This article is part of the Wiki series: MSDN/TechNet Forums. 

Forums Update 2/13

People may have noticed some hiccups today as we deploy an update. This update does a few things:

• Addresses the Alert Me bug, when replying to threads the alert setting is not subscribing people automatically to the thread they reply to.
• Thread states are out of sync, where an question with legitimate answers is not showing as an answered threads (impacts also proposed answers)
• The forums rich text editor looked bad on Windows Developer Preview IE10
• MSDN/TechNet English only forum home page update. General design update to clean up the home page. Filter column moved to a find/search forum experience
• Visual design updates on the TechNet forums to generally have a cleaner design with fonts consistent with other Windows 8 themes and reserved icons that are less distracting
• Other minor bug fixes.

While the update is being applied (3-6pm PST) users may experience strange behaviors and slow response times.

Forums 4 - Release 35 - February 6

Release Details

This forums release had two main goals

• Update to the rich text editor
• Updates to address performance issues in the application, especially for thread page load times for thread that had more than 40 replies

We also expect the performance issues to improve overall stability and availability of the application. In addition to the above there have also been numerous bug fixes.

Known Issues

Editor: Edit code in Google Chrome drops line breaks. When users edit code after it has been submitted, the edit code dialog drops the line breaks. To get around this copy the code and re insert it (instead of editing the code in place).

Profile Site Update - January 19th

• Translation Wiki: Activities, achievements, points etc. are now being recognized for work done in community translation of library articles. Some information about the Translation Wiki is available here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/dd362340.aspx) with more information coming in the next month or so. The statistics widget will show counts of translations submitted, approved and count of moderator actions completed. Achievements are earned based around these 3 stat counts; more specific details to come.
• Library: We've been tracking Library annotations (community comments) for a long time now. Tonight the statistics for annotation count has been added to the profile. There are no points and achievements currently defined for this application at this time.

Profile Site Update - December 1st

• Point History Graph - the second part of our statistics work is going live today. At the top of a profile page you'll see a time graph representing accumulated points over the time a persons profile has existed. Looking at a profile you'll see when they were active, how many points earned in that month and points at that particular month. We plan to add more interaction to the graph over time (such as zooming, achievements earned when, etc.). Please note there are a couple of bugs we will address in our next release including duplicate months being shown at the start or end of the graph.
• Pie Charts - For Activities by Application and Points by Application, you'll see the tabular data replaced with pie charts. When you hover over a piece of the pie you'll see the actual value along with the percentage of that piece. See someone new in the forums, you'll be able to quickly tell if they've spent time elsewhere in our network with ease. Note there is also one design bug here where the colors between the two pie charts aren't always mapped to the same application. We'll fix that in the next release as well.
• Missing Achievements - There was another report or two of some achievements not being awarded. We've found that issue and those achievements will appear again over the next week. We'll actually be recalculating all achievement progress to ensure we catch anything else that might be hiding away.
• Hover User Cards - There was some feedback that the hover cards we display when you hover over a users name, appeared to easily. We've tweaked that some to make that a better experience.
• Avatar Restrictions - If your avatar when converted and resized exceeded 8KB, the system just stopped processing the rest of the image. Apparently that's not really a good idea. ;-) So we've fixed that so that we process the whole image.

Btw, we have heard the request to flip the activity and stats tabs. We haven't done that yet and are still collecting data around usage of both tabs. We are also working through a design update (that activity feed really does need it) so we'll be addressing what order we have the tabs in conjunction with this other work.

Forums 4 - Release 34 - October 27

• New surveys on non en-us forums: Enable the team to track success and effort from our users.
• Tagging: Analysis on how tagging could be integrated into the forums system. Expect details on this later.
• Database Updates: Continued work to reduce replication dependencies and database complexity.
• Performance Fixes: Adopt a library that merges resource files to reduce requests and improve performance.
• Notification Service Fixes: Ability to reprocess recognition activities that have exceeded the failure retry limits
• Bug Fixes: Analysis and resolution of the higher volume internal exceptions logged by the application. Fixes in end user scenarios 
• Editor Analysis: Evaluation and internal prototype work leveraging editors that have fewer issues for end users. 
• Profile Answers: The number of forum answers are now available in the Experience tab of the profiles.

 

Forums 4 - Release 33 - September 29th

Forums 4 - Release 32 - September 1st

Forums 4 - Release 31 - August 4th

• Record profile activities and points for private forums (partner, mvp and moderator forums)
• Record activity for contributing a proposed answer
• Multiple fixes in the notification service (activities, points and email alerts)
• Enabled better monitoring to quickly detect and address notification service outages
• Bug fix for "Thread Preview" when viewing thread posts out of brand context
• Minor ux bug fixes

Forums 4 - Release 30 - July 14th

• Forum Search: A convenient new “find a forum” feature enabling users to type in the forum or category they are looking for 
• Recent Forums: A list of ‘recent forums’ helping users get to places they have been 
• Most Popular Forums: A list of ‘most popular forums’ helpings users quickly find the forums that has the most recent activity Forums recognition will be updated for the July 14th release.
• New Profile Recognition System: This will introduce a new recognition paradigm in forums. Updates will be made to the recognition rules and user points will be recalculated. Users will also gain new achievements to better reflect their effort in participating.

There are three main reasons for the new Profile Recognition System:

1) Better motivation for users for the right behaviors - The new system rewards user points for quality contributions and new achievements for effort-based quantity actions. It also rewards users more points for contributing answers that are viewed and voted on more. The idea here is to better reward users for good, fast answers.

2) A more consistent and central way to describe our users – The recognition system will centralize and offer filtered views of a user’s participation not only on forums but across other MSDN and TechNet properties such as Blogs, Wikis and the Code Galleries. As new properties are brought on board they will show up in one place in a consistent display.

3) A more flexible and sustainable solution – The new recognition system will allow the forums application to continue to add new incentives and adjust rules to promote behaviors that support a more healthy ecosystem. It will also make the application healthier by retiring the legacy points system, a continual cause of stability issues in the application.

Forums 4 - Release 29 - June 9th

Forums 4 - Release 28 - May 12th

Forums 4 - Release 27 - April 17th

Forums 4 - Release 26 - March 17th

Forums 4 - Release 25 - February 17

Forums 4 - Release 22 - November 18

Forums 4 - Release 21 - October 28th

Forums 4 - Release 20 - September 30th

Forums 4 - Release 19 - September 1st

Forums 4 - Release 18 - August 5th

Forums 4 - Release 17 - July 8th

Forums 4 - Release 16 - June 10

Forums 4 - Release 15 - May 21, 2010

Forums 4 - Release 14 - April 18, 2010

Forums 4 - Release 13 - March 18, 2010

Forums 4 - Release 12 - February 18, 2010

Forums 4 - Release 11 - January 21, 2010

Forums 4 - Release 10 - December 17, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 9 - November 19, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 8 - October 16, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 7 - October 1, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 6 - August 28, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 5 - July 9, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 4 - June 25, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 3 - May 28, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 2 - April 23, 2009

Forums 4 - Release 1 - March 27, 2009

This article is part of the Wiki series: MSDN/TechNet Forums.