Website feedback

Now that I have stopped crying…only because I ran out of tissues…could I add to the suggestion box please?

Babypips will never be the same but as Clint said, if a few things could be modified to make the place both user friendly and a little more inviting, perhaps a bit more of a “community” feel could be regained.

I don’t know if these points have already been covered but the first would be the lack of compartmentalisation of the text. At the moment it feels like you’re adrift on a lonely sea of monotonous and endless text . Are you not able to gather up certain blocks of text and put a nice coloured rectangle around each so we know where we are. All you have currently is a faint underline to segregate each topic/section.
There are no points of interest on the page…nothing to draw you in…and it is incredibly uninviting , unimaginative and barren.
It makes me feel quite lost out there.

No offence but it looks like the site was designed by a blind monkey.

Could you please reinstate the “number of members currently online” feature . It would be nice to know whether or not there was anyone else out there in what often seems to be a ghost town of a forum .
Losing that little feature has added to the business & money before people feel that the site now exudes.

Is it possible to have a members name underneath the circular avatars. Seeing 5 letter N’s all in a row for example and not knowing who all 5 are until the avatar is highlighted is another unnecessary extra “job” for the readers, not to mention how horribly impersonal it is.
Remember, there are real people behind those avatars.

Finally…for now…what’s with the teeny tiny Babypips logo/link on the top left of each page.
What’s that about?
It looks absolutely ridiculous and should come with a “requires a magnifier” warning.
I’m sure on those infinite white pages you could have found some room for the most important thing of all… your name!

P.S PAGES RULE… ALWAYS HAVE ALWAYS WILL…

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Most important item for me is to look at threads I follow and clearly see latest and new posts.
This was very easy and clear on the old site. The new site, not so much right now…

As others have pointed out, it’s also important to keep the key contributors around and encourage constructive posts.

Much extremely valuable data has been posted and much of it by a handful of users. Its important to continue to provide an effective space for them to contribute.

I think the key issues with the new site can be fixed.

Thanks for the feedback, FundamentallyFlawed

We’re looking into the possibility of offering “themes” as a way to change the background color and colors associated with other areas of the website. It’s a huge undertaking, technically speaking, because we’re dealing with regular desktop environments and mobile/tablet devices as well. But it’s something we were looking into even before the switch. Also, we’re almost ready to release a change to the font color hopefully by the end of the week.[quote=“FundamentallyFlawed, post:37, topic:105305”]
There are no points of interest on the page…nothing to draw you in…and it is incredibly uninviting , unimaginative and barren.It makes me feel quite lost out there.
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I can understand this completely. Discourse, the forum platform, wanted to put the focus on the content and the discussion. But a little splash of color here and there wouldn’t hurt. We’re also looking into this as well.[quote=“FundamentallyFlawed, post:37, topic:105305”]
No offence but it looks like the site was designed by a blind monkey.
[/quote]

I will give our resident monkey your feedback.

This feature exists in another form on the new system, but there are bugs we’re working on resolving. Stay tuned for this feature.[quote=“FundamentallyFlawed, post:37, topic:105305”]
Is it possible to have a members name underneath the circular avatars.
[/quote]

This will be extremely difficult to do. Adding names introduces a host of spacing issues that have ramifications on the desktop and mobile designs. I don’t see the names coming back for that reason. You are able to mouse over the names from your desktop/laptop (no click necessary) to find out the avatar’s owner. Are you using a tablet or mobile device?

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I’m not sure what you’re looking at. If you’re in a thread, there is a green bar locked to the top of the screen while you scroll, which includes the thread title, clickable "breadcrumbs that tell you in which category and subcategory you’re in (e.g. Community > Community Feedback), and then a white discussion icon that takes you back to the Forums homepage. Is that what you’re referring to?

Team Pages - check!

@fundamentallyflawed
what’s with the teeny tiny Babypips logo/link on the top left of each page.

@Pipstradamus
I’m not sure what you’re looking at. If you’re in a thread, there is a green bar locked to the top of the screen while you scroll, which includes the thread title, clickable "breadcrumbs that tell you in which category and subcategory you’re in (e.g. Community > Community Feedback), and then a white discussion icon that takes you back to the Forums homepage. Is that what you’re referring to?

I was just referring to the new look Babypips logo and how indistinct it is compared to your old one.

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Folks need to know exactly where they’ve landed. Or they’ll take off somewhere else.
You don’t have to lose all your former personality , surely?

A post was split to a new topic: Ichimoku indicator together with the combination of price action

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The most recent post was in 2012

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So why be under the ‘latest’ section???

There was a post made 2 hours ago replying to that thread, but it was removed by a moderator. I’ll have to look into why that didn’t remove the thread from Latest. Thanks for pointing that out.

No worries, don’t want to come across as picky!

If one can believe the view count my two long running threads they are on track to have 70% less views in June then they got in May. I really feel like I am talking to myself any more, Interaction with other traders is what I came here for and this new forums format seems to have chased a lot of people away

Just want to say how nostalgic it felt to see that old screenshot, Fundamentally Flawed.
It felt like the BabyPips of old, and straight away I wanted to head for some of my old threads (yes I did start one or two) and one by Dpaterso which I had contributed to.

There were several others that I enjoyed.

The reason I am here right now, is because it is Sunday night in Australia as I write (615 pm on the East Coast) and I just received an update of the week’s activities.

I am not inspired to look further, because my time is precious. If I can’t find stuff quickly, I move on to the next thing.

It is the same with my emails.
If an email I get won’t load because the website it is taking me to is too slow loading, I simply delete it - lost nothing except possibly what the email wanted me to see.

I hope Baby Pips doesn’t fall into that category for me.
If I can not find what I want quickly, I will be hard pressed to wander back here again, sadly.

@Ingot54

I know what you mean Ingot. I’m trying but this new Twitteresque style of website is just a little too hard to take. I’m terribly nostalgic. I have a long history with the Babypips of old, always in the background, through many years of trading struggles. I finally found the courage to join (and speak) and this happens.

Perhaps there should be a “Back Room” Babypips using the old software, where all of us sad and hopeless can go . I’d be quite content to sit in there with the pages and the readable text and the colourful in your face cartoony style!

I don’t quite understand the excuse that it was either an outdated vBulletin or Discourse.
What, no software options other than those two available guys? Really?

Very good idea.

Obviously not, but the forum seems to have (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “to impose on itself”) a whole range of problems that no other trading forum has. It looks like most of them boil down to the same issue, though, really.

And here I thought it was me. . . .
I only have one question: Was the new site designed by millennial’s?
(HINT: If you change a website, it is supposed to be a change for the better, an extension of what is working… not some artsy, fartsy attempt at being cool.)
This website has gone so far south.

Quite right,

Judging by what some earlier departees said, the one thing the forum and the members seem to agree on is that many of us might find greener pastures somewhere else. In spite of the color scheme!

Yes - quite agree with that.
I wonder how much research went into asking members about it?
I mean the members do not “own” the forum, but without the members, there is NO forum … right?

I was not chosen as one of the Beta testers, and I am unsure whether Beta testing was even done.
In the old days, that’s how change was brought in - with the informed consent of those who actually use the software.
Whether it is a forum, or a new piece of trading software, Beta testing was a painless way to iron out bugs, and gauge acceptance.

I am thinking it is probably Millennials who fired the first shots here.
But my generation would have been more considerate of those others who also share the room - not just the needs of self-first.

Hope that wasn’t the case, but consultation after the event seems to me to not be an effective strategy - at least on this occasion. All I know about this development was an email arrived in my in-box, and that’s how I got to know about it.

My grandmother would have told me to have some manners!

Anyway, I don’t want my negativity to spoil what could be a change for the better over time, but as things stand, I do not see anything here for me today.

Will check in in a few weeks to see how it’s going.

And without being able to keep some valued, more senior members on board, which it failed to, it has a lot less value to the brand new ones at whom the site seems exclusively targeted, so most of them probably won’t stay either.

What happened here is obvious.

What makes less sense is why it was allowed to.

Ah, yes.
But what is done, is done. There are other websites and other forums. . . time to move on.
I do not see this changing (that in itself would be an admission of a mistake) anytime soon.
I used to refer this site to new traders, but cannot do it any more.

If there are things you cannot find, please let me know, and I’ll try to point you in the right direction.

There are many legitimate reasons (to us anyway) for the switch - security, developer community, plugin availability, extensibility, support community, level of active development, user community, code base, built-in mobile support, real-world examples of successful migrations from vBulletin. And we looked at not just two, but several forum platforms, including vbulletin 5, Xenforo, Vanilla Forums, phpBB, Invision Power Boards and bbPress (by the makers of Wordpress) over the course of 18 months. I would say that’s pretty extensive. You have to remember that we also had to move 10+ years worth of users, posts, threads, images, uploads and URLs to any new system, and that fact alone reduced the potential pool of platforms significantly because they couldn’t handle that amount of data securely or efficiently.[quote=“wmtoby, post:13, topic:105561”]
Was the new site designed by millennial’s?
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No millennials here. Just our design and developer teams that have been with us close to 10 years and have worked on almost every major front-end and back-end change we’ve made.

We’re making adjustments where we feel they are needed. Many issues brought up by other members have already been attended to or are being actively worked on, so change is happening. But overall, we are happy with the result of the switch. Many others feel the same. If you spent more time on the website, and especially the Forums, we’d think you’d experience this too. But you are quite right, what’s done is done. Some of our changes may be too much for some users to embrace, and for them a decision will have to be made on whether they stay or go. We’d rather they stay, of course, to give the changes a chance. Because we’ve got more to come, to be released in the coming weeks and months. Thanks for your feedback.

Fair enough. I can’t argue the point as I know nothing of the ins and outs and intricacies of forum software.
I only know what I like.
You can’t fight city hall I guess.
As you said, there are only two choices…move with it or move on…

Pipstradamus - there was nothing specific I wanted top find, but if I was coming back here and found myself confronted by (as opposed to greeted with) the new format, how would I find a specific thread?

I was able to find my old thread - INGOT’S RAINBOW … A Position Trading Strategy - but how would anyone else even know it existed, with no search function? I was wondering where I can find (quickly) the Parabolic SAR - that’s all! thread, and the Experimental Breakout\Ranging Double Strategy and finally NickB’s 4H Scalping Method

To be fair - I know where they are, because I have the old links.
But how does anyone else know … or even appreciate that the categories even contain such threads?

What I meant by time searching, was that research has shown that you have about 3.5 seconds (I made that up, but it is something like that from memory) to capture the attention of a reader on the landing page. If the item is not of interest, or can not be located, the reader may well just use their precious time elsewhere - perhaps another well-known forum which does have a very familiar and readable format.

I can not see this forum being more popular than that forum, so I do not buy that you could not continue with the old format. The other forum seems to be managing ok with it.

https://conversionxl.com/first-impressions-matter-the-importance-of-great-visual-design/

http://www.marketingscoop.com/Article_Tools/Silverpop_Landingpage.pdf

I think you have been sold a pig in a poke, to use the 16th century expression.

It may nave been easier to take members along with you on the journey, rather than having to explain later why they have arrived now at Detroit instead of Disneyland!

Measure twice … cut once.