The AOL Community Info Blog

Yesterday I blogged about how your feedback on Message Board features is gathered by AOL. Today, I have a response to some great questions asked by a member about the status of several features.

Our Message Board product manager Karen, aka BoardGrrl, took the time to prepare the following response:

I've been working with our development team and project manager to put together a new schedule of upcoming features.  We've also been taking a hard look at your comments on boards, message boards in general, including some other message board systems out there to determine the direction of AOL message boards in the future.  More to come on these plans as they develop.

Yes, spell check is very much on the current plan.  In fact, it’s one of our top priorities.  We have a couple of features in testing right now including a new RTE (feature which will give you more control over the appearance of your posts and let you save your font preferences AND should fix the hyperlink bug). Spell Check will be coming on the heels of that.  The new RTE should be out in November, and if everything goes according to plan, spell check and a few other features should be available in January.

2.  “Is the ability to edit or delete your own posts something that is going to occur?  If so, when?”

Again, yes, editable posts are on the horizon.  I’m taking a stab in the dark on the schedule here, but I’ll go out on a limb and guestimate February.

3.  “When can we expect to have our filter limits increased?”

Working on that right now…stay tuned for updates from the CoMET team.

4.  “When can we expect to have a Mark Board Read feature in the folder level that works with My Boards?”

To be honest, this is not currently on the board schedule.  But I will talk to the team to see if we can squeeze it in with the other features we plan to start rolling out soon. 

5.  “Is anything being done to reduce the load time for the boards?  Even with a T1 connection, the boards are very slow loading…”

We have requested a full performance analysis to determine ways we can speed up our load time for boards.  Part of the issue is the need to improve the performance of the publishing system we’re using for all our AOL pages. Another part of the issue is the need to improve the performance of how boards’ content is pulled.

6.  “Has the issue of being able to read boards off line been addressed?  If so, what is being done?”

I’ll have to take this request into account in our future development efforts for boards. 

7.  “Is the issue of “Product not available” when changing signatures or settings in setup being addressed?”
Tracking down the root cause has been challenging because this error happensintermittently and cannot be reproduced with great accuracy.  The next time any of you see this error while you’re in boards, please shoot me an email with the time that the error occurred, the screen name you were using at the time, and the board/page you were on when this happened.  This type of detailed information will help us isolate the problem so that we can get it fixed.

8.  “Have the navigation issues been addressed?  Having to click “back” twice, etc.  If so, what is the resolution?”

Yes, I find this particular bug to be particularly annoying as well.  We’ll be fixing this soon.

9.  “Are we going to have a way to tell easily if there are unread messages on a board without having to actually click on a board and open it?  If so, when?  (Having all of your boards listed on the right side instead of just three, might be a solution)

I assume you mean from your list of all My Boards as well as from the mini MyBoards view to the right of board and thread lists?  This is a great suggestion.  We do have space restrictions on the right side, but I’ll add this to the future improvements list.

There are more questions and responses on Karen's AIM Page. Check it out to get the full picture.

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