Joanne, you have to click on the arm to like a post. if you press on the word "like" it shows you who liked the comment.

As being added goes, since they changed everything it stopped showing up right away... after you refresh the page your like will appear.

They totally messed this up.

Good grief! Now when I open a post it shows that "Oldest" is selected, but the comments show up as "Newest". I then have to click on "Newest" and then on "Oldest" for it to actually show properly.

Thanks, you just added one more unnecessary useless step to all the other ones.

@Emily Hurley Newest to oldest, best answers, and commenting from the top works for certain subjects that attract discrete, random contributions like news, celebrity gossip, or true crime. In the Houzz forums, thoughtful researchers are gathering and sharing information based on a linear sequence. Just because you can add features available by code doesn't mean they are appropriate for this forum. Look at Woodweb, the John Bridge Tile Forum, the Terry Love plumbing forum, and other technical forums like StackExchange. You will see comments sorted sequentially from the beginning to add coherence to the discussion, allowing contributors to follow the line of reasoning as they work to the conclusion. An exception to this would be if hundreds or thousands of replies were regularly generated per topic, then the sort features would be helpful. This is not the case with the vast majority of Houzz posts that are solved within a dozen replies most often, several dozen for popular topics, and only into the hundreds on rare occasions.

An editable FAQ list in a prominent location might be one of the most helpful additions to keep contributors from having to repeat the same information over and over for newcomers regarding topics like vent hood efficiency, countertops, lighting, and other basic remodeling concerns.

I share the sentiments of others in this thread that "Best Answer" devolves into some sort of popularity contest and confuses those whose answer was chosen above more qualified responses. An editable FAQ list as mentioned above would be one way to help highlight the best of Houzz rather than trying to achieve an organic best answer ranking. You can see examples of this type of collaboration in some of the open-source software communities that facilitate living resource pages to help people to find important information by topic rather than requiring them to research many threads to find what they need. Everyone can contribute to keep the content fresh, and spam is flagged quickly. Changes can be reverted according to a Change Log. This type of format is commonly supported by most content management systems.

The like button works but doesn't show the correct number of likes.

I agree with everyone. Why fix something that wasn't broken? Keep it simple. Get rid of Best Answer, and show comments oldest to newest. Get rid of the "read more" option.

The thread was started on Friday ( today is Tuesday) and Emily did comment then. Hopefully they are working to get this resolved and we will see the improvements shortly.

No doubt.

?

Who was the idiot that came up with this idea?! They should be fired! Sorry if that's harsh.....but it doesn't make sense at all! If Houzz wants to have a cutesy place where you can click to see the MOST LIKED RESPONSE (aka Best Answer) , I would be OK with that. That'd be fun. But don't make it HARDER for me to read thru all the replies. I'm too busy for this nonsense. SMH

I'm just going to repeat what dowagercountess said:

I agree with everyone. Why fix something that wasn't broken? Keep it simple. Get rid of Best Answer, and show comments oldest to newest. Get rid of the "read more" option.

I also am unable to like posts anymore....

@acm, to get your "Like" to show, try refreshing the page. Problem is that if you want to continue reading the thread, then you'll also need to click on "Oldest" again and then click on any "Read More" along the way.

It is still a problem. We are spending way too much time on these discussions and Houzz IT has worked out a way to get us (ticked) off.

Hi everyone, we did hear your voice here. Thanks for Emily to pass feedback to the team. With the newest update, users who see the sorting options could keep their preference on sort option (Won't be gone after refreshing).

For the "Best Answer" part, it does hurt the regular viewing comment experience (especially, after having the sorting option). We are figuring out a way to improve it, but this might require some extra effort, really appreciate your patience. Right now, the best answer could either algorithm-selected (based on thank/like), or selected by the original poster. The initial goal is to help users quickly find the highlighted comment instead of browsing the whole list of comments. I agree there are lots of details we could do better here. Again, really grateful for all the feedback. Thanks a lot!

BTW, @acm the like should be back now.

@ Haoyu Chen We don't get what you trying to do better when everything was fine as it was. Just restore the previous configuration and move on.

That "best" thing is a misleading feature like someone mentioned before it might not be the best solution but if someone gets to that point might not continue looking at the rest (just a sample)

Like Amazon, they have Best Seller for a certain item, so many times I sent it back because it wasn't best it was garbage. This is misleading markings.

That said you wanna make it good, do what users ask you, please go back from "oldest to newest" and get rid of the Best Answer thing...people will figure out on their own what advice to follow, and as we all know the more we read the more educated we become because people should learn not only how to do it they should also read what they shouldn't do :-).

Thanks!

Forget the " best answer." No one cares.

Forget "newest to oldest." Everyone hates it.

These columns are discussions, and should be considered as such. Anything that disrupts or detracts from the flow is a failure on your part to understand your market.

Clean it up, keep it simple, and stop trying to add features that techies may want but clients do not. You guys are really, really bad at assessing what your customers want and it's more than time you actually started to listen to the feedback, instead of trying to justify why you're ignoring it.

Thank you for the explanation.

Once again- why does it switch back and forth between gardenweb and houzz and have different functionalities? If it is intentional and even for a purpose, maybe if it could be explained and imagine this- have it in a guide or FAQ - maybe we could see the benefits.

Why when I select notifications does it revert to houzz??

For now it's confusion.

I forgot to add, please get rid of that Read More/Read Less just another useless feature and extra click, bad enough you have to click for pictures to show up, Newest/Oldest, etc with all this clicking what you trying to accomplish give users "hand arthritis" :-)

Also the View setting, please reverse that so you see posts that include pictures, but if a user wants them off they can turn them off instead of having the other way around...

And I think the message you OUGHT to be getting here isn't, "please improve these things," it's "quit messing around with stuff that isn't broken, you clueless clots."

Go hire a UX designer. And make all your current tech staff read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321965515?tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1

If you insist on having the comment box at the top, which only makes sense for those that don't want to read any other replies, then place a second comment box at the end of the thread. This way you please both types of users.

I think that having Newest at the top and the comment box at the top is going to increase the number of Zombie Posts ... very old posts that are brought back from years ago with an irrelevant comment ... usually a "me too" comment or spam.

In preferences, they added a setting how you want them to display Oldest or Newest not sure if this is only for Pro accounts.

Since most like the Oldest to be displayed at the top, the comment box should be moved to the bottom to eliminate scroll down and then up again to make a comment or add another one at the bottom.

Thanks!

This site gets weirder and weirder all the time. For a while I couldn't comment or like if I used Firefox, so I switched to Edge. Now I can't comment, sign out, or do anything in Edge, but I can in Firefox. WTF????

So now the comments are back to oldest to newest, with possibility to change to newest to oldest, which is fine, but if you click on the notifications it brings you to the top of the thread and not on the answer notified,, which is a PITA, and the field to enter a comment is at the beginning of the thread, which means that you have to scroll back to the beginning after having read the thread. Why is it that Houzz does not seem to be able to implement the most basic functions of a discussion board correctly.

If you want to bring modifications, do nested answers, this would make the thread a lot more readable and useful.

I don't know why for Houzz this is so difficult. It seems to be a continuing saga.

Delphi Forums, on which I frequent some design and construction forums, one can customize their view to linear or threaded (nested). Everyone is happy and this technology has been around for 25 years. And for each, the first half dozen words or so of the response are in the threaded view, expanded upon clicking. Here's what the threaded view looks like:

Hey all, We appreciate the feedback tremendously and are working on adjustments! I know change is tough and we may not be hitting a hitting a home run every time in terms of what you need to make your experience better, but I hope that we can keep an open and respectful dialog here to work together to make something great. More updates coming!

Since it seems like you choose to test out features on some people's accounts, but not others (for instance, I saw the "Best Answer" feature a long time ago before any one else started mentioning it and I don't see this newest-oldest 'feature' now), it would be nice if you allowed people to opt out of being in the test group once a feature is deemed to be annoying.

Hi, Emily,

adjustments! I know change is tough and we may not be hitting a hitting a home run every time in terms of what you need to make your experience better, but I hope that we can keep an open and respectful dialog here to work together to make something great. More updates coming!

How about less "rah rah" and more explanation of what your techies are doing, what they PLAN to do, and why there is never any announcement than shenanigans are about to ensue?

The only thing worse than your IT dept. is your communication.

The question to Houzz admin remains "why do you feel the need to change what is working just fine?"

Have you received complaints about the old way of displaying comments? Everyone here seems to think it worked fine, and all your "improvements" only serve to annoy everyone.

Again, "read more" "best answer" and "newest to oldest" are unnecessary at best and incredibly irritating at worst.

The problems of the site not working on various browsers, the "Like" button not working right, and the "submit" link not working are issues that should be addressed.

As Holly stated, the IT issues are a BIG problem, but the communication also leaves a lot to be desired. If you want to test out a new feature, why not do a poll on whether users think it would be a good idea? You poll users on a variety of meaningless questions, why not use the site to get a better feel for your customers?

Per Emily - More updates coming!

🙄 Oh, boy. Can't wait. And that's not meant to be disrespectful, that's my open dialog that the way 'updates' happen here is not generally an improvement. Rather they become things we have to adjust to or find work-arounds for among the users because once the updates are a fait accompli we seem to have no luck getting tech help.

I am giving up. You keep changing things without notice and without testing. This makes the product unusable.

I am not even sure how this particular version is supposed to work. Very frustating.

So now it seems to be back to newest to oldest, with only the beginning of the thread shown and then the possibility of showing more ( a little bit by a little bit). I was on a thread that has more than 50 000 more and that I follow. Impossible to see the latest posts except by clicking 50 times on " more". Even with this shorter thread, I had to click once to see the latest post, which makes notifications useless. Thanks so much. At least, I have my android version that seems to be still working.

OMG!!!! Now I'm not seeing ANY oldest/newest as an option!!! It's just defaulting to Newest/Oldest. And the Comments box is at the bottom, so you have to scroll all the way down to make a comment.

Geez, this gets worse by the day, Houzz!

The GW side of this is functioning as usual. Why not bring it back for Houzz users? Insanity!

The "Best Answer" feature is asinine, especially since it allows the OP to supercede Houzz's choice of Best Answer and they can even choose one of their own comments as "Best Answer." At that point, it becomes more of a "pinned post" at the top of the thread.

I think the browser that you use is also a factor. For Chrome (my main browser) and Firefox, the site looks and behaves normally to me. It has the "Best Answer" feature but that's just annoying, it doesn't make the site unusable.

Then I tried it in Microsoft Edge and it had newest to oldest with the comment box at the top. And for me, the switch for the newest-oldest vs oldest-newest didn't work as well as the "See more comments" link for when the thread gets too long. I think Edge is horrible anyways, so I never use it.

I didn't try Safari or any other browsers.

If you are seeing the f*@#ed up version, try a different browser.

I am on Chrome and have plenty of problems. It seems totally random.

If I could make any request for a feature it would be to lock old threads like most other forums do. It drives me crazy when people comment on posts that are ten years old without recognizing how old the post is.

Be careful what you ask for. If the Houzz programmers attempt to do that, they'll probably end up locking all of the recent threads instead and then it'll take months before they are able to undo it and all the while they'll be telling us to just be patient while they explore new ideas and features. And we won't be able to complain because all of the threads are locked. :)

Now some of the discussions are oldest to newest and some are newest to oldest! They just can't make up their minds!

I find it extremely annoying. I can switch from Newest to Oldest, but only manually for one dilemma. Then the next dilemma goes back to Newest again. Also, the "Best Answer" isn't usually the best and is just in the way.

I haven't been able to register a "Like" or a comment when I open the site in my preferred browser (Microsoft Edge, where I have Houzz bookmarked), nor have I been able to enlarge a posted photo by clicking on it. Today I opened in Firefox, and was able to do all three. I don't understand enough about how the technology to know why that is now the case - I just know that I'm only occasionally interested enough to switch browsers, etc. to do so. It does seem - and I'm trying to be helpful - that many of the changes and decisions made by Houzz about the site have made it less and less user friendly, indicative of what seems a common belief among website operators that users' interest in their site, and the amount of time they wish to spend there, is so significant, that the users will spend time and effort to make it work for them. I for one have just spent more time typing this comment than I am willing to spend figuring out how to participate in the site each time that changes!

I've been using internet forums for A LOT of years. This forum has a great following DESPITE the non-intuitive features and frustrations.

Things that are sorely missing, and not exactly new / hard / novel

• remembering where you were in a thread and taking you to see new posts when you come back
• keeping things in order so you can scroll DOWN to see a conversation
• Hitting "reply" to any comment and being able to quote the comment
• Not having to open more and more comments (many forums simply autoload as you get to the bottom
• Not having to scroll ALL THE WAY to the end in order to comment and then - pulling you up to the top. Again - make it easy to comment.
• Being able to DM someone right from the conversation screen - maybe even show their stats instead of just the tiny profile pic.

I think these have been asked for for years. And instead of these things arriving that make these forums easier to navigate - we get "best answer" and get forced to click to see more. :-(

Hopefully some things can be made better.

Did they get rid of the EDIT post/reply feature? Or do you only have a specified time to edit?

This user unfriendliness is just forcing more people to go to FB Groups. The asininity of the Pin-lemmings there are the only reason they aren’t more popular. “So, Im doing marble contact paper countertops, and black chalk painted cabinets, but it’s just coming out sooo dark and cheap looking?” Ya think?

I can still edit my post below. (or delete)

Well as of a few days ago I have lost the ability to pick oldest first vs newest first. The option just disappeared. It displays responses newest first, which is the most annoying way. It's like reading a book starting on the last page.

Check out this posting order. :)

Hi @rsc2a, could you please send me the discussion URL that has the ordering issue? Thanks a lot!

Haoyu Chen

It's this thread

https://www.houzz.com/discussions/5934738/wrong-plumbing-location-in-post-tension-slab#n=9

It looks fine to me, but the problems seem to affect some people but not others.

Where is the "manual" button to change from Newest to Oldest post? I can't even find that anymore!

This is still not working properly.

- Still displayed Newest to Lowest without a possibility to change, and also showing only the oldest posts, which makes it impossible to see the most recent posts of long threads without clicking many, many times on see more posts.

- Clicking on a notification does not bring you to the notified answer by to the first answer of the thread.

- See more does not seem to be showing a consistent number of lines (Here, I see See more after just 3 lines for the Best answer, but other posts that are just as long are shown entirely. Showing just a few line may be fine on a phone, but I am here on a PC with Windows 10 and Chrome. Just makes it harder to use the forum, except if it is actually the goal.

@Emily Hurley & @Haoyu Chen Thank you for giving our chronological order of comments back!

Pretty please, will you also revise the "Read More" function back to showing full comments automatically? My reason is that while this is a feature often seen on other comment systems like Facebook or news article comment sections with disjointed remarks on a common topic, so often at Houzz, the full comments are necessary to understand the progress toward a solution to a design issue. Needing to click "Read More" is usually essential and always annoying at Houzz.

Am I understanding correctly that if I want to read the comments from the earliest post to the most recent that I have to scroll and scroll and scroll till I reach the initial comment? There is no setting to order them?

@A BD This is an old thread, and the comments list is back now to being ordered sequentially by date, oldest to newest. That doesn't mean they won't change it again, but for now it is back to normal at least on my settings. Some people were experiencing different settings than others for a while. There is currently no option to order the comments any other way.