Hi folks -
We have some more updates coming over the next couple of days to the interface of the forum. These will be minor compared to the update from a couple of months ago, but will hopefully improve your experience and provide a more consistent look-and-feel.
I’ll have a longer explanation once the changes go live, but don’t be surprised when you hit refresh tomorrow and things look a little bit different. 
@ScottF the changes I think look good. What I miss is the “latest” category in the menu since this is the one I use most often. Since I read a lot of threads and replies I like to get back to the (well) latest issues regardless if they are unread or new. Is there a chance to bring that back?
So now that the update is live, let me point out a few of the features:
We’ve moved some elements of the user interface around to (hopefully) make things a little more clean. The search bar is in the top header on each page, along with the yellow new topic button.
We also moved the hamburger menu over to the left side, to correspond to where the sidebar appears. The menu is now open by default so you can get familiar with the navigation options it offers, but if you find it too noisy you can close it. And when it is open, there’s no more awkward “scrunching up” of text in the topic list.
Breadcrumbs in the title bar should make it a bit easier to navigate between categories, while allowing you to filter using tags.
Much of what we did here is based on community feedback, so thanks to everyone who voiced their opinion. The goal here is to make the forum as useful and friendly for you as possible, so please continue to let us know what you think, so we can improve the experience for everyone.
We’ll have a few more changes coming in a couple of weeks, and I’ll have another explainer post for you then.
Hi @mlauber71 -
I know you can navigate to “Latest” via the “See All” link on the welcome page, but let me check to see if we can make it accessible from the sidebar as well.
EDIT: It was pointed out to me that “All topics” at the top of the sidebar actually takes you to the latest topics. Maybe we should rename it to be a bit more intuitive, yes?
@ScottF thank you for the consideration. I was not really aware of the additional menu and it would be one mor click.
My idea would something like this:
Something new: we’re making some changes to how the different [XYZ] Extensions categories are organized, particularly their subcategories, which will no longer have their own dedicated pages. Things will look a bit different once we’ve finished updating, which will happen over the course of a few days.
Another thing to note is that posting in the [XYZ] Extension categories will now require you to choose an appropriate tag when creating a new topic, for example “rdkit”, when posting about that extension.
The goal here is to reduce clutter on the main categories page, and improve the effectiveness of searches going forward. I’ll have more to say when these updates are complete.
Hi @ScottF, on a similar note to @mlauber71 , when I am accessing the KNIME forum from my mobile, I must say I find the new format much less friendly. For mobile access, I don’t want to scroll through the news every time and am only interested in the Latest topics. I may read some of the news once, but after that it is kind of “in the way”
When I saved the forum to my home screen on Android, unfortunately for some reason I could never get it to save a direct link to the “latest” page, and it always plonked me at the top level. Not quite sure why that was, but it was a little frustrating.
However I installed an app which is a dedicated android homescreen shortcut creator (previously I had been just taking the “save to homescreen” option in my mobile’s browser) and gave it the address https://forum.knime.com/latest and now I have a mobile phone shortcut that works well again and I’m back to not having to scroll down to see updates! 
Hi @takbb -
Glad you’ve found a solution, but it is strange to me that the latest page wouldn’t “stick” in your mobile browser. I just tried it on my iPhone and it works OK. Let me ask and see if this is a known issue with Android OS. Sorry for the trouble!
Thanks @ScottF , What I’m finding on Android (Samsung Galaxy S10) is that if I open forum.knime.com/latest in Chrome, I don’t get an option to save to homescreen from the menu at all, which is odd because I get the option on other sites, so I’m guessing there is something special on the site that Chrome is picking up on.
So I have tried it in the Samsung Internet browser on the phone, and manually navigate to forum.knime.com/latest, then Add to homescreen. But on using the created shortcut it opens back at the “Welcome to the KNIME Community Forum” page. I don’t know a way of seeing what address has been stored in the shortcut. Hence I headed for a third party short cut creator which as I say did the job.
Hello all - I made a few more updates to the forum today. There is now a Discourse group for COTMs. This allows COTMs to have a special flair and title on each post if they choose. They also have the ability to post to their own private category now.
I also updated the Discourse group for KNIMErs so that we have our own custom flair as well - it makes it easier to see when a KNIMErs has responded in a topic.
In addition, I added a group for JKI participants, so that they get custom flair and title too. You can check out Aline’s most recent JKI thread for an example of how all three groups look in action: Solutions to "Just KNIME It!" Challenge 05 - Season 2
You can only have one bit of flair active at a time, unfortunately - that’s just how Discourse works. If you want to change your current flair and title, just go to your preferences:
I hope these cosmetic changes will help spur more participation and interest in both the JKI and COTM programs, and bring clarity to who the experts are here on the forum.
As always, let me know your thoughts, or if you have any questions!
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