Hello all,
a quick heads-up that the CorelDRAW Community will be unavailable most of Tuesday November 18, 2014 as we conduct a major upgrade of this site. You can find more details about what is coming in my blog at http://community.coreldraw.com/blogs/gerard/archive/2014/11/12/major-upgrade-to-the-coreldraw-community-next-week.aspx
Wouldn't it have been sensible to have a beta test of this new forum, instead of rushing it out untested?
There are clearly things that are awkward or wrong and could have been corrected before launch.
Problems so far:
1) Use rich formatting needs to be on by default as it was in the previous forum. There is no benefit in turning it off -- you can still post plain text in the rich format box.
2) Even with rich formatting on, important keystrokes (such as control-B for bold) no longer work.
I'll reserve judgement on the problems finding new/unread posts, which will presumably work better in subsequent visits.
3) Annoying popups.
Nobody needed annoying popups to find out how to navigate the old forum -- it was all self-evident. And the insolent "later" button which only turns them off for 10 minutes reminds me of typical microsoft arrogance. But at least you could turn the annoying paperclip off -- a "do not show these messages again" box is needed alongside the Later button.
4) Please lose the pointless animations. Example: the related box. Just show it -- it does not need to distract unnecessarily by sliding it in.
OK, I've found one positive benefit. The CorelDraw X7 Suite subforum is no longer above the CorelDraw X7 subforum in the forums list, so we might get a few less people accidentally posting CorelDraw questions in the suite category without saying the question is about CorelDraw.
Logically, I would put photopaint above the suite category for the same reason. But at least by not having suite as the first entry means that people will look a bit harder at the other categories and choose the appropriate one when the question is not specifically about the suite.