This weekend we are transitioning to the new website at www.sidefx.com - the old site will be known as archive.sidefx.com and still be available during the transition. There may be shutdowns on the site this weekend and the forum will be locked when the posts have been moved to the new forum.

Please note that we are still working on the site and look forward to getting your feedback. Please post any issues to this thread.

Robert

FYI: there are public links to the Houdini 15.5 docs, although you still need an account with valid access permissions to reach it, it seems.

Hey guys! great to see this come online!! congrats!!

one thing I cannot seem to find is the old daily build download page (which shows multiple versions/builds of Houdini available to download). Is there a way to reach that page or is it still under construction?

thank you!

Trying to login from my iPhone only moves the top banner to the middle of the screen, but doesnt reveal the inputboxes.

-b

Downloads don't seem to work on the new site. Logged in I just tried to download Daily Build for Windows via menu “Get->Download”, selected the version I wanted to download and clicked “download”, then for a fraction of a second some text and and image were shown but no download was being initiated. Tried that twice. No luck.

Marco

I am seeing emoticons inside of code.

I also just noticed that previous image attachments did not migrate to the new forum. Is this a still a WIP or are we cleaning the slate and starting over?

grayOlorin
Hey guys! great to see this come online!! congrats!!

one thing I cannot seem to find is the old daily build download page (which shows multiple versions/builds of Houdini available to download). Is there a way to reach that page or is it still under construction?

thank you!

That is in the works - we hit a small glitch in transferring it over and we are working on it today. It should be back soon.

jparker
FYI: there are public links to the Houdini 15.5 docs, although you still need an account with valid access permissions to reach it, it seems.

Oops - I have turned those off for now (although they may be back up really really soon…..)

• On my phone (Galaxy S4), there is no post reply button. Had to use Desktop to post this entry.
  
• Love the new responsive design, it's scaling pretty well.
  

• The emoticons are hard to read; maybe the mouth/eyes need to be black?
  
• The orange on white is hard to read if the text isn't bold (i.e. the forum titles)
  
• I keep searching the ‘site’ search in the black header bar, rather than the floaty-icon for the forum; can we just fold them together, so that when on a forum page, search in the header searches the forum, and when elsewhere on the site, it searches the whole site?
  
• Results from google search are still broken (I assume it'll be fixed when the new pages are indexed)
  
• Love the new tutorial system; but I agree, no way to delete the test one we've all made!
  

grayOlorin
Hey guys! great to see this come online!! congrats!!

one thing I cannot seem to find is the old daily build download page (which shows multiple versions/builds of Houdini available to download). Is there a way to reach that page or is it still under construction?

The download page can now be accessed from GET > DOWNLOAD.

Please note that the downloads, daily builds and store are all being “borrowed” from the old site. That is why they are a bit slow at the moment. our goal is to eventually replace these elements with “native” elements on the new site.

New site looks great!! Really dig the layout and access points.

cheers

Minor issue: on a phone ‘Show recent posts’ could be at the top of the page, instead of having to scroll down to the end.

I can't download Houdini (Production or Daily) using the new website. All I get is a blank page. archive.sidefx.com still works though.

Edit: Downloads works now.

Greetings, prepare yourself for brain dump on the new site and forum things! I’m sure plenty of what I’ve got here have been said by others, is personal preference and can be disagreed with and some of my bugs are known and will be fixed eventually, but here’s what I’ve got for now..


General Website Thoughts -

Front page:

To me (and others I’ve talked to) the SideFX site now looks like all the other technical product websites and that’s not necessarily a good thing to me. Heavy on images and wasted space, low on relevant information. The previous main page provided a lot of more direct information with regards to customer stories and company news as well as upcoming training (when it existed) or other events. Now you’re presented with scrolling series of massive and scrolling images that are short on useful information. There is a single item visible for customer stories, news and tutorials whereas previously you were presented with a lot more. There’s no clear idea where to go to get more customer stories or news (I eventually found them under Community). I at least would have expected the hard to read titles above the tiles as being clickable to take me there. I also find the single, large tutorial tile there redundant since if you immediately scroll down you’re presented with the same one plus additional ones. I’m much less interested in user generated content on the front page and more interested in customer stores and company news. I’d almost prefer an actual Community landing page that could have gallery images and tutorials features more prominently there, as well as a feed widget from the forum to indicate that there is one for those who aren’t’ necessarily aware and to just see all the user things that were recent


Top horizontal bar:

I feel that the black main title bar at the top of the screen is way too tall and space wasting. According to my element inspector it is 74 pixels tall however all the elements contained in it are 24 pixels tall, resulting in a large amount of empty space for little gain. I do appreciate that the search field and profile icon/menu were floated over to the right edge from their previous addition.


Generic Page Styles:

Pages such as the main Documentation page, System Requirements or say Learning Paths all have the same basic template that on my screen wastes over half the originally displayed page with a giant image with tiny text: 57px Documentation text over 420px header bg images. Throw in 45px for that bar with social media sharing buttons, 89px for the Home > Support > Documentation nav bar that’s a huge amount of irrelevant space that occurs before another Houdini Documentation title. It just seems so wasteful and visually ads nothing other than bloated tech company feel. Sorry.


General Content Presentation:
It might just be me but I find a lof ot the pages that are using ul and ol elements to have just a tiny bit too little vertical space between them, making it a bit harder to follow and separate points as I scan through them. Like they are too crammed together vertically or something. I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly what it is that’s causing me issue. Kerning maybe?


Social media “Share” buttons everywhere: These seem cheesy and are annoying and not useful in a lot of instances on pages that aren’t basically news or customer stories, things worth sharing. Not sure why anyone would share things like the docs landing page or system requirements.


Specific Page Issues: A few comments on some random specific pages I observed

System Requirements -

I find this page really hard to read with all the weird layout spacing and such. It feels like it could be less wasteful by perhaps arranging the OS information into three columns to save space but also group them together more.

I feel like the Graphics Card section is an affront to my eyes (partly due to previously mentioned issues with item based spacing) but also the bold text in the middle.

Perhaps join the GPU Acceleration in with Graphics Cards

While I understand the link to the VFX Reference Platform is applicable to the OS information it also feels more appropriate down near the 3rd party dependencies field.

Documentation -

I find the main Documentation page a bit strange. I think I’d find it better if the icons weren’t as large and organized a bit differently. Since each row contains various docs for a certain build it would seem to be a bit less redundant to have a title like “Houdini X.Y” and then have links that didn’t also contain the version number. Maybe rename “Developer’s Kit” to HDK? I’d also prefer the HDK docs before the Hqueue ones since I feel those are more relevant to most people (not that either are probably interesting to 99% of the people who come to that page).


User Profiles:

Avatar images - It would seem that the new system does not support alphas in avatar images? My Python logo avatar image (.png taken from Houdini) that carried over from the last one (and my subsequent attempt to upload it again) has seen its fairly standard alpha nuked and replaced with a black background.

Optional/empty profile fields - It would seem best if optional fields (Expertise, Location, Website, etc) could just not be displayed if they aren’t set. Right now you just see a bunch of “Not Specified” entries that don’t really add anything. Same goes for if someone doesn’t have any recent forum posts, tutorials or gallery uploads.

Industry of Interest & Expertise - Do we really need these, or can they just accept raw text? The choices for both are fairly limiting and missing plenty of valid options. Also, is Industry of Experience even viewable anywhere?

First + Last names - According to the editing UI these fields are NOT required but when you try and submit changes to your profile if you don’t have anything in them it will tell you they are in fact required. Can the page be made to either reflect their mandatory status or have them not be mandatory?

Contact options - There doesn’t seem to be any way to contact a person from their profile. Maybe this has to do with messages being “Coming Soon” but the old forum at least had an option to email people.

Hide Online status - We used to be able to set this, is that still possible?


Forum -

“Bugs”:

User names are capitalized all over the place

Timestamps are all different in various places
main page: April 28, 2016 8:53 A.M.
forum page: April 28, 2016 08:53:53
forum thread: April 28, 2016 08:53:53

Could we remove seconds and use 12 hour time, not caps and period separated A.M./P.M.

I feel like the “Board footer” title is a leftover, unchanged template name and could be something different?


Key features the new forum is missing:

No link to click on that takes you to first unread message

When searching the results display doesn’t show which forum found posts exist in, just the title. This is really useful for filtering out results.

Easier access to showing new posts since your last visit. It’s really frustrating having to scroll to the bottom of the page when this was at the top of the previous forum. Could this be put back near the top?

Other issues:

RSS links on the main page are the same color and directly beside forum titles/links, making them EASILY accidentally clickable. Could these be removed from the main pages and moved to top of individual forum pages?

Online user list expands vertically, wasting space as more users are online. Important since there are necessary links below them that increases scrolling, particularly on mobile platforms

Board information - Can this be collapsible or hideable? I literally care nothing about it and if I have to scroll past it to access other important features then I’d rather it not be there, personally.


Forum Posts:

Preview Posts is not apparent - I was going to write about how it wasn’t possible to preview things but I eventually found that tiny button that lets you do this. Is there any way to make this button/feature more apparent?

Too much “user” information - When viewing actual posts, the left column containing the user information seems crowded. Could we maybe remove some of the information from there? Particularly the colored online status? I’m not sure how that’s really relevant. Some people also don’t seem to have a Joined date. That info seems more useful on a person’s profile as well. Everyone also seems to be a Member. I’m okay with the post count but not sure what exactly the progress bar offers over that.

Posted links look weird where it takes your link and then also seems to attempt to add an additional link to the main domain your link points to




I've also been having issues where the mobile site doesn't seem to be able to remember me and I have to log in every time I visit on my phone. It remembers my details but I've still got to always go through the motions. Anyone else seen this?

Oh, and is there any way to curb the excessive notification things? Attached is a screenshot after I hit the mark all posts as read button. It proceeded to give me 3 different notifications about it. The same behavior happens if you search, giving you 3 notifications about how many posts it found. Of the notification choices, I'm partial to the blue bar one.

Graham's post reminded me: the email notifications including the new message are AWESOME! However, they have no formatting, so it's just a block of text. Could the email's include the formatting of the text? i.e. bold, paragraphs, etc…

Don't know if this is temporary but when searching out a question using google or bing you'll get promising results from the old forum, but when I click on the search result it only takes you to the new forum page (http://www.sidefx.com/forum/) [sidefx.com] not the actual post

edit: figured out google at least stores a cached version of posts so I could view it there in case anyone else had trouble,
e2: seems some search results bring you to the new forum posts, other just to the forum hierarchy, example

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=python%20export%20object%20site%3Asidefx.com [google.com]

first result when I clicked goes to forum hierarchy,

but this search's first result brought me to the new forum post as expected

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=camera%20target%20location%20site%3Asidefx.com [google.com]

graham
I feel like the Graphics Card section is an affront to my eyes (partly due to previously mentioned issues with item based spacing) but also the bold text in the middle.

I've talked with Chris about making this section much more concise. It's currently the content the old site had, but it should go down to around 5 points when those changes are made. There's a lot of somewhat redundant information there right now.