It’s clear that many of us aren’t thrilled with the new FIRST website, but I’m sure in time it will grow on us. I wanted to start a thread not to point out our own opinions on the design or style of the site, but but rather to bring attention issues of functionality and usability such as broken links, content that is missing, etc. I’m hoping by listing our issues with the new www.firstinspires.org in this thread, we can help FIRST improve the site for everyone. Things that were on the old site that are no longer on the new site should be included on this list.
Working links to all the old game stuff are not working. Sometimes I go look at old KOP information to try and find instructions for some of the old boards we have, or just to know what came in an old KOP. First took them off the website, however you used to be able to google for the old links. However now those old links don’t work, and you can’t find the old KOP information at all.
On the team-event search, switching between Team and Event resets to selecting all programs. It would be nice if it didn’t unset my filter (to just FRC for example). Also, I can no longer type in a state code like I used to, and now have to scroll down the page to “MI”. It might also be nice if some distinction was shown between inactive and current teams.
I’m not sure if this is broken or intentional, but when I first go to the page it’s sorted for events within a 100mi radius of my zipcode, yet when I reset fields it goes to all events between the current date and a year from that date
The “state” field for international teams often lists numbers–not sure if this what they filled in or if it’s being randomly added
Archived Game Documentation:
The “Game Summaries” link is broken
Match/awards footage aren’t linked to
Regional/champs results aren’t linked to
Footer:
This might be something to do with facebook and not the website, but the links in the recent tweets are hyperlinks, while the one under facebook is just text (the facebook post does have a hyperlink)
I try to use the archived site exclusively. Way more intuitive and easy to navigate than the new site, not just because I’m used to it. It’s just laid out in a more efficient manner (IMO).
Do we really need a “Drive in” movie (for you older folks like me) playing in the background?
Better download and personally archive as much as possible now before it disappears or is ridiculously difficult to find. I tried to do that last year with all of the documentation for the previous control system. Looks like it paid off.
Another thing that is making me nuts about the new website is it is spatially sparse, it too visually open, takes too much scrolling. You have to zoom out to about 75% to make it comfortable. The fonts are too big, kinda of like this annoying post.
After re-sizing the screen, it made a giant ton of difference in my ability to surf the website and grasp everything.
I like the Dashboard, I can see that working out very nicely. The resource library looks like it can fall into place. But this team/event lookup ?? arrrgh.
A few days ago, I was looking at some of the FIRST scholarships the other day, and it looks like they removed the checkbox filters that used to be off to the side when searching for a specific type of scholarship. That meant I would have had to scroll through many pages of scholarships to find one that would be “usable for all schools.”
The resource library seems like a great idea, but the way some of the items show up is just screwy. For example, the Standard Alignment Map shows up as a image. When I click the usually useful download or preview buttons it shows just picture of the spreadsheet. To actually download the file, you have to click the link at the top of the page that you can only get to by clicking on something that doesn’t look like a hyperlink. And then that text doesn’t say download or any other easy way to tell that it’s how you download it. I think this might just be an isolated example though…
I don’t think the person that created the article loaded it or understood it correctly.
If you click “FIRST Robotics Competition Standard Alignment Map” - the blue text you will get the spreadsheet, which is what should have happened if you click the download or view links under the ‘image icon’. The items you get by clicking the links right now is some JPG of something that seems useless.
How do you get to the curator so they can fix this ??