Since switching over to Arena, we were able to debut the new ToffeeWeb Live Forum for the Hull City game yesterday. Thanks for those who gave it a try.
Some feedback was provided on there and I’m bringing it together here so we can try and address the ongoing concerns. Similarly for the new Arena Comment System on all the main News Stories, which is also a constant irritation for many.
The New Live Form
Here are the issues we’re seeing with our first use of Arena’s Group Chat that we have renamed the new Live Forum. Please add your concerns and grievances in the ‘Conversation’ below.
- Slow to load: When opening the Live Forum page, the comments panel is not there. It takes a few seconds to load before you can see any comments.
- Comments are listed Oldest first: Ironically this is what we wanted for the main Comment System (below). The old Live Forum was Newest first; is there a preference or can we stick with Oldest first?
- Small Window: The comment window only shows perhaps six comments at most. To see the rest of the forum, you have to scroll up and down inside this window. The size of the window cannot be changed. It should be made adjustable, as are most such windows in most apps.
- Too much White Space: There seem to be one or more extra blank lines between the comments that spreads them out and thus makes poor use of the small window.
- Need to Refresh: Some users felt they had to refresh the page manually to keep up, wheras the old Live Forum updated almost instantly.
- Posts split right and left: ‘Your’ posts to the new Live Forum appear on the right side, without your name (and in a horrible purple font!), while everyone else’s posts appear on the left, in normal font, with the poster’s name. I think the split works okay once you are used to it. Makes it very seay to se ‘your’ posts and look for any responses.
- Edit and Delete options: These options are great… but I don’t think many people found them. If you hover over your meassage, three vertical dots appear top right of the message. Clicking gives you these options: Profile ; Edit ; Delete. If you choose Edit, that message appears at the bottom of the window also and you can make changes before you repost it.
- Character limit: I’m sure there must be one but nobody seemed to hit it yesterday.
- Horrible Colour: Why is the window a horrible purple colour and not a nice Everton Blue? I think it defaults to Arena’s corporate purple; however, the settings allow me to set the Main Colour… which I did. To Blue. But it didn’t change. We have reported this failing; Arena have still not fixed the problem.
- Links Created: Incredibly, links are recognised and created on the fly as soon as you start typing a URL. This is a very good feature!
Other pertinent comments made include:
“Sorry but this new format on TW just does not flow”
I think this may be due to the limited number of posts in the small window. The window size should be adjustable; we’ll see if Arena will take this request on board.
“Pray you are not paying these appalling site developers. Would ask the owners but who are they?”
In this day and age, you have to pay for most things. The owners of ToffeeWeb are Moveup Media, a French company who operate a number of sports websites. Look them up on line.
Thanks to everyone who registered with their First and Last names. I think this is essential to promote relationships, a feeling of community, as well as taking personal responsibility for what you post. We will be working to encourage this going forward.
Arena Comment SYSTEM
There’s been a lot of concern expressed about our switch to the Arena Comment System, which appears below all News Stories, Features, Editorials, Match Reports, etc. I’ll list the issues we are seeing with Arena; please add your ongoing concerns and grievances in the ‘Conversation’ below.
- Comments are listed Best first by default: This has to be the biggest and most incomprehensible bugbear about the new Comment System (below). Instead of listing in chronological order, its algorithm ascribes some score based on likes or replies or length or name of poster… who actually knows?
- You have to manually select Newest: To bring any kind of order to the comments, you can only select Newest first. The more logical Oldest first sort order that we used ot have with the old comments system is simply not an option. We’ve requested it… and Arena have said they will look at it… but things are progressing at a glacial pace.
- If you refresh the page…: it resets to Best! If it wasn’t asinine enough to have Best set by Arena as the default, it rests as soon as you try to refresh the page to update the comment section. This is totally unacceptable.
- Show More Comments: If there are more than 6 comments posted, there is a button at the bottom inviting you to Show More Comments. This gets old really quickly as it only updates by another handful, and you have to keep clicking to get more comments to show.
- Show All Comments?: Why isn’t there a Show All Comments option that would open up the entire thread and let you read all comments in chronological order? Good question. We have asked; Arena are looking at this.
- No Comment Numbering: Many of you miss the ability to cross-reference earlier comments by the simple mechanism of having a numerical order assigned to comments posted.
- Replies: The entire structure of the comment thread is disrupted by having a direct Reply option below each comment. This isn’t necessarily a bad feature but it becomes a problem if people use it for significant replies, rather than just posting a fresh comment. Replies are limited to just two levels of nesting, which seems to be a good thing. But each level must be manually exposed by clicking “Show x more replies”, which is annoying. The missing Show All Comments command should open up all replies as well.
- Character Limit: Those writing longer comments have run into this. It’s something that the customer should be allowed to set and change. But Arena does not let us do this.
- No in-comment formatting: Being able to use Bold, Italic or Underline text inside a comment is so fundamental, it defies common sense that anyone would design a comment system without this — much less market it as a professional product. Yet here we are… once again, Arena has been informed of this abysmal failing.
- Links not recognised: So it works seamlessly in the Live Forum (Arena’s Group Chat). But no such luck in their Comment System. Go figure!
The list of issues we have is quite astounding. What is more astounding is some of them have been created deliberately by Arena. Who in their right mind would ever set a comment thread to order itself by ‘Best’ as default? And make it something that can’t be changed by the customer???
In case you, our precious readers, were in any doubt, we are all extremely frustrated by what we have found in trying to get the Arena software to work for us. We are engaging directly with them on your and our behalf, but progress so far has only been backwards. When we installed their software, it was not defaulting to Best sort order. This is something they added recently, much to everyone’s extreme annoyance.
Some of the related comments made on other threads include:
“It’s this whole thing about having to open EVERY conversation and then open EVERY reply to get a full appreciation of the thread, it’s ridiculous. And you have to do it EVERY time you leave and return to the topic , it’s tedious.”
“Tedious, unnecessary, utterly out of synch, horrible to go backwards and forwards. We have yet to be told why this was done.“
“Absolutely – it’s a jumbled mess now. You can’t see any posts, and it always defaults to ‘Best’ posts. Well who decides what’s Best?? I just want chronological order like normal forums are. Ridiculous.”
“Yes… I’m afraid Toffeeweb’s credibility has bit the dust and is a shadow of its former self. Why they had to change the format is anybody’s guess.“
“You have to open every post and every reply to see a conversation flow — although that’s the problem, they don’t flow!“
“I’m finding the only way to not miss a comment is to open every reply to each comment on each thread.“
“From what I read by Michael and Patric, they had no choice. I don’t know the reasons for that, but they’ve been trying to get things as back to normal as possible for weeks. It’s been a slow process and they are pissing against the wind it seems, lot’s of regulars are not contributing much, if anything. First the betting debacle and now the comments issues… not been a great 6 months for ToffeeWeb but, if things improve, people who have a look will drift back. I did after the last big change, once the AI manufactured shit stopped that is.“
“I’ll go anywhere for a chat, debate, argument about Everton, but I’m struggling to stay interested in the comments on ToffeeWeb at the moment because they are all over the place. Not sure it would take much fixing either…“
“Sorry but this updated site isn’t showing posts consistently. It’s abysmal. I’m hardly on here now. And this post will probably disappear into the ether.“
“I’ve looked at a couple of other football websites over the last few years which have a similar way of communicating in line with this newer version of ToffeeWeb and my own personal view was that they couldn’t lace this website’s boots. Unfortunately, now, I’m not so sure…”
“The new format is not fun at all. When you open a new article, it shows ’0 Comments’! But when you go in, you find some responses. It is really painful to click on each of the ‘Show Replies’. The absense of numbers to the contributions also makes it difficult to refer to a post in my contribution. It has been a frustrating experience so far and I hope the site owners are working on improving it.“
“I dont know why the new owners bought this site as you can see how few posters there are using this site. Despite Harry Diamond and Michael Kenrick imploring the owners to change the format to something we can all relate too, the new owners dont seem to want to listen to them. It’s completely destroyed the enjoyment of this site for me.”
“Can we have a vote on whether to go back to the old format as I believe it will be a resounding Yes!”
What Arena have told us is: The Comment System is a shared product used by many partners, so changes like these need to be reviewed by their Product and Engineering teams first. They assess feasibility and impact on everyone. If a request is approved, it’s prioritized in their roadmap alongside other work. That takes time, and they’d rather be upfront about it than promise turnaround times they can’t meet.
Please feel free to add your frustrations and anything else I may have missed in this shocking laundry list of software design failings.