Who thought getting rid of the Yahoo message board is good?

[mkreegar]

Please understand I am making the following comments with no disrespectful intention toward Ray or NinjaTrader.

I can't imagine why anyone thinks this format is more convenient than the Yahoo board. I can understand making it an addition, but not a replacement.

The Yahoo board was really convenient, at least, for me. You could easily scan the message page to see: What you've already read, what you haven't read, what topics you want to read, and the spam was very obvious and easy to skip.

With the new NinjaTrader Support Forum I really dislike having the subjects separated by topic; It's just a lot more effort for the same benefit. If you are going to stay with this concept I would suggest you add the same features that NeoTicker has on their board, to ease the incovenience, such as:

1. A button called "view all new posts", that gives you a list of threads for each post since the last visit.

2. A button that called " view first unread message" that is available when you click on a thread.

3. A button called "mark all forums read" to make it obvious we have read all messages we are interested in and to get rid of the ones we are not interested in.

Also, just as an FYI; NeoTicker supports an internal message forum, like this one, and an external Yahoo forum. They still get many more posts on Yahoo than they get on their internal forum.

Sorry if I've missed some fundamental benefit to this new internal forum, but as I say I have fairly extensive experience with both and IMHO Yahoo should not be eliminated.

One more thing: Did anybody actually poll NinjaTrader customers to really assess whether they prefer this new format? Cause sometimes the people yelling the loudest don't represent the majority.

Matt

[nkhoi]

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shut down seem like drastic measure, why not just let it be as back up resource.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

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This was a discussion quite some time ago with a lot of users as well as personal requests to me.

NinjaTrader is growing so fast right now that I really need a better way for NinjaTrader, LLC to be able to handle support. The Yahoo forum is just not set up for this and causes a lot more work for me from a support standpoint. This type of forum is much better suited for support for NinjaTrader, LLC going forward.

I like your suggestions and will wait a while for other suggestions to come in before I incorporate changes.

Thanks for undersanding.

Ray

[mkreegar]

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Ray,

I understand your issue and appreciate your sensitivity to some of these ease of use issues.

Matt

[NightRider]

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I dare believe that I like this new support forum for NT instead of Yahoo groups.

Looks a lot better and after time everyone will find it to their liking...



NightRider

[efremiv]

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I liked Yahoo because I could get the daily digest of all new posts emailed to me everyday. Can you do that with this?

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

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You can subscribe to topics and then have emails sent everytime someone posts. I don't believe there is a send all threads option.

[trymph]

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why not just pump everything in here to yahoo with general note to all that "the developer" will only respond to posts in here.......but at least those that wanna keep up can check yahoo to keep current.......IMHO yahoo gives Ninja better exposure to those that are newbies......cant hurt in terms of marketing to be in as many places to as many newbies as possible.............

[vernie]

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I couldn't stand the Yahoo group! All the ads and extra stuff drove me crazy. We have a Forum like this for Wave59 (a charting software) and it's very easy to use, and makes a nice commnity, so I'm really happy to go this way.

[mkreegar]

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OK, I have waited to see how this new message board would actually work before making further comments.

Again, these comments are not meant to reflect any disrespect for Ray and I understand and accept his reasons for going with this internal message board.

However, there are, in my opinion, a number of problems with this new format - from the user perspective.

First let me say that I agree with the comment made by trymph that the Yahoo message board gave NinjaTrader (NT) better exposure and might hurt marketing.

When I was evaluating NinjaTrader one of the most important things I did was look at the Yahoo message board to see what kind of problems current users were having and the quality and speed of the responses. Without the ability to do this it is far less likely I would have given serious consideration to NT.

My next issue is that it is FAR less convenient to access new posts. For example if I select the "recent" tab there are already 25 topics listed. If I want to read the posts I have to tunnel down into each topic, scroll down and read the new posts, then use the back button, on my browser mutiple times, to get back to the list. Same procedure for each topic. This is a real pain. Also, since we users get to name the topics, a number of them are worthless in terms of being descriptive.

With Yahoo I could get thru 25 new posts, efficiently within say 5 minutes or so. If NT is going to stick with this new format then I think these issue need to be addressed soon.

Let me reiterate/expand on my suggestions from 11/29/04.

1. We need to have the ability to mark individual topics as "read".

2. We need to have the ability to globally mark all topics and messages as "read",

3. We need to have an additional tab named something like "new posts". In this tab all new posts are listed. It would also be nice if there were a "next" button, imbedded in each message, so we could sequentially read all messages in the list without having to use the browser back button over and over again.

With these new features we can go directly to the "new posts" tab and if there is nothing in the list then we know we have already read everything that is currently of interest.

I believe these steps would go a long way toward getting this new forum much more efficient and accessable from a user perspective without compromising Ray's needs and concerns.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

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1. Done. Each time you have visited a thread, the thread subject line color will change indicating that you have visitied it.

2. Done, you can mark a complete forum as read

3. I believe forum icons now change color to indicat when new posts are there. I don't think there is a tab for new posts.



Ray

[trymph]

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I cant seem to get the recent tab to sort by latest post(reply) on top .....is it me or not functionable this way????

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

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That's how it shows up for me as well as global default. Not sure how or if you can even change it.

[rossitercapital]

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i like this better too - although i agree that navigating could be a bit better.

[Travis]

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Hi Verdana,

Do you think Ninja Trader is compatible with Wave59 for Automated trading? That means id DLL available?

Travis