Autum brinds dashboard weirdness

mark
September 22, 2010, 05:52 AM posted in General Discussion

The Mid-Autum Festival seems to have brought changes to the dashboard.  About half of them seem nice.  The other have seem to 添麻烦。 Among the nice ones, I kind of like being able to get expanded lesson information right from the dashboard.  The inconvenient ones include that the only way I can find to change the status of a lesson is to visit the page for that lesson.  I usually change status for a bunch at once.  So, a simple task had become complex and rather time consuming.  I also haven't found a way to control the length of the list that is displayed; you can have any number you like, as long as it is ten, and I can't scroll down the list to the ones after ten, which compounds the anoyances associated with setting lesson status.  Finally, it seems that no change comes without busting something.  Even though I am subscribed to the Elementary lessons, today's didn't show up in my dashboard.  I'm not sure if this is a hint that I no longer need Elementary lessons, or a punishment for already having ten lessons in my active lesson list, or just some random bug.  I am not sure if anyone is still in the office to address this stuff, if not, don't drink too much before you come back to work.  Debugging is no fun when you are hungover.

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RJ
September 22, 2010, 08:33 AM

Hi Mark,

Yes, despite promises to the contrary, this change has resulted in the usual fare: The targeted functions (Course RSS and mobile improvements this time) don't work, and there is significant collateral damage. I really wanted to be able to say the website is looking better and this change went smooth, I really wanted to, but I cant. And why do they always roll out changes right before holidays or at the end of the week, knowing there will be nobody home to deal with the problems?

Things are better though and you have to realize that the target audience is now those with guided plan or above. You can btw, still change the lesson status on the manage lessons page, at least I can, but they still make it impossible to send a lesson back to bookmark status from the studied list without visiting the lesson itself. Oh, and I didnt get the elementary lesson either, so its not just you. Have a mooncake, thats what they are doing. :-)

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chris
September 22, 2010, 09:19 AM

Hi Mark.  Most of the things you list above can actually be done on the "Manage Lessons" page, e.g. change number of lessons being shown on each page, change status of each lesson.  I must confess that I never spend more than a few seconds on the 'dashboard' since it came into being - I always immediately click through to "Manage Lessons".  For me, this page makes more sense to be my Cpod home page.  I also like the overall status table that is shown on the right of the screen when on the "Manage Lessons" page.  Chris.

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mark
September 22, 2010, 03:38 PM

@Chris, thanks for the tip.  It seems that the "manage lessons" page has retained the functionality of the previous dashboard page for viewing all current lessons.  That helps.  I hope it is either not slated for the same re-vamp, or the kinks get worked out before it too becomes a two steps forward, one step back, page.

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RJ
September 24, 2010, 10:44 AM

Actually, in all fairness, the current "dashboard" (including the "manage lessons" and "course" sections of it) is a pretty decent design (in my opinion) when working properly. If cpod ever gets done playing "whack a mole" with the seemingly endless software "glitches," we should be in good shape. There is still the issue of comments being too easily "thread-buried," but that is a separate (design) issue. Here's hoping for the best going forward.