Discussion and Feedback on the March 9th 2012 Release

One more bug:

After updating an existing model file, it returns you to a 404 page.

Tried that several times.

CGD

I never liked the ratings stars, I thought they were a bit misleading and rather stupid. I see now they are disabled, but why do five stars appear on the models list page, if they are not to be used? Surely they should be erased altogether?

Edit, they don't appear on individual model pages, but do appear on the model lists. It is all rather confusing and ill thought out. Why can't these web pages be made simple, simple, simple, instead of filling every bit of space with confusing and contradictory stuff?

Yes, I see someone else reported that the "remember me" feature is not working. That's true for me, too. Also the complaint about the distortion of the photograph of the item. :cry:

What I would like to do is be able to set a default for the display of my items to always show the newest first, please.

Oh, BTW, while you're fiddling with things, is there a way to show what a ring or earrings will look like without a person having to order the item first? If it doesn't look right when it's uploaded, then a person could immediately delete it and try again, which would save a lot of time and especially money.

OR please try to find a way to show which jpg or whatever was loaded to make that ring or earrings, or let me give it a name, so I can at least tell which is which if I can't afford to order it right away!

I have accidentally ordered three or four things twice because I couldn't tell which design it was and didn't remember if I'd ordered it or not, since there's no way to tell them apart, and didn't find out will they both arrived. I don't really want to have to buy a bunch of test rings or earrings to see if my design worked. Money is not that plentiful.

I know you guys are working on all this stuff, and I appreciate that, but wow, am I frustrated at not being able to create! Please hurry, at least on the Popper feature, since that's all I can do for now.

Thanks for your time!

(That should have been "till" they arrived in my previous post.)

And the other bug I have found is there is no place to click "save" when making rings or earrings anymore.


Thanks again.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: There is still no button visible to edit rings or earrings. Mine are saying not for sale, but they are! And I can't change it.

Thanks for making us aware of your issues. If you are the last to post, please edit your previous post to add you your new findings. This makes things a little easier to go through.

Really struggling with this new release.
The biggest problem is that the "front window" of my microcubology shop (which I spent ages updating for a new 2012 look) is now showing customers a 'Default' view of some really old models that are not even for sale! I can force it to show me the latest models by changing Sort from 'Default' to 'Newest', but that only affects what I see, not what my customers see. There appears to be no way in Shop Settings to control the Default view.
Default used to mean 'the order that I define in my product inventory'. It doesn't seem to mean that any more.

The second annoyance is that I can no longer do any sort of shop management on my iPhone - I can't even log in. Viewing the shop as a 'non-logged in' customer, I can't change the Sort selector to get to my new models because that doesn't work either. Browsing on the iPhone used to be easy; now it's impossible.

Thirdly, Product Inventory Management (the old one that works) doesn't work any more. The link is there but clicking it does nothing. My latest model is at the end of the inventory (that's where they get added) - I want it right at the top, so people can find it. Using the old inventory management I would just navigate to the last page and click one button on the new model to move it to the beginning. New Product Inventory Management not only takes an age to load, but apparently I can only move an item up one row at a time, after which I have to wait while the table redraws. Can I really be expected to repeat this over 70 times to move one model to the front page?
I'm using Chrome on the PC and Safari on the iPhone. Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong? I'm curious that none of these points has been mentioned before.
Hoping for better soon.

Richard Gain
microcubology

Yes, a customer just mailed saying he got that problem. This after a rejection of a model that have been printed 10s of times, so the problematic point has been printed 100s of times; and the rejection was cryptic, because it did not explain the true reason (easy to understand why some get angry about rejections). Luckly that customer has lots of patience, but no idea how long his stock will last (items and patience).

Figuring the key for new items is also rather convoluted, it seems you only get it if enter edit mode and exit it.

Also, the recent uploads gallery is no more.

Edit: attached images in forums are "saved" instead of "viewed" now. And the popup says the file is 20 bytes. The downloaded file is full size.

Hi guys,

- Private models are working again.

- The original sorting order which has been defined by the Product Inventory has been fixed as well.
So the correct models show up again instead of the ones you want somewhere in the back of your shop

- we are working on the product inventory system.
The old version will soon be fixed so you can all easily switch position of the models again.
Until the new product inventory we have to be patience, I'm sorry.

Kind regards,
Mitchell

Hi guys,

In addition to Mitchell's update, here are a few more things which have been fixed, or are currently close to being fixed.

* No login with FB or Twitter - Temporarily disabled (we had issues with this feature and will reimplement it again soon)
* Image Ratio isn't right on the model page - Resolved
* After Posting a forum item, I get logged out - Resolved
* Order Overview spreadsheet not showing - Resolved
* Detail Pictures - Resolved
* Shop Sections Double Spaced - Our designer will take a look at this and weigh in
* Shop Sections no longer lists the # of models - This is a bug and will be resolved shortly.
* No Add to Cart button on Shop - Currently moved to my models. We're assessing the pros and cons of this one.
* Number of Rows shows number of products - Resolved
* Logout redirects to Login page - Resolved
* Comments are not working - Resolved


We devoted resources to debugging over the weekend in order to deal with some of your feedback right away. I know this release has been a painful one, and that we've got a long way to go before we're delivering the kind of releases that you want from us, and that we want from ourselves. I will just reiterate that me and my team are going after the issues relentlessly, and the problems from this release will get solved.

Thanks for your patience,
Ana

The customer says he can see private models now, but not allowed to add to the cart, so still no order.

Bugger!

As Stannum said, private link worked (take unusually long to work after setting it) but add to cart isn't.
It redirects to this:

The material problem seems NOT solved yet. I can see the "not visible to public" materials listed beside the model images. I use Chrome and logged out to check this. After a refresh, the "not visible to public" are gone. But visitors will not ever know to refresh. So please take care of this, as I logged out before checking as a visitor.

Also, if a model is not designed with certain material, the price for this material should NOT be listed. Neither publicly nor privately. As this does bring too much confusion.

On " my models " page, the "from" prices are the prices of material I did not select. These prices are useless and meaningless to me. I'm attaching a screenshot of it. The "Not For Sale" model is actually FOR sale. I wonder what happened to it. I think just marked up prices to public and not marked up prices to the shop owner are enough, any other unrelated information will cause confusion.

I like the thumbnails under model's detail image, which encourages visitors to click on. Referrals aside are also encouraging. I would give these a thumb-up !!

After changing the material in the Chopping Cart, the material selector backdrop stays on page, making further shopping cart action impossible without reloading. I'm using IE8.0 on WinXP.

Hello,

Thank you for your work. I noticed several errors with the display of images and thumbnails with all browsers (Firefox, Iexplorer, Chrome, Opera with WinXP or Vista).

The thumbail images have a wrong ratio, they look squeezed. In fact when displaying thumbnail images alone their ratio is correct but they are only deformed inside the template of the shop.



Thumbnail displayed alone (rightclick show image)



2. The new slideshow will not display the images entirely, the right side is now cut on all images.



3. The full screen slideshow button is disabled now. This function was cool.

4. I also noticed that my sessions are not recorded anymore, I need to login every time I return to my shop.

Thank you,

Alain

1) Some models on the My Models pages are shown as "Not For Sale" and should be. When I click on editing the model I see that it is shown as Public and Available for Sale. I've run into at least five of these on the first two pages of my models. Here's a LINK to just one of them.

2) Mentioned in an old thread today: Myself and another member having problems with models marked as private and customer not being able to add item to their cart. We had to mark the item as Public before the customer could do so.

Okay, I lied, third problem has been ongoing for a while now. Super slow loading pages. I frequently have to cancel the page load and click to re-start it. Frequently a few times. If I leave the page loading I often go from another tab in my browser and visit another site only to come back and see that the Shapeways page still hasn't loaded! I'm pretty sure this is a direct result of the exponential growth that Shapeways is going through - perhaps you need more server space?!

Edit: Just seconds ago had email from customer saying she could now add the previously private model but seemed to be waiting forever for the PayPal page to load. I know this by itself doesn't indicate a SW problem but it does show what I myself have noticed a lot.

Glenn

Hi,
I dont know if this is just coincidence however 2 of my new product's view count's were increasing but they have both seemed to have jammed at 100 views when clicking on the personalize button to view the number of views, this might be to do with the update.
Hope this makes sense.

Hey guys,

Thanks to those who brought up additional bugs (or re-emphasized old ones) since my last post. I'm making sure they get logged. As I mentioned yesterday, we worked through the weekend on bug fixes, and are continuing to work on getting all issues resolved.

Here's a look at our most recent bug fixes:

* Updating username & email address for my account doesn't work - This is now fixed.
* Default sort order missing from My Models - This is fixed. You can now view your models in the same order as they appear in you shop via the default option in your sort drop down. Per community request My Models page is being sorted by Newest when you first go to it. Therefore, you will see the newest models you have uploaded first until you change the sort option.
* Latest blogs & latest forum posts on homepage displayed as undefined - This is now fixed.
* Staff picks are staying static - Fixed.
* Private links not visible - This has been fixed. Customers are also now able to purchase via private links.
* Image Popper - This is now fixed.
* Country code set to unknown - This is now fixed.
* Google Analytics not added to Product Detail Pages - This issue is fixed.
* When no images are present view defaults to 3D render - Fixed. This now defaults to 3D render IMAGE.
* Caption Bar displayed when no caption is present - Fixed. This no longer happens.
* Uploading / editing a new file from product detail page causes a 404. - This is now fixed.

I will continue to keep you all updated on our progress as we go.

Thanks again,
Ana

Private items get linked as public in the cart (keyless).

Descriptions get cut at some point and just show "html>".

Weighing in...

I face many of the problems already stated above, and the ones that really bugged me are the horribly stretched thumbnails and the cropped model images. I really would like a return to the old method of retaining the aspect ratio of pictures and doing a resize to fit the frame.

Problems not mentioned so far (to my knowledge) are:

- I like to use Facebook to advertise designs, and I like the thumbnail that appears on Facebook whenever I share a link to a Shapeways model. As of this new update thumbnails don't appear on Facebook.

- I don't mind the 'from' price showing on My Models, but the price shown is not even accurate to my cheapest material. Thankfully these prices are invisible to the public, but I'd appreciate some consistency.

- Not only does the 'Remember me' checkbox doesn't work, the site logs me out after too short a period of inactivity. I had to remember to 'cmd-c' this post just in case I was logged out while typing this.

- Minor gripe, but the UI style for 'edit product' modes look different off and on.

The good:

Bugs aside, I love the new picture display UI on the model page. The 3D view especially is not flashy, but it's robust and serves its purpose.

Looking forward to having all the bugs fixed. The site will look nice when it's at its 100%.