A huge step backward--what are you guys thinking?

I prefer to maintain my anonymity, and it becomes increasingly difficult to do that when you have an outside party aggregating all the information about you and your hobbies, beliefs, etc, across every site you frequent. When I first signed up for the Sonos forums, I was pleased to see that Sonos had resisted the "Disqus" movement. I abandon sites that move to that system.

After getting my initial questions somewhat answered, I left off the forum for a month. When I came back, I couldn't find the forum. I searched all over the site and couldn't remember exactly how I got into those forums. There was some link for an eye-searing, hard to read thing called the "Community" which looked nothing like the forum. I finally figured that I must have lost my login somehow and tried to re-register. I ended up getting sent to some kind of outside site, which proudly proclaimed that I was now a member of some "family of sites", that my information would be spread across these sites, one login for everything, and that they would be happy to use my information and posts for their own benefit. In short, Discus all over again.

I complained loudly to both Sonos and the other party. I said that I signed up under Sonos but ended up farmed out to this other site and never had a chance to read or approve of their misuse of my information. I demanded that the account be closed, deleted, and excised from any backups. Allegedly this was done.

Now, here we are on yet another forum, and this one is a "community" (I dread buzzwords, whether its in the real world or online). Its "powered by" some new company, InSided. Is this simply software that replaced vBulletin? Or have the forums been moved into "the cloud", and the whole thing is a redirect to their servers? I would hope Sonos has still kept some control over their forum, but I have no idea. We've been migrated, but there has been no disclosure about who controls our info. I certainly hope that InSidious, or whatever they're called, is simply a server software provider and not that other bunch under a different name.

So.. who has our info?

Hi Proton, thanks for raising this issue here. Privacy is usually at the front of my mind when signing up for a new site as well, so I share your concerns. I am contacting InSided to get you a clear statement on how your information is used (or not used) since I want to make sure you get the answer you deserve. In the mean time, you can review the Sonos privacy policy here:

http://www.sonos.com/legal/privacy

The editor is very limited. Perhaps this is just another aspect of "social" platforms, which tend to encourage pithy, limited engagements. The old Forums editor was very useful, but even this was throttled a bit after the text box resize drag corner was removed.

Not so convenient, one could use a more capable 3rd party editor, then drag and drop into this text box. But this is not so great for the limited BB codes.

"Privacy"? Forget it!

The new platform doesn't support a preview mode but if this is a must-have to you, let us know.

Definitely a "must have" for me!

Hi Proton, thanks for raising this issue here. Privacy is usually at the front of my mind when signing up for a new site as well, so I share your concerns. I am contacting InSided to get you a clear statement on how your information is used (or not used) since I want to make sure you get the answer you deserve. In the mean time, you can review the Sonos privacy policy here:

http://www.sonos.com/legal/privacy

John, thanks for the response. I appreciate you contacting InSidious on our behalf, but there is one part of my post that you should be able to answer without their involvement: where is this forum really located? Is the current forum simply software that Sonos is using, on Sonos company servers? Or is this whole forum really being served by InSided from a remote location and the Sonos site is merely a front end? You should be able to ask your company webmaster or IT person to get this answer.

Thanks.

BTW - can we do something about this non-expandable 7 line high text entry window for posts? Wow, this is aggravating.

One other thing I need to mention...

After I sign up for a site, I always turn cookies off to help reduce or eliminate tracking. They will perform their function, which is to identify my ID and password to the host site, but the cookie can't be altered to modify tracking info, and new cookies can't be dropped either. I've done this with every forum I'm a member of, and with the exception of a couple of really archaic phpBB sites, I'm always able to read, post, search, and edit. I can also modify my profile. No problems, and some of my sites have had the same cookie on them for years.
I found that this forum will not let me have access to posts - even to read - if cookies are blocked for more than a day. There is no technical reason for this to happen.

BTW - can we do something about this non-expandable 7 line high text entry window for posts? Wow, this is aggravating.

Just a quick comment on this one to say that making the post box expandable is one of the first things we're going to be changing. More to come.

John, thanks for the response. I appreciate you contacting InSidious on our behalf, but there is one part of my post that you should be able to answer without their involvement: where is this forum really located? Is the current forum simply software that Sonos is using, on Sonos company servers? Or is this whole forum really being served by InSided from a remote location and the Sonos site is merely a front end? You should be able to ask your company webmaster or IT person to get this answer.

These forums are hosted by InSided, who also developed the software itself. It's an arrangement for licensing and distribution commonly called SaaS (Software as a Service). Ask.sonos.com was SaaS and hosted by a company called Get Satisfaction, but the forums were not, they were hosted by Sonos on a variety of servers over the years.

The answer on privacy turns out to be considerably more simple than I previously thought, but when your personal data is being discussed, one can never be too careful. All information hosted on this site, including any personal data you've input, is covered by the Sonos privacy policy I linked earlier in the thread. I would recommend you read the section of the policy on information use yourself if you have any questions on how your data is used.

Hi everyone,

As many of you have requested, we want to provide you with better insight into what feedback from this space has been heard and what we're focused on changing over the next few months. Our focus for the last two weeks since launch has been on bugs or other functionality problems but we're also collecting and reviewing your comments on the features of this site.

We've made two specific feedback threads in the new community feedback forum here to address two trending topics, the reply field and the new posts display mode. We hope that splitting into some specific areas of discussion will allow us to consolidate everyone's viewpoint, and also give you a central place to check the status of the requests. These two threads are by no means the only feedback we're looking at, but for now these areas will be our starting points:

New Community Feedback Topic: New Posts Display
New Community Feedback Topic: Reply Field

Please take a look and add your comments. If you have any general comments on this approach, please share them in a reply here.

Can I put in a plea for easier navigation between pages of a thread, byputting the links to page numbers at both top and bottom of the page? This would mean not having to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page before choosing which page number to navigate to.

Thanks,
Steve.

Can I put in a plea for easier navigation between pages of a thread, byputting the links to page numbers at both top and bottom of the page? This would mean not having to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page before choosing which page number to navigate to.

Thanks,
Steve.

Plea received. We'll add it to the list of design suggestions we're working with. Thanks.