Update: New discussions design!

while I agree that a new discussion design is needed I don't think it should look like that.

I feel the new design sacrifices structure and readability for a cleaner looking layout. 

my suggestions to improve readability :

• darker bolder text fonts
• remove answer and question badges
• decrease the size of the user's profile picture 
• increase the size of the vote count

I personally like a couple aspects of the old discussion design better, the new text is harder to read in my opinion. (And why is the flag number public??)

Plus, the (temporary) inability to delete posts could lead to problems.

That said, the new layout looks more modern and clean, so I admire both designs. 

This is a great improvement on KA. I'd like one suggestion however, which is making the font darker. While it is readable for me, even though I am farsighted. But for a more cleaner look, it should be a bit darker. However everything looks much better.

Okay, I think the new design is great, it looks modern and sleeker. Is this same thing going to be added to program discussions?

Dare we hope that it has also been extended to the app level? (I'm an iPad user, but I'm sure Android users would love to have it, too?) On the other hand, the iPad app has a few broken things that need to be fixed (in particular, the disappearing problem when the sketchpad is used and the removal of the undo tool from the sketchpad), so these may need to be higher priorities than getting the discussions in the app.

I find the new look much more cluttered and the questions all seem to run together in this new format.

I hope the restoration of the edit and delete functions will be a high priority — there is already an epidemic of duplicate posts and I frequently use the edit feature!  

I prefer the old design much much more, it's even more modern!

The new design is remarkably elegant and pleasant to the eyes.

We are used to the old design so it will take time to adjust, similarly when the color and logo of the site was changed.

There are no cons except the new design is more compact. Don't know if that's a big issue but time will tell.

While this reactionary always dislikes change, I have come to accept it, be it in my new cell phone, a new firmware release from Elon Musk, or even the Khan Academy web site.

But, come on!  How can you release a new "improved" dialogue UX that does not allow editing?  My fingers barely pay attention to my brain, while my eyes know exactly what my brain is thinking.  I may be odd, but my typical posting requires around five edits before eyes, brain, and fingers agree that the posting is done.

The Answer boxes on the Community Questions forum page are tiny and are NOT scrollable.  As a huge fan if brevity, you might think that I approve.  I do not.

Wow!  Really?

Well, you can edit if you go to the Discussion section from your Dashboard for now.

As they said, "The team will be working on discussions again in the coming months and will add those abilities back at that time, along with additional polish".

I understand maintainability of a large website, so I'm excited for these updates in that respect. The clean and modern design looks great to me, I have some comments to make on it though, please pass them on to the devs.

• The new tooltips are very nice, but I wish profile showcases were displayed inside it like before! Also, the "+" in front of the energy points is confusing and unnecessary, it looks as if I actually gained something by viewing the tooltip. Please remove it.
  
  
• Is it possible the code formatting backgrounds be added back? That helped distinguish code from normal text, and that's much harder to do now.
  
  
• The posts all run together right now, there isn't enough separation between them. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a forum design without some kind of separation between items. The most common I've seen would be grey lines, just like here on the Help Center and in the old designs it used to have! Please add back grey lines to separate posts like before, here's a screenshot of what it would look like, which I think looks much better BTW:

• It's great that KA is improving accessibility, but some of the boxes that show up when clicking are off center, which cause me annoyance. Two examples:

Extra space on the right side:

Extra space below and on the right:

If those were centered that'd be great.

• The new flag modal looks great, except for that box with the post to be flagged inside. The box should be removed and the text left by itself; the extra scrolling in the box is unnecessary.

• My biggest issue with this update is the loss of deleting and editing my posts. According to my investigation, posts can be edited or deleted just like before via the internal API, the buttons just aren't there. Is the dev team planning to re-write all the backend code for post editing? If not, leaving out these two simple buttons doesn't make sense! While everyone waits for these buttons to return, you can bet the KA Extension team and I will add them back ourselves. Download it for Chrome here, new updates are coming soon.

If you got this far, thanks for reading. Vote up if you agree. =)

I really, really don't like this new design and would much prefer the older one.

There is a bit of old functionality missing from the new comment design. I get notified that someone has commented on one of my answers, the link to the new content takes me to the page where the new comment came in, but it no longer jumps down to the actual remark. This makes it very hard to find, especially if the new comment is buried inside an older post. 

The other thing I haven't quite groked yet is the difference between a Reply and a Comment. These words seem to be used interchangeably. 

Reply section includes only answer to the question.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!  We're reading and considering it all, and some of it (such as public flag counts) has already been addressed :)

Also, a quick-and-dirty workaround to access the edit and delete functionality is to access comments from the Discussion tab on your profile page.  This tab hasn't been updated yet, so those comments should still have edit and delete visible.

Please continue to offer any feedback you have on this - we really do appreciate it.

I agree with the vast majority of the negative comments .

1)  The new design emphasizes people's avatars / icons and their names over the content.  The content is in much smaller text, which doesn't make sense.

2) Put back the gray line between entries which was present in the old format.  It made it much more readable.  You could visually see where one question started and ended.  Now, they seem to run together.

3) The boxes to enter replies are much smaller.  And the boxes to comment on a reply are even smaller.  You can't much of what you have typed.  So, it is much harder to proof read your reply prior to submitting it. 

4)  Then, on top of that, you have to make a huge detour (into profile, discussions, answers, then find your answer) to edit your reply if you find something needs correction.  I was sent a comment about a typo in a reply I posted over a year ago.  There is no way that I can find this and edit it at this time.  There is no good search capability to help find an answer posted that far back without paging thru and reading hundreds of other answers to find the one that needs correction.

Personally, this new format is very unusable from the perspective of someone who responds to many questions.  You count on KA users to ensure students get answers to their questions.  But, you've tied our hands in terms of ensuring we give them good response.  The combination of no edit / delete capability within the Q&A forum and not being able to see what I have already typed results in a very unfunctional tool for responders to use.  You should have held off releasing a new version until it was fully functional.

5)  Clicking on notifications to view comments and then clicking on the comment no longer takes me directly to the actual comment.  I only get to the page level.  As noted in another entry, this is less than ideal for pages that get lots of questions.

6)  Clicking on “flag” used to give you a nice compact window to select the type of “flag”.  Now, we often get a window we have to scroll thru to see all flag options.  Bring back the old way.  It was much more user friendly and efficient.

Cool design, it's bubble-like and all. :-)

A couple of issues:

For the subject-based discussion pages, I would rather have "Posted in <Video Link>" in a smaller font, similar to the vote counter. (Over-emphasis on those parts, as Kim mentioned.) The video link should be more of an auxiliary feature, I should think, which hopefully justifies my reason for the down-size.

The only major major issue I have is the edit/delete functionality, but since there's a promised return (and alternative through dashboard), I won't complain too much [yet].

Also the discussion page reloads every time I answer a question or post a comment. Not sure whether this is a feature, but I need to reload a second time to see my answers and comments. This seems like a good way to avoid answer conflicts but meh, it really hinders me sometimes.

I'm not sure what KA's rationale behind the design is, but I kinda prefer the old design since it prioritised the question (question on left, name on right) and made it quick to pinpoint... Doesn't mean I hate the new design, it's just more personalised by having answers glance through the name and video first.

It's likely I'll adapt and get used to the design over time, but who knows.

Edit: Also, I can't resize the answer box!!! Very difficult to structure medium-long answers.

Late yesterday (9/10/18), the questions no long seem to carry any name or link to the page where the person posted their question.  This is terrible.  I often used that link to find or better understand what the person is referencing in their question.  Without even the name of the video / lesson, there is no context to know what they are asking about. 

@Kim I noticed that! However, if you click on the timestamp it will take you to the page where the question was asked. It will require a little more work (right click and open page in new tab is a good idea), but it should be fixed soon :)

Update - Edit / Delete should be available to everyone again; click the "more" link to see!  Let us know if you find any issues with it:

@Kim - Thank you for your most recent report!  We're looking into that issue now.

Also - does clicking notifications take you directly to the comment the notification was for now? I think that's been fixed...

Hello everyone. I'd like to point out another issue that seems to have been overlooked. The word wrap has not been implemented properly. Long links spill out of the area/box allocated for the comments/answers. Please look at the attached screenshots of three of my answers (along with their zoomed-out counterparts) posted before the redesign and a comment posted recently to understand what I'm talking about.

Example answer 1:-

A zoomed-out of view of example answer 1:-

Example answer 2:-

A zoomed-out of view of example answer 2:-

Example answer 3:-

And now for a comment posted on the same date as this post:-

I hope my point is now clear. Any solutions for this problem? Or should I just submit a bug report at KA Help Centre?

I liked it when you could see a user's badges when you hovered over their profile icon. 

In addition, I think the questions and answers seem rather squished. I think Jett's solution would maintain a modern look and keep it clean: add some gray lines between each question. 

Just noticed this---If a learner inserts a bunch of blank lines at the end of their post those blank lines are preserved and published. Makes for a big unneeded white space.

I know this is an old post, but I did write a new post explaining why I didn't like the feature, but for some reason it's "pending an approval". It's probably too long, I don't know.

Anyways.

TLDR: I don't like this current discussion update. It's so inefficient and painful to work with. (You can also read the text in bold).

1. The comments' width is too short

This might not be a big issue, but it's still annoying. It's like reading on a phone attached to a computer! The space taken by the avatar picture could be replaced with wider comments. After all, what matters is the answer, and the student most likely doesn't care about the user answering their question. Some Math solutions require long formulas, algebraic expressions..etc. and when one of them is written in two or three lines, it can be confusing.

2. Colors

Again, this is not a really big issue, but maybe something to note for the future?

Yes, I've heard about the whole site recoloring thing. But the color for the buttons (and links) is too bright! Even if it's temporary, don't use a color that contrasts so much with the background. At least the colors should be easy for the eyes... Maybe it's just me, since I'm a bit too picky when it comes to colors, but I'm sure everyone would love a nice scheme of colors.

3. "Comment" Button Hides (A glitch?)

When I accidentally click outside of the gray box, the button disappears. Sometimes I have to click outside the box then click the box again to make it work. I don't want to click two (or even three) additional clicks every time I click somewhere else. It seems like it's not an issue for some people, so maybe it's just my browser. (I'm using Chrome, by the way.) 

4. The inability to change the height of the comment editor

This is the most annoying problem for me. There are long answers, and these answers need to be double-checked. Some people don't re-read what they wrote, but I do. I don't want to open Notepad every time I write a long post.

And for some reason, whenever I try to select one word or one letter, the text automatically scrolls up or down, depending on the cursor's location, so I have to select by SHIFT and arrow keys...

These are basically the main problems I have with the new "design". Just to clarify, I'm totally okay with the "design" itself. It's not too bad, but I truly hate the functionality of the new discussion.

@Preetodeep: The issue of text wrapping for links is something has been solved, thanks for bringing it to our attention!

@redapple8787: These changes were driven by careful design decisions, but your feedback has been passed on to folks responsible for implementing those changes. :)

@Willy: Blank line breaks at the end of text are no longer included in questions and comments, thanks for pointing it out!

@Lin Gh: To address your comments one by one: 1) This was another design decision made by our team, but if it gets to be an issue for more learners, we are open to added feedback; 2) As our Support Advocate Evan describes in your Feature Request and Feedback post, color contrasts was very carefully considered to include the accessibility needs of some learners, so there probably won’t be many new changes made there; 3) I’ve alerted the team about this bug, and it’s been accounted for; 4) This issue was known earlier, and you should see a fix for that early next week!

Thank you all for your thoughtful feedback! Our team is incredibly open to your concerns and comments, and we do our best - given our constraints and deadlines - to make your learning experience on Khan Academy a seamless and productive one. :)