-SHIFT-Left Arrow), these shortcuts appear to be extremely laggy. I mean that either:

- nothing appears to happen unless you hold down a shortcut for a few seconds and wait

- something happens when you initially use a shortcut, but subsequent uses (or holding down the initial shortcut) appear to do nothing, unless you wait several seconds

In other words, when editing a comment, I can select one character with CTRL-Left Arrow, but if I try to select more than that (either by pressing the shortcut repeatedly or holding it down and waiting), it's extremely laggy to the point of appearing not to work at all.

I assume that there's some super-inefficient javascript processing that's happening when you select text, and that it's not debounced at all.

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  • Interestingly it's not happening in this thread (either in the OP or this comment), but it does happen in other threads. Might have something to do with the presence of comments from other users.

  • I was searching for it recently, now I know why it's gone. Also on other forums there is a survey button on the right.

  • I hope it's a sign that we there will be a new forum.

  • in reply to beva

    Yeah, the survey has been around for months, iirc.

    To me all it means is that Garmin noticed there are problems.

    beva said:
    I hope it's a sign that we there will be a new forum.

    The last time Garmin switched forums (around 2018):

    - They chose this ancient platform which sucks on so many levels (it's especially useless on mobile), even though I personally begged them to use nodebb or some other modern forum platform.

    It doesn't even use native emoji support in the client OS (emojis have been available in Windows since Windows 7, circa 2010). Instead it has its own broken emoji implementation where your reply will be blocked if you quote text containing emojis (it's funny that the forum's own broken emoji implementation looks like an attack to cloudflare, I guess). I guess they don't care so much as they know the demographics who post here are unlikely to care about emoji support.

    - They lost a ton of content in the changeover, like images, code, attachments, and links. The old forum shortened link text like this one does, and in the changeover, all links were replaced by their text, meaning the original URL was lost in the vast majority of cases.

    - All the URLs for existing threads were changed (without any kind of redirection from the old URLs), which broke all inbound links (including links from Garmin's own dev blog posts which they still host in the CIQ dev doc site).

    Btw, we had similar problems posting code in the old forums (even the same symptoms, like posting parens or digits would trigger the problem, as if they are trying to avoid code injection attacks).

    Maybe they will just get rid of the forums altogether, like most companies did in the early 2010s (ironically, at the time, most companies seemed to feel that FB communities would serve the same purpose, but ofc FB is dead now too). Microsoft also recently get rid of a bunch of old (but still used) forums, as well as a ton of blogs.

  • in reply to flowstate
    flowstate said:
    The last time Garmin switched forums (around 2018):

    You made me remember 2018 when they simply lost (or intentionally got rid of) the older device forums in English, but for somehow  could save their German equivalents. 

    So. eg you can still post about 910XT in a German 910XT forum, but no English forum for it all.

    Comparing the contents of 

     https://forums.garmin.com/de/sports-fitness/sports-fitness-legacy/f?pifragment-1383449079=2#pifragment-1383449079=1  

    And 

    https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/sports-fitness/#pifragment-2057=2

    implies they are a “bit” different. And the same for Outdoors where everything was lost im English pre Fenix 5, while the German forum goes back Fenix.

  • in reply to beva
    beva said:
    I hope it's a sign that we there will be a new forum.

    There would be no reason to do this extra work if they were going to a new forum. (There doesn’t seem much value to doing that work at all.)

  • in reply to flowstate
    flowstate said:
    They lost a ton of content in the changeover, like images, code, attachments, and links.

    They said the old content would be moved over. 

    (I wasn’t too happy it wasn’t because I lost a lot of work. I don’t put as much work posting in the new forums because I don’t want more work wasted.)

  • in reply to Tisztul_A_Visztula
    Tisztul_A_Visztula said:
    You made me remember 2018 when they simply lost (or intentionally got rid of) the older device forums in English, but for somehow  could save their German equivalents. 

    It seems the forums are being supported by a German group (otherwise, the special support for the German language wouldn’t make sense).

    I’m figuring the forums are “semi official” and are allowed as long as the company isn’t too bothered by it (supporting or paying for it).

  • in reply to flowstate
    flowstate said:
    To me all it means is that Garmin noticed there are problems.

    I think Garmin the company has limited interest/involvement in the forums.

    It looks like they are a side-project of a group in Germany (Garmin employees in Germany).

    If so, don’t expect a lot of resources to be devoted to it.

    flowstate said:

    The last time Garmin switched forums (around 2018):

    - They chose this ancient platform which sucks on so many levels (it's especially useless on mobile), even though I personally begged them to use nodebb or some other modern forum platform.

    It might be well past the time to expect anything to be different (see above).

    It seems fairly likely the choice is between what we have and nothing.

  • in reply to dpawlyk

    Alas, I do not exactly remember when the German forums popped up, I just remember that when I shaked my head in an anger that Garmin had killed the relatively young Fenix 3(HR)  forum and everything older, at the same time I saw Fenix 3 HR forum in the German forums as legacy.

    So even if the German part is not Garmin, interestingly the German group decided to keep their own older forums and classified them as legacy at the very same time when Garmin deleted everything which could have become as part of legacy.

    So it was a sort of coordinated or synchronized move.....

    Strange, isn't it?

    PS: Sorry, Garmin that not everybody forgets everything and focus on the newest pieces of Garmin life. ;-)