Please give us breadcrumbs at the bottom of the page and more

Report · May 26, 2014

In long threads, if you want to go back to discussions you have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to find the bread crumbs. This is a huge time waster for everyone.

Also, check out this thread in the AE forum: AFTER EFFECTS WISHLIST

This is an often visited thread and the only way to get to the most recent post is to click through 9 pages of posts. Not having access to the most recent post directly from a forum link or inside the thread is, well, nuts. Please fix this. It would only take a single line of code...

Report · May 26, 2014

At the top of the page there's a link to the Latest Reply.

Scrolling up to the top of a page is indeed tiring, but that's why keyboards have a HOME button.

Report · May 26, 2014

Rick Gerard wrote:

In long threads, if you want to go back to discussions you have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to find the bread crumbs. This is a huge time waster for everyone.

In FF I have this at the bottom:

Is this not what you are looking for? I guess what we need is a link to go to the top of the page and not only to go to the original post. Perhaps this is what you are after.

Report · May 26, 2014

Both of those links navigate within the current thread.

I think what Rick wants is the breadcrumb trail at the top of the screen repeated at the bottom of the screen so you can quickly move back to the Discussions page. Just like it used to be.

So if you're at the bottom of a long thread and want to move on to a new one, you don't have to go back to the top of the page just to click the "Discussions" link to get out of the thread.

This was requested on the first day that the new forum was inflicted on us. No action to date.

Report · May 26, 2014

What's wrong with pressing HOME or END on your keyboard (or the BACK button on your mouse if that's where you came from)?

Report · May 26, 2014

Dave... I missed the Latest reply link, but it is still two clicks away from the thread title in the Forum home page. Thanks for pointing it out. The latest reply is where you used to go with you opened a thread and it's still where you should go. The nav buttons on the right side of the page are useless if there are more than 3 pages. There should at least be a first and last button.

What I'm looking for on the breadcrumbs is what John posted but at the bottom. Home and Back won't take you from The after Effects Forum to the Communities. or back to the first page of the discussions thread if you are on page 2 or 3, are not available on a mobile device or on most laptops. Again, this is just poor forum design and requires just a line of copied code to implement. Nothing to it.

Also, while I'm ranting, you can find the unread posts in any forum by clicking Content and then Discussions from the Forum home page but if you set a bookmark and come back after some of the content has changed you are not brought back to the Content>All Content section requiring another click to get you to a place where you can see the content that you have not read yet. Come to think of it, what purpose does the All Content tab serve. It's identical to the Discussions tab except that you can't tell which threads you have read, or who was the last person to post, or anything else useful. All Content should go away and unread threads should show up on the forum home page.

While there are many improvements in the UI, there are some very useful features for moderators, regular contributors, and even first time users that went away.

Report · May 26, 2014

Dave Merchant wrote:

What's wrong with pressing HOME or END on your keyboard (or the BACK button on your mouse if that's where you came from)?

We are merely asking to reinstate a small detail which already existed in 4.5 and disappeared for no reason in SBS 7.

Not sure why it needs debating. It's one simple line of code in a HTML page, same as most other forum software.

Report · May 27, 2014

John Waller wrote:

It's one simple line of code in a HTML page, same as most other forum software.

Oh if only that were true! Jive is a beast of a thing to alter; it's a J2EE platform running a template system called FreeMarker, but that only defines the position of the widgets on each page and the CSS. The content of a system-level widget like the thread block comes from its Java class. Adobe can't edit them because the site's running on a hosted install.

Intel have been using Jive for years and they have probably the most heavily-customized site with public access you can play with - even they haven't managed your simple line of code .

Report · May 27, 2014

Dave Merchant wrote:

Intel have been using Jive for years and they have probably the most heavily-customized site with public access you can play with - even they haven't managed your simple line of code .

Yet somehow, against insurmountable odds and despite Jive's best efforts to prevent them introducing such use friendly features, Adobe managed to offer it in Jive SBS 4.5 for several years. Now it's impossible. That's progress. Well done Jive. You won in the end.

I'm now even more in awe of Adobe's engineering prowess. What a feat!

Report · May 27, 2014

John Waller wrote:

I'm now even more in awe of Adobe's engineering prowess. What a feat!

As I understand it, Adobe has nothing to do with the development and maintenance of these forums. All the development work and any customization is done by Jive and its engineering team.

Perhaps, it is time to move back to NNTP/Newsgroups where customers can continue getting support and their credentials remain safe because they don't have to be real ones. AVAST was hacked over the weekend and they are down and unlikely to be online for a very long time indeed:

Report · May 27, 2014

mytaxsite.co.uk wrote:

As I understand it, Adobe has nothing to do with the development and maintenance of these forums. All the development work and any customization is done by Jive and its engineering team.

Perhaps you're right. So Jive themselves managed it once too.

I remain in awe of whoever managed it last time. They seemed to understand the little details which are appreciated by end users.

Report · May 26, 2014

Dave Merchant wrote:

Scrolling up to the top of a page is indeed tiring, but that's why keyboards have a HOME button.

Not all of them, Dave; not all of them…

Here's my everyday keyboard:

Apple iMac G5 Ultra-Thin Aluminum USB Keyboard w/2-Port USB Hub A1242

Standard-issue Apple Russian-language keyboard:

Report · May 27, 2014

Your first keyboard has a home button. Your second one will use the standard OS X shortcut of fn+left arrow. I find it a lot quicker to tap a key than move my mouse across the screen and click a link, hence why apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro are so heavily driven by keystrokes. It's not like your left hand is doing anything else.

Navigating beyond your history stack via the breadcrumbs is not something that happens very often on this particular site (I know people do do it, but it's not how the site flows were planned - a typical user is guided to a space, prompted to ask a question then expected to wait for a response). Yes Jive could add all manner of things to the page chrome (why isn't there a copy of the "follow" buttons at the bottom? A dropdown of all the communities on the top bar?), but it all increases the load times and data transfers - and people are already complaining the place is slow. There's a laundry list of genuine bugs we need fixing first, such as the "latest reply" showing the OP's name.

Report · May 27, 2014

Dave Merchant wrote:

Your first keyboard has a home button.

Oooops! This is embarrassing. I uploaded the wrong image in error. My bad.

Let me try again:

Not all of them, Dave; not all of them…

Here's my everyday keyboard:

Apple iMac G5 Ultra-Thin Aluminum USB Keyboard w/2-Port USB Hub A1242

Dave Merchant wrote:

…Your second one will use the standard OS X shortcut of fn+left arrow. I find it a lot quicker to tap a key than move my mouse across the screen and click a link, hence why apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro are so heavily driven by keystrokes. It's not like your left hand is doing anything else…

Well, that's your personal preference and habit, Dave, and it's not acceptable to me at all.

Coincidentally, I had just posted this in another forum:

Re: Shortcut for switching between windows in Photoshop CC?

Conversely, there are clumsy dinosaurs like yours truly who now avoid most shortcuts at all costs, mainly because our diminishing brains prefer (or demand) not to be cluttered with all that information.

The time I wasted trying to remember a shortcut and/or correcting mistakes made by using the wrong shortcut easily outweighs whatever we could serve in the future by using shortcuts correctly.

A. Einstein used to say that he chose not to clutter his brain by learning anything that can be looked up. My version of that is not to bother learning a shortcut for anything that can be done with the mouse.

In any event, thank you for the "standard OS X shortcut of fn+left arrow", I never knew that.

Report · May 27, 2014

station_two wrote:

In any event, thank you for the "standard OS X shortcut of fn+left arrow", I never knew that.

Also conversely, fn+right arrow will bring you to the end.

fn+up arrow will move you up one reply at a time

fn+Down Arrow will bring you down one reply at a time.

In other Apps The up and down arrow moves you up or down one paragraph at a time.

Report · May 27, 2014

Thank you, Phil!

Report · May 27, 2014

…In any event, thank you for the "standard OS X shortcut of fn+left arrow", I never knew that.

WOW ! It works, and very well. I hope to learn this one after all. It'll be a time saver.

Thank you again.

Report · May 26, 2014

Dave Merchant wrote:

What's wrong with pressing HOME or END on your keyboard (or the BACK button on your mouse if that's where you came from)?

If you asked that in earnest, I would immediately question your status as an "MVP" of these forums.

But I have a hunch you were only being contrarian.

Report · May 26, 2014

Rick Gerard wrote:

In long threads, if you want to go back to discussions you have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to find the bread crumbs. This is a huge time waster for everyone.

I wholeheartedly agree. I know I can use the Home key (by taking the hand off the mouse, then hold down the Shift+Home buttons) will get me to the top = breadcrumbs. But I'd much prefer to have them at the bottom too (instead of the useless 'Help | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy and Cookies (UPDATED)'.

We had it on Jive 4.5; it's present in practically every forum software on the planet; would it cost so much to re-implement it in SBS7?

Report · May 27, 2014

It looks like that the staff and Developers don't seem to understand or appreciate the problems people are finding using these forums so the changes we all want won't happen so quickly. for example, a similar request was made at this link:

I don't think this has gone any further than just the discussion on these forums.

Report · May 27, 2014

As some of us have discussed in the last week or so, we suspect that Adobe does understand the problems suffered by forum users and their frustration.

It just so happens that those problems and frustration fit perfectly into their desire and plans to drive folks away from the forums.