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Community Update - March 15th, 2019

Allen's avatar
Allen
Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
Mar 16, 2019

Welcome to our regular blog on changes to the community platform.

 

Mobile

In this update we have focused on making some incremental improvements to our mobile UI.  This is only the first release of what will be a complete review of our mobile UI. So tell us what works, what doesn't and what you would like to see in our community ideas board.

 

Performance

We have been taking a closer look at some of the feedback we get about page load times. Specifically we had noted an issue with Internet Explorer 11 taking significantly longer than other browsers to load the community. We are still reviewing our data on this but we have made some changes to improve the experience for all users, notably:

  • We removed the 'Trending spaces' from the homepage, it was not working very well and was slowing the whole page down.
  • We have changed how some of the feeds load to try to make them load quicker.

We will continue to assess this over the next few weeks and see what other options we have to make the pages load a whole lot quicker. 

 

Auto mention

In discussion spaces when you reply to a topic you will now automatically mention the author. If you are replying to someone else's reply then you will mention them instead. We plan to add this same feature to blogs shortly, let us know if you like it and if it helps.

 

What are we working on?

The biggest piece of work we are working on right now is multi-lingual support for the community. We will shortly be rolling out AI translation between English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. The objective with this will be to allow members to reply to each others comments in their own language and the community will automatically translate it to the language of the reader. As part of this roll out we will also start to translate elements of the community UI into these languages over the next few months.

 

Although the exact launch date has yet to be decided I expect it to be live before the end of April. Meanwhile, here is a sneak peak: (note the content is just test data!)

Content translated from German and Spanish to English

Text before being translated

Help us shape the Microsoft Tech Community, create your ideas here and upvote your favourites.

 

Updated Apr 01, 2019
Version 3.0
Community Update
  • Allen's avatar
    Allen
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    Apr 01, 2019

    DanielNiccoli ,

     

    Do not fear the Language translation on the Tech Community will default to English unless you select a different language from the drop down.

     

     

  • DanielNiccoli's avatar
    DanielNiccoli
    Steel Contributor
    Apr 01, 2019

    When you're implementing multi-language support, please let us choose the language. I'm not living in the US and every time I visit docs.microsoft.com you shove a automatically translated version down my throat. It's infuriating. And I'm a bit scared I'm going to get the same bad experience here. I want to read the forums in English and not be redirected to a translated version of the community.

  • Cian Allner's avatar
    Cian Allner
    Silver Contributor
    Mar 20, 2019

    Thanks for the update, it's always interesting to hear about upcoming plans and features! The multi-lingual support sounds brilliant and will make the site even more accessible.


    The auto mentions feature took a bit of getting used to! When it's the first reply to a post, it seems strange and I tend to remove it but I like it now. Especially for longer threads, where it makes it much clearer who you are responding to and also in the email notification, it signposts who is being referred to.