Forums 3.4 is live!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:33:09 Z

Today’s release (3.4) is live and includes a number of new features, as well as bug fixes. Here are a few of the highlights:

· Persist Expand/Collapse on forums home – When you visit the forums home page (MSDN | TechNet | Expression | Microsoft), we remember which categories are collapsed and which are expanded. That means the next time you go to the home page, you’ll see the forums you use the most, and not the ones you don’t.

· Visual Updates – After listening to your feedback, we have made some enhancements for usability and accessibility to make our forum pages easier to read.

o Forum view – Moved “New Thread” to filter bar, moving messages higher up the page, and added the number of results being displayed.

o Proposed Answer Updates – Proposed answers are more clearly differentiated from the true answer.

o Browse Users Updates – Updated to include avatars and user badges.

· Threaded View – Switch your thread preview mode from the flat “list” view to a hierarchical “threaded” view. The setting is persisted and applies to all forums.

· Mark all as Read – If you want to start fresh and mark all threads as read can do so by selecting “Mark All Read”. After that the “unread” filter will only show new threads or threads with new posts since they have selected the mark all read option.

· Categories in Breadcrumb –This adds an extra level in the breadcrumb, so you can navigate up from a forum to a group of forums (ex. Windows Server forums), without going all the way to the forum home page. This helps users who come in to a forum thread from a search engine, navigate “up” to find the right forum for their question.

· Mobile Support – This is an initial release of support for mobile devices. You can view forums, threads, and messages, post new messages and reply. You must have already signed in and created a profile. The mobile version can be accessed by simply adding “mobile” to the url as in http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/mobile/en-us/forums/.

As always, we welcome you feedback, please let us know what you like and what you don’t by posting to the bugs and suggestions forums.

What’s next?

After today’s release our sole focus will be on performance and scalability, so feature work will take a back seat for a few months. We’ll still fix important bugs, but there won’t be significant additional functionality until later in the fall.

Thanks,

-Andrew

Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com