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Documents We've Upgraded the element14 Community and We're Glad You're Joining Us!
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  • Author Author: cstanton
  • Date Created: 14 Oct 2021 1:00 PM Date Created
  • Last Updated Last Updated: 23 Nov 2021 5:09 PM
  • Views 8455 views
  • Likes 12 likes
  • Comments 106 comments
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We've Upgraded the element14 Community and We're Glad You're Joining Us!

imageWelcome to the element14 Community!

The element14 Community was started nearly 13 years ago now, with the intention of being a home and Community for Electrical and Electronics Design Engineers and Hobbyists and Makers alike, in conjunction with presenting relevant products from the Farnell range of stores available globally.

 

When the site was conceived, we chose a Community vendor, content management system, platform...whatever you wish to call it, called Jive. The internet landscape was rather different about ten years ago. Social media was only just hitting its stride with sites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, and forums were still very commonplace. We needed an environment that supported a mixture of media including videos, images, diagrams, and technical documents and whitepapers all in one place that would allow our members to comment, share and revisit. Along with our activities such as giveaways, competitions, and reviews, we created some custom content such as RoadTests, Design Challenges, and integrated our webinar providers (like WebEx) into Events.

 

{gallery} element14 Community over the Years

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2008: element14 Community Launch

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2009: element14 Community Update

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2010: element14 Community

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2011: element14 Community

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2012: element14 Community

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2013: element14 Community Jive 6 Update

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2015: element14 Community Jive 8 Update

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2019: element14 Community Redesign

 

Technology moves on and so do requirements. Those who're familiar with Jive will know of its quirks, it isn't great for social sharing, and editing and inserting your content can be cumbersome in the day of HTML5, CSS and HTTP2. Additionally, our current site has suffered from the usual technical challenges - slow performance at times and periodic outages. While the development team has done a lot of profound work and customisation on the website, the underlying platform has started to creak.

 

Over the past 6-12 months to November 2021 we have been working hard behind the scenes, arranging contracts, drafting up requirements, raising support requests and observing the different alternatives, and we've finally made a decision that we believe will be sufficiently familiar to all of our members, to our staff, and also allow us to transition into a better Community in the future with more features.

 

For that we've chosen to migrate the element14 Community website over to Verint's Community platform. It's taken some customising, tweaking, and there'll be adjustments to make for everyone - but we believe it'll be a better experience overall.

 

Why are we upgrading?

It's time for something new, fast and gives us more opportunities to give you a great element14 Community experience. We've heard your feedback on the discussions, comments, and surveys over the years and we now have the opportunity to upgrade to something better, newer, faster, up to date, and supported by better infrastructure!

 

In 2017/2018 Jive was purchased by Aurea Software. This had implications for the platform which they blogged about, but the links to the blog posts about this are now dead. There are many issues with Jive that have become evident as time has passed, from how it handles spam, to being user friendly and being confusing to users. Behind the scenes the other issue is that Jive dropped support for self-hosted platforms and sold off the support contracts to third parties, but halted any further development on it. Jive have 'hosted solutions', but that isn't Community. Jive are now mainly (though technically always have been) a hosted enterprise intranet solution and not a public facing self-hosted website platform.

 

So what did that mean to us?

It meant that we are on a fixed time limit. The version of Jive we're running would eventually be end of life, including the nitrostudio bunchball contract that was combined with it, and getting support for it with the new owners was gradually becoming more difficult. The companies which the support contracts were sold to ultimately wanted everyone to move from Jive to another platform, because they had their own.

 

We had to find something that:

  • Has good technical support from the vendor
  • Is customisable
  • Gives the advantage of more features
  • Ideally is faster as a platform
  • If nothing else, is a good 'like for like' swap in to reduce confusion for us and our users
  • Supported gamification (points and badges)

 

Being on a fixed time limit, which ended up being the space of a year or less, to change from one platform to another has been a huge undertaking and strain on the team as we've worked to specify  requirements, hardware needs, what we can transfer, how we transfer it, working with consulting developers as well as our in-house developers, asking for some of you to be our beta testers, and ultimately we have had to cut some corners until the platform's released because the support contract and licenses for Jive will expire soon and we can't renew them.

 

We're confident that the new choice of platform is ultimately better for us and you, the users. It took us 10 years to get Jive into a better place, and we'll be taking what we learned from that into the new platform to make sure it's in a good place for all of us as we migrate. We will soon be welcoming our new public facing Verint Community.

 

What's being transferred?

Everything we can. Active user accounts, your blog posts, RoadTest reviews, discussions, comments, etc. There will be changes to how it's laid out, but everything should still be in the same category of groups as it was originally. Also the points you have earned in gamification, and the badges/achievements.

 

We are taking this opportunity to also clean up a lot of content from the element14 Community. For example there have been a lot of changes to the identification of spam content, so that needs to go. There were also a lot of groups and spaces relating to very old campaigns, marketing and internal teams which also need to be cleaned up and removed.

 

There are also a number of groups that are more public and member facing which we will be removing. Some of that content has already been made private or removed from the site. I've heard your concerns as some of you want to back up your content (Community Site Clean-Up - Read if you're a long time member with old content on the site ) and you've asked for a list of the groups/spaces that're being removed or have been. I'll update this thread with more information on that.

 

Because of this clean up, it should make finding content/navigating on the new site easier. There'll be a change to the navigation menu at the top, which will be categorised, and when you visit those categories, there will be sub categories, forums, blogs for those groups and areas. There will also be a very good 'search' function that can browse and search categories and all content across the site when you're on the homepage, and when you're in a group it becomes contextual for that group (but can be expanded).

 

To confirm, if you have an active account on the element14 Community, all of your content will be copied over.

 

What're the benefits of upgrading?

From both our internal testing teams and the closed beta testing we performed with a mixture of our element14 presents crew and top members, we have some stand-out benefits of the new site:

  • A new, cleaner look and layout
  • Faster load times, served by new servers
  • Greater control over how points and achievements are earned in gamification
  • A different search engine, allowing you to find and filter content searches
  • New features and functionality, if not for members then for staff to serve up content
  • The same awesome content - we're bringing over practically everything!
  • Groups are better categories of content - you can find multiple forums of conversation within a group
  • Less confusing navigation - we've cleaned up a lot of the 'spaces' and 'groups' and now you navigate based on topic or technology
  • URLs have changed - we've put in a lot of forwarding, but we're moving away from www.element14.com/community to community.element14.com !

 

 

What does this mean for you and what you'll need to do now we're live!

All active user accounts will be migrated to the new website platform. Your password cannot be migrated.

 

image

 

To use the new website platform, you have to reset your password using your e-mail address.

 

image

Be sure to check your 'junk mail' or 'spam' folders for the password reset e-mail. Because the address we're sending out from is new you may experience the e-mail going to your junk mail folder. Please ensure that you permit any e-mails from the address 'communitymessages.element14.com' and add them to any exception filters you may have.

 

If you didn't make sure you had a valid, accessible e-mail address on your user account you will need to get in touch via Feedback and Support now that the new website is live and I'll help you to sort out your account. Else you'll have to register for a new account.

 

Known Issues

The Feedback and Support area of the new site will be your go-to for your answers, Site FAQ and where to post your questions about the new site and for you to see any known issues that we've identified.

 

We are also tracking known issues in the known issues announcement.

Welcome to the new Verint element14 Community platform!

Thank you for staying with us throughout this journey.

If you have any queries or concerns please share them by adding a comment, reaching out to cstanton or posting in Feedback and Support

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Top Comments

  • cstanton
    cstanton over 1 year ago in reply to Gough Lui +8
    Life is a perpetual test
  • Fred27
    Fred27 over 1 year ago +6
    I think the hamster's little legs gave out. By the way, I was impressed that the hamster was done using just CSS. https://codepen.io/jkantner/pen/wvqeXrQ
  • cstanton
    cstanton over 1 year ago in reply to rsjawale24 +5
    Updates are at the bottom of the doc
  • dougw
    dougw over 1 year ago in reply to cstanton

    When creating a blog you used to be able to select an image and associate a URL with it, so when the image was clicked on it would go to the associated URL. Those links on imported content have been deleted or replaced.

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  • ntewinkel
    ntewinkel over 1 year ago in reply to jacksdad3

    I’ve been using a Wemos D1 mini to do that. It’s programmed with Arduino, and has Wi-Fi built in, at a very affordable price. Recently I updated the setup to send mqtt msgs to my Raspberry Pi, using NodeRed and influxDB to make the ui easier and better.

    it’s unusually cold here…

    image

    Ps, you might want to start a new post, instead of a comment on this huge thread 

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  • jacksdad3
    jacksdad3 over 1 year ago

    I just completed a hoop house in our garden and want to build a temperature/humidity sensor package to wirelessly monitor the inside of that house, our duck coop, my shop and garage, and other locations.  I am thinking of using Arduino with WIFI as the basis building block.  Any suggestions?  Thanks!

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  • cstanton
    cstanton over 1 year ago in reply to rbj

    > That option is only available *after* logging in,

    It's available when you're not logged in:

    image

    > Which is not all that easy to find.

    It's linked here:
    image

    And before the migration it was linked on social media, the front page of the site in announcements and in the e-mail newsletter.

    > I remain unimpressed with the way this change was communicated

    Thanks for being understanding, while I cannot manage your e-mail provider or why you missed the e-mail, and you choose not to follow the other communication methods that a lot of sites typically use these days, you're still here and the site migration has happened. There's no going back.

    Take care and enjoy the Community, thanks for being here.

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  • rbj
    rbj over 1 year ago in reply to cstanton

    In response to my complaint about the initial log in problem: "Please log problems in Feedback and Support"

    That option is only available *after* logging in, and now that I've been migrated, there's no way to reproduce the issue. Seems almost pointless now. (Especially since you seem to think that everyone else will have known before their first attempt on the new site. Speaking of which... )
     
    "There was this blog post.. "
    Which is not all that easy to find. If I click on "Members" -> "What's new on Element14", there's nothing I can see there about it. For some reason, I have to choose "Members" -> "Documents" -> "More" -> "Documents", and then it finally shows up as the second in the list of All Pages.  Of course I have no idea where it was posted on the Jive site, but unless I was subscribed to your content, how would I have found it on the old site?

    and
     "... which was posted a couple of weeks before the change happened"

    So two whole weeks notice of a complete rebuild that must have been in planning for months?

    "It was in an announcement on the home page..."
    And luckily there still is an Announcement on the home page or I'd never have found this post or had any idea what was going on. But I'd only have seen that announcement if I just  happened to log in during that two week window and went to the home page instead of going directly to my area(s) of interest. Up until now, my only interaction on the Element14 community has been as a result of following links from YouTube videos posted to the Element14 Presents channel.  I only do that rarely, and those links are never to the home page.

    "... and that announcement was sent out via e-mail to all members with a valid e-mail address on their profile"
    and
    "You may want to check with your e-mail provider as to why you didn't receive the e-mails"

    I'm glad to hear that an attempt was made to let me know. However, as I said in my original note my profile did have my valid email address. There's been no problem receiving other updates, including (after turning on Page and Comment notifications) notice of your reply, so it seems unlikely to be a technical problem at my end. I did check my spam folder after getting logged in, but there was nothing there. Of course spam is automatically deleted after 30 days. What date was this email sent out?
     
    I suppose my provider might have a filter that silently drops mail that's addressed to hundreds of people, but my "e-mail provider" is Google's Gmail, so I don't see how checking with them will help... they're not going to change things for me. Also, if it was Gmail that dropped my notice, than I think there's likely hundreds of other members that would've also had their notice silently deleted. I'll bet a lot of them still don't know about the changes.

    "Also try following our Twitter account and Facebook pages where we also announce changes..."

    So I should to sign up for two new services so that I can see updates about this one?  Nope. Just ... nope! Not only is that unreasonable, but I don't want to waste time or the space on my phone for Twitter, and I don't trust Facebook's privacy protections.

    I remain unimpressed with the way this change was communicated.

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  • cstanton
    cstanton over 1 year ago in reply to 14rhb

    I'm sure there's a calculationf for that...

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  • cstanton
    cstanton over 1 year ago in reply to rbj

    "After much (much much) stumbling around, I finally noticed the small "we've migrated and your ID isn't valid any more" notice on the login page."

    Please log problems in Feedback and Support

    "It seems I now have to JOIN individual"

    Groups.
    /members-area/support/w/site-faq/27370/why-can-t-i-create-content-or-comment 

    "Why was no general notice sent to members that this was coming?"

    There was this blog post which was posted a couple of weeks before the change happened, and we also sent out e-mail notifications from the Jive site.

    " I don't know how the people who commented a month ago found your post"

    It was in an announcement on the home page, and that announcement was sent out via e-mail to all members with a valid e-mail address on their profile.

    "
    Colour me unimpressed."

    You may want to check with your e-mail provider as to why you didn't receive the e-mails, and also look out for the announcements on the homepage from now on so you don't miss out on any future details.

    Also try following our Twitter account and Facebook pages where we also announce changes, and make sure that our e-mail newsletter isn't being blocked by your e-mail provider.

    I can understand frustration of coming into this kind of scenario cold, however it sounds like there was a technical fault at some point with your e-mail provider and your ability to see announcements on the site.

    Thank you for understanding and being a part of the element14 Community.

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  • rbj
    rbj over 1 year ago

    Yesterday - Dec 2 - I followed a link from David's "The Electronics Inside" YoutTube video, and couldn't get logged in.  After much (much much) stumbling around, I finally noticed the small "we've migrated and your ID isn't valid any more" notice on the login page.

    I've spent a day trying to find out what's changed and how to do anything useful, but so far am pretty much lost when trying to find anything.  It seems I now have to JOIN individual <somethings> - not sure if they're groups, or blogs, or areas, or what - to comment?  (I had to join "The Electronics Inside" to be able to post, but I didn't notice that text bar at the bottom of the page for a while either).

    All very annoying, but most annoying of all - Why was no general notice sent to members that this was coming? I don't know how the people who commented a month ago found your post, but I was - and am - a member of the Element 14 community, and didn't receive any advanced notice at all. You certainly had my email, because that's how I got my password reset.

    Such a major rework - and the disabling of everyone's ID - is the kind of thing that a properly run organization would have notified the users about before implementing the change, not just done it and left the change to be discovered the next time you happen to try and log in. 

    After I did finally get logged in with my reset password, I checked my notifications, and there's nothing there about it either. (The only notice there is from "migration-admin" two months ago, but all it says is that I should visit my home page to customize it to include the information that's most important to me.  Ironically, the message closes with the salutation "Happy Connecting!").  So, there's an ID named "migration-admin", but that admin didn't even bother to notify anyone that a migration was happening?

    I can understand the need to upgrade.  And I supposed I'll eventually figure out how the new system works.  But I'll never understand how anyone could think this was an acceptable way of implementing the change.

    Colour me unimpressed.

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  • 14rhb
    14rhb over 1 year ago

    Congratulations E14 team - all up and running :-)

    I must confess I enjoyed the guinea pig running along in its wheel - maybe I watched it a bit too long. Actually staring a it intently it appeared to be slowed down. I wonder how far it ran in total?

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  • DAB
    DAB over 1 year ago

    You all did an amazing job getting everything transferred over.

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