I'm quitting out of the community.

[SkrOYCx]

Hi you all! I'm @SkrOYC. I'm unable to get my account back for some reason:

I've tried at least 10 times the instructions from this post with no luck:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Account-Info-Registration/How-to-Create-a-Community-Account/...

But, you know what? I don't want to be here anymore.

It was awesome to experience the good fealing that helping others can give you. Eventhough I just started around 6 months ago as an active user on the old (and better) community, I really enjoyed it.

I'm gonna miss people like @Steve @Aurelien @WillowMobileSys @Marc_Dillon @MultiTech and others (I hope I haven't misspelled the usernames).

With this new community it's not fun and joyful anymore. Discourse was straightfoward on so many ways that made me go into a very intuitive url (community.appsheet.com), answer a couple of questions and continue with my day.

I'm really shocked how a company like Google can't make a better product than Discourse. Or maybe I'm not that shocked knowing that Discourse is Open Source and it's made by users that cares about the product.

This is the first time I entered a community and, as I said, I enjoyed it. Now I know it won't be the same, nor better, on Google's hands.

From a productivity perspective, Google Cloud Community seems like the perfect product, because it's so bad that you spend time working instead of helping.

SWITCH(
  [APPSHEETCOMMUNITY],
  "GOOGLECLOUD", "SkrOYC is out",
  "DISCOURSE", "SkrOYC is in",
  ""
)

[graham_howe]

I'm not sure how 'qualified' I am to comment as I only started using AppSheet at the end of November and so have only been a member of the community since then. However I did notice immediately how quickly and thoroughly questions were responded to as well as of course all the other content that was contributed regularly.

What I see since Tuesday is not good though. If you look back at unanswered questions, there are perhaps 1 per day, even fewer in the past. This week we have 5 unanswered from Tuesday, 9 from Wednesday, 5 from Thursday and 14 so far today. What that says to me is that many of those who have been so generous with their time and committed to this community, are already dropping their involvement significantly.

I do understand your point @WillowMobileSys that the community is the people and not the tool. But I would suggest that my data shows since the tool changed on Tuesday, some of the most valuable members of this community have been a smaller part of it.

[WillowMobileSys]

---

@graham_howe wrote:

I do understand your point @WillowMobileSys that the community is the people and not the tool. But I would suggest that my data shows since the tool changed on Tuesday, some of the most valuable members of this community have been a smaller part of it.

---

I can only say this...I have been involved in numerous migrations over my 26 yr career and EVERY one of them, no exageration, has met with this same problem:

• Complaints by a handful that they don't like the new tool, difficult to use, etc.
• Low initial usage of the new software.  It's usually worse when there has been no introduction to the new - kinda like cold versus warm marketing!

I don't wish to offend anyone, but software migrations remind me a lot of taking a child out of a toy store.  Even if you go into the bigger, better store just down the block that has all the same toys - but even more, the child "hates" it.  Why?  Because the child is mad you took them out of the first store and they weren't ready to leave.  After walking around in the new store for a while and seeing some cool toys not in the first store, then suddenly they love this new store so much more!

To nip it in the bud, some might point out that starting at the bigger, better store and then going to the smaller store has the opposite effect.  I don't think this version of the analogy applies to our situation but I know some will disagree.

[SkrOYCx]

I think the change is more than just the community platform.

We have seen how changes are made no matter what with low feedback from the people that use the tools. Just check how there have been changes implemented into the AppSheet platform without our opinion/testing/feedback.

Today, under Google, AppSheet is on a weird spot where it can do more but it doesn't feel the same as before. I think that this applies to the community, although I've to say that I don't feel like this new platform is actually better (again, from my pov and the things I like)

[WillowMobileSys]

I agree.  AppSheet all around has a different feel. 

As for the Community, I haven't come to a conclusion yet if it is better or not.  Some I like, some I don't and other items trying to see if I can even compare.

[Steve]

I just got off a productive call with @AndrewB. We went over some of the bigger frustrations that have been surfaced. I was very impressed by his willingness to consider the complaints of the community. I have confidence his team will move to address them. He and I will try to stay in touch to continue the new site's evolution.

[lamontfr]

@Steve Thanks for taking the lead to make the new community site more usable. This is reassuring for all of us. Your excellent contributions over the last few years, including all your work on the documentation, have helped many people in learning AppSheet, which is key to its success.

I also noticed that the new Community Managers @AndrewB and @Michelle are eager to fix the problems. I found a few more bugs yesterday night which show that the platform looks like it is still in beta.

[SkrOYCx]

@WillowMobileSys  wrote:

I apologize in advance but since you are implying I have lower standards than you and since you started this post, I have to call you out on your values list above!   Again, sorry to do this to you.

Initial impression is everything.  And you have made it clear you don't like this new forum.  But when it comes to stating something lacks certain values, you need to explain, if you truly what to be helpful and contribute to improvements.

I would like to see your answers to these questions about this new forum tool:

1. What Privacy concerns do you have?
2. What functionality is it missing?
3. What keyboard interactions are missing?
4. Which DPI are you talking about and what is the problem?
5. Why is it not easy to use? 
6. What capability for Markdown do you need?

---

Hi @WillowMobileSys. I'm sorry if it sounded like that, I didn't want to imply anything rather than explain what are the things that I feel are important for me.

1. Actually, this ones comes just for the fact that Google is the new owner of the platform, we can't do much around that. But know that the community is on Google's product, it's more noticeable. Privacy is on a weird spot, some people doesn't care, some people do. I don't use any Facebook service for example, but that's another field.
2. When I say function over beauty I mean that this site is obviously following Material Design (aka Material You?) but, although it looks great, it doesn't provide the functionalities on the next 3 points.
3. I always used Ctrl+Enter/Cmd+Return to post, the same I do for emails, and here it doesn't work. In general, there are no keyboard shortcuts on the community itself, just on the editor afaik
4. The DPI is how dense the page is. Right know we don't see much, eventhough I use a 1440p monitor. It's actually a lot of wasted space in my opinion and also other's.
5. Some ideas:
   1. We don't know easly which post we have read vs wich ones we haven't.
   2. There are a lot of posts around the same idea an other ones like the avatar shown aside the post, before it was the last user replying.
   3. The order of the questions is actually not by last response, because a lot of questions are not shown in the main page. Just try replying a post and it seems like some post/topics are "automatically hide". Maybe it's just taking into account when a reply is posted to the main topic.
   4. It's harder and requires more clicks/time to get to the replies others make to you and also likes to your posts. It's now "SkrOYCx and x others liked" or "SkrOYCx and x others replied". We don't know who are the "others", we have to figure it out ourselves by checking practically all the posts on a topic.
   5. In general, there are a lot of nested pages to get to what we need, before it was solve by just showing the info on the same page. Point 4 is an example that to get to the "notifications" part you need to enter to another page. Check who have clicked "like" on one of your posts, another page..
   6. The old Leaderboard is missing. It was not a crucial feature, but it shows how straighfoward it was to get info like that before.
   7. We can't search for something from the Browser address bar. Before we could type commu.." and the page was suggested, if we hitted Tab we could then type our question. Since this is now a forum inside a community, it can't do the same. At best it would search something on the whole community (GCC).
6. Markdown on the editor. I use Markdown a lot. I hate mouse-driven interactions. Click to create a list. Click to create a table. Click to create a code block. You know the rest... BBCode was also great. I'll miss [quote], [spoiler]

# Markdown is powerful.

Is seems like there is just some kinda-markdown support on TinyMCE via Plugin that is not implemented. This shows what Koichi Tsuji said about how this platform seems like a place to entry-level users, people that likes mouse usage, WYSIWYG editor, beauty, and other stuff.

Before it was easy to write something like:

```php
IF(
  ...,

  ...,

  ...
)
```

Now it takes you to expand the toolbar, look for insert code example and then create the code without seeing the previous post in order to help.

That's another one, we had our current reply/post stick at the bottom, we could move freely and our new post was always there.

Other: We could Quote other's response, now it's a nightmare to do. (Just try to quote part of this reply/post)

Other one: We had a preview of a post when adding a permalink, now it looks like this:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Community-Feedback/I-m-quitting-out-of-the-community/m-p/388...

Another: We could see a preview of the page when adding a link, now:

https://help.appsheet.com/en/articles/2357277-in

The list goes on a little bit more but I'm just tired and bussy. Others have seen more things that make our lifes harder here, I'm not the only one.

Also, it's not about complaining just because there was a change. It's about the fact that someone stole features and it's a patter we are seeing on AppSheet and we fear we are gonna see it in the future. Let's be clear, AppSheet gets a little bit more powerful every month but the "We think this is better so we are gonna do it" way of working from Google's team is something I'm pissed off

PS: I had to post this here instead of directly to your reply because I did reply to you, updated the page about 30 seconds later and my post wasn't there. I tried to post it again and it said I have to wait "3.600 seconds" before I can post another reply to the same post. I'm tired

[SkrOYCx]

@WillowMobileSys 

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[SkrOYCx]

@WillowMobileSys 

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[SkrOYCx]

@WillowMobileSys 

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I'm sorry for the mess. Now my post are being deteled... This platform just hates me

[graham_howe]

---

@SkrOYCx wrote:

I'm sorry for the mess. Now my post are being deteled... This platform just hates me

---

I noticed this one day last week, I typed out a reasonable lengthy reply, hit post, no error message but it didn't appear. So I cursed a little, assumed I had done something wrong, typed it out again and hit post. Again it didn't appear. I tried refreshing, clearing cache, logging out and in etc. Then a few minutes later both posts appeared so I deleted one of them. I only saw this issue once and so didn't report it because I couldn't reproduce it in any way.

[AndrewB]

I am truly sorry about this. This is not acceptable and we are committed to fixing this.