Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized the following list (highest priority first):

1. Errors when editing documents: Can no longer edit documents?
2. Display avatars on threads:
   1. Avatars (status level, vExpert, moderator, VMware employee) will display in threads; currently they display only on community pages
3. Display helpful / correct answers in threads: Cannot tell what replies are marked correct or helpful.
   1. Answers marked helpful / correct will display in the threads; currently they only display on community pages
4. IE6 errors on "All Communities" dropdowns: in IE 6 "all communities" dropdown is not clickable
5. Make new private messages easier to find: Notification of PMs
   1. The username menu title will be bold when the user has unread private messages.
6. Wider view area for threads: Please make the thread posting area wider!
   1. We are working on some JavaScript so that you can expand the thread view to cover the right column. This gives 30% more area to view threads while allowing us to keep the fixed width, which allows us to provide more consistency for the site across browsers and display sizes.
7. Truncated names: Shortened logins on forum
   1. Names will still be truncated on community pages, but they will not be truncated in places where there's plenty of space to show the whole name, e.g. on user profile pages.

Yes, we have a winner for the Profile Image + Avatar Drawing!! And the winner is....

(drum roll)

TristanT

Congratulations, Tristan! I am now sending you a US$50 iTunes gift card that you can redeem for $50 of goodies from www.itunes.com. Enjoy!

A big thank you to the 140 people who have uploaded both a profile image and an avatar (and were in the drawing), as well as the additional 300+ people who have one or the other but not both (and therefore didn't qualify for the drawing -- but I thank you anyway!). I encourage every VMware Communities member to upload at least one image, so that people can learn a bit more about you.

And thanks to the Web site http://www.random.org for generating a true random number -- no pseudo-random numbers used here -- for the drawing.

Regards, Robert (see Upload a Profile Image + Avatar, and Win! for drawing details)

An error in VMware Communities was fixed on Sept 15 at 11am Pacific, and all functions of VMware Communities are now available and the site is running with no known errors.

From Sept 14 early afternoon Pacific until Sept 15 11am Pacific, the nodes in the cluster running VMware Communities were not connected properly. During this time, different data displayed depending on which node in the cluster a user was connected to. No data is known to be lost, and once the nodes were reconnected, normal behavior returned. The cause of the problem was human error, and we are reviewing internal processes to make sure this does not happen again.

If site visitors do see any issues, please contact RDellimmagine or post to Communities Website Feedback.

Update 9/16 AM: It appears there are some data issues with threads posted before the above error was fixed. My dev team is investigating, and I'll update here when I have more information. I apologize for the problems this is causing. Regards, Robert

Update 9/16 PM: We fixed a couple of places where the above issue caused messages to point to the incorrect parent messages. Also, I believe that the threads-out-of-chronological-order issue resolved itself. This issue persisted a while after the fix was made because it took some time for the cache to catch up with the site once all nodes rejoined the cluster. Regards, Robert

The VMware Account Management Portal, through which you log into VMware Store and Communities, will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance tonight (Friday, September 11, 2009) beginning 6:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, for approximately 5 hours. During this time, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

A Google search option is now available on the VMware Communities advanced search page. The Google search option uses Google's "site:communities.vmware.com" feature to limit results to the VMware Communities site, and functions as a good complement to the VMware Communities native search function.



For IE users, we fixed a bug in the VMware Communities native search. IE users who search within a large number of communities will no longer see a blank page caused by search strings exceeding IE's 2083-character URL maximum. Instead, those searches will default to a site search, which does not encounter this issue.

Thanks to all who gave feedback on search. If you have more to add, please do!

Regards, Robert

VMware Communities will be unavailable at 5pm Pacific on August 12 for a maximum of 30 minutes.

We are upgrading the cluster software on VMware Communities for increased stability.

Thanks, Robert

Community members,

The Account Management Portal, through which you log into VMware Store and Communities, will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance tonight (Friday, July 10, 2009) beginning 6:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, for approximately 5.5 hours. During this time, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

Thank you,
Badsah Mukherji
Web Communities Team

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(courtesy of "vmwarerocks")