Community Platform Updates - October 2021

[StanG]

Hello Upwork Community, Stan here. I’m new to the Community team here at Upwork. I’ll bore you all with a more formal introduction down the road, and instead jump right into some updates. Initially, many of these are updates behind the scenes, but over the coming weeks they’ll start to become much more visible.

Moving towards a more modern Community

Announcements in this section will soon move into a Blog, allowing us to bring product updates and news to you in a more modern day format. We’ll also be rolling out many improvements such as a more sleek and responsive message editor, additional subscription and notification options, and enhanced search capabilities. 

Immediately though, you’ll begin to notice some tweaks to features in Community such as the private messaging system.  It’s getting a facelift today, and next week it’ll look even better as we roll out the updated text editor.

Full transparency - We’re working hard to bring these updates out quickly, and we’ll likely introduce a few bugs along the way. With that said, we’ll also be working to resolve them as quickly as we introduce them. If you notice something not working as you browse the forums, please let us know. More so, if you have any thoughts on how we can improve your experience here in Community, we want to hear it.

10/19/2021 Update: Blogs are now live which is where you'll be reading this!

[petra_r]

Stan, another change I find mildly irksome:

When you click on a forum member's name it shows their last few forum posts. If you then scroll down a little and click on the "View all" button,it shows more posts. Previously, it showed all their posts with some additional info about the thread, including the number of replies since their / to their last post. That extra info has vanished, and I'd like it back because it used to be my quick way to see replies to (mainly but not exclusively) my posts so conversations can be kept going or questions answered.

Is there a particular reason why this has been changed and can you wave your magic wand and change it back again pretty please?

[StanG]

Petra - We're checking into that. Unfortunately I don't have a particular reason for it going missing, it's not a feature I am familiar with (It's not out of box functionality for our platform) so we may have inadvertently lost it when we pushed a lot of these updates live.

Give me a few days, and we'll see what happened and how quickly we can get it back.  

[firescue17]

Wow! This UI bug is finally fixed!

The communication and explanations in this thread are outstanding. How do we vote for Stan to [re]design the reports and other features we use to make money? (that's a compliment; perhaps my first one)

[firescue17]

Can you please fix the forum survey to:

1. Not scroll to the bottom of the page when declining;
2. Respect being declined during a single session (or better yet, a week or a month). It's annoying and frustrating to have to decline 30 or 40 times in Every. Single. Tab. Especially, when you lose your reading place every single time due to #1.

[StanG]

Steven - Glad to know we’re making some progress 👍

Surveys shouldn’t be so annoying now! It should be waiting 90 days until it prompts again (or cache is cleared for logged out users).

We’re still working on resolving the bug with it throwing the focus to the bottom of the page. We’ll disable it until we get this resolved.

if there is anything else we’re clearly missing, let us know. By year end, hoping to have most these legacy bugs resolved going into 2022!

[firescue17]

1. Please add a horizontal line to the MCE editor since HTML is not allowed.
2. Inside our forum profile, please return the category for the list of threads we STARTED (vs commenting on others' posts).
3. Inside our forum settings, please return the checkbox option to "jump to first unread post" instead of starting at the beginning of a thread every time. This option used to exist and was removed for no good reason.
4. Please add the ability to filter searches to our own threads/comments.
5. The Upwork icon in the upper left-hand corner of the forums bounces to upwork.com instead of community.upwork.com. The user experience of being redirected to a different website in a new tab without warning is jarring, unexpected, and non-standard behavior.
6. There is an option in the MCE editor to change the text size labeled, "Normal." However, "Normal" is not the default font size for a brand new post. The default font size is actually, "Small." As such, it is confusing and unintuitive to attempt to (re)format a post with a uniform font size (see bullet point bug below), selecting "Normal" actually makes the text too large.

There is an (intermittent?) bug with bulleted text appearing in a smaller font size:

• like this

[firescue17]

The mobile menu is missing a login button. 

[yitwail]

Steve, it never had one and it also never had a quote feature so I can’t quote your observation, but it would be handy to have such features so thanks for pointing it out. FYI, my workaround is to kudo something, which will display a login screen when you’re not logged in. 

[StanG]

Steve - I actually had the same thought when I first joined. Turns out we do have it on the homepage, it’s just in the more unnatural spot ever. We’ll get it added to the top of the page as one would expect in a future update!

[StanG]

Steve - To the rest of your points - Yes! A few of these were already on the list, but we got them all added now to our backlog. Rest assured we haven't removed anything on purpose like jumping to first unread, instead it's a bug we may have introduced as we updated various features in Community. We'll definitely try to get some of the more functional issues resolved as soon as possible.