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

As always BarryM expresses things with articulacy.

At the risk of repeating myself I'll summarise what I'd consider 'fitness for purpose' capabilities in a board:
- quickly identifying new posts of interest since the last visit, including author, time and so forth
- searching and filtering historical threads, to mine the wisdom of 10 years' worth of past visitors
- easily composing and previewing posts, including the usual forum tools for BBcode insertion

In all of the above the InSided platform has fallen short. The confirmation that the necessary features don't exist in their platform and therefore require months of dev/test pretty much reinforces my view that it wasn't up to the job.

As always BarryM expresses things with articulacy.

I absolutely agree, well said Barry. We are committed to improving the community and making it the best it can be. Thanks for sharing your concerns and where you think the best places to head are. We’ll keep you updated with any news as soon as it’s available.

Ryan S,

Thank you for your reply to my post of a day ago and to all the others who took the trouble to also post a reply. I guess I am still wondering why 5 months in we still do not anything remotely like the required functionality of the old forum?

I do not seem myself as a luddite and normally embrace change, but the old Ask Sonos page seemed to work for those with questions and the kept the old forum clean and useable. I used to be a reasonably regular reader and poster on the old forum but my number of visits to the current Community has dropped off considerably! I do not have the metrics, but I suspect if we were to look at all the regular contributors (6 months ago) on the old forum and their actively now I would not be alone in this.

In short, after 5 months the new Community is not as good as the old forum. If that was the intention then fine, job done. But if Sonos were trying to improve things then big fail I am afraid.

Like OPs such as TJRL, ratty, BarryM and others, I agree totally. The new community is not a patch on the old forum, which I thoroughly enjoyed visiting. My own post count has plummeted.

Is the software company even entertaining the features everyone needs? Basic stuff like staying logged in doesn't even work half the time. Another problem is when I post from my iPad, the screen doesn't refresh, so it looks like the post didn't go. Would be nice if once you selected desktop version on a mobile device it stuck.

Is the software company even entertaining the features everyone needs?
Even if they were, the fact that so many features are missing from the InSided platform doesn't fill me with optimism. Possibly the only hope is that someone will eventually have the courage to order a further migration, to a platform built from the ground up to satisfy the basic requirements of a modern board.

Is the software company even entertaining the features everyone needs?
Even if they were, the fact that so many features are missing from the InSided platform doesn't fill me with optimism. Possibly the only hope is that someone will eventually have the courage to order a further migration, to a platform built from the ground up to satisfy the basic requirements of a modern board.

I wasn't registered before the current board so can't compare. But it is true to say that this forum is not very good in terms of seeing latest posts and the layout within a post is not very good either.

Surely there are plenty of forum templates out there that would do the job?

Despite being long in the tooth and evidently a bit hard for the admins to maintain, the vBulletin platform version used by the original Sonos forums was far more functional than this one (leaving aside the 'social' baubles). Even the GetSatisfaction platform used by Ask.Sonos -- which ran in parallel with the old discussion forums for several years as more of a Q&A place -- was in many respects better.

Rather than combining the best aspects of the vBulletin and GetSatisfaction boards we lost a great deal. BarryM's is a good summary.

A key rationale for ditching both previous boards was to bring everything under one roof, including all the 10 years of historical threads. The dreadful irony is that those old threads might as well have been consigned to oblivion, such is the uselessness of the built-in search facility. I get better results by using Google's site search.

The platform does have some room to grow for sure, but it certainly is fit for purpose. We were looking for a partner to work with to combine our two communities together. Something with a new look and feel over the old forums (and some important features on the administration side) but also with many missing features from the ask.sonos page. After a lot of looking we found that InSided had a lot of what we were looking for, and had a lot of potential to grow too. They've been a great partner so far and we're looking to do a lot more with them in the future. There definitely are some things that we'd like to see improved and some features that should be added, but we think they were the right partner at the right time.

We're looking forward to working with them to make the community the best it can be, and the best Sonos community we've ever had.

You must be joking. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I was a regular in the old forum, I hardly ever visit anymore. It has become infantile, almost impossible to search and even the most basic things it gets wrong. One example only: I was reading this thread without having logged in. I had to go back to the main screen to log in and find my way back to this page. Months ago I already concluded that this forum is not there to help customers and allow them to share their views but to stifle that as much as possible while pretending otherwise.

Vacuous remarks like "We're looking forward to working with them to make the community the best it can be, and the best Sonos community we've ever had." are particularly galling since you have had quite a bit of time to set things right and nothing substantial (as far as I am concerned) has happened.

Oh I just spotted Ryan S's response to Barry. He completely agrees and the usual garbage about how they will improve things. Ryan S. did it ever occur to you that this sort of behaviour might actually alienate customers and make them look for alternatives?

Months ago I already concluded that this forum is not there to help customers and allow them to share their views but to stifle that as much as possible while pretending otherwise.

I am little more charitable on this point; while what you say is probably the outcome to a large degree, I don't think it is a planned one. I see this a classic example of marketing leadership making decisions based on personal preferences and persuasions, without ever being in active touch with ground realities. And I can assure you from my experiences in other companies that none of the Sonos responses are from these people/this person.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Perhaps that is coming across stronger than appropriate, but the drift is accurate, I suggest.