NI Community News

With the move to responsive design and larger avatars now visible on the site, we have updated the default avatar collection to a higher resolution set. The legacy collection will no longer be available, but your avatar will not be changed if you already selected from the legacy collection.

Over the summer, we announced that our ongoing community renovations would be approached in stages. We rolled out a new site design in July and have been working on processing and addressing the user feedback that we received. Now, we're ready to announce the new timeline for the next phase -- the migration of the NI User Group Community onto the platform that currently hosts the NI Discussion Forums!

We had previously announced that the community would be unavailable due to maintenance this weekend in order to complete the upcoming renovations. However, the timeline has now changed, and we will be approaching the renovations in stages.

• On Monday, July 25th, our new design will be unveiled on the NI Discussion Forums! There will be some intermittent outages over the weekend of July 22nd through July 24th due to the design updates and due to maintenance being done on ni.com.

• Starting on Friday, August 5th, user groups, blogs, and documents will be migrated from the NI User Group Community to the platform that currently hosts the NI Discussion Forums.
  The NI User Group Community will go offline and be unavailable starting on that Friday, August 5th.
  • Update: The migration of content from the NI User Group Community has been postponed to a date that is still to be determined.

• We had previously announced that inactive user groups and blogs would be archived. However, we've had an overwhelming amount of feedback regarding our plan to archive user groups. At this time, we have decided to migrate all user groups over accordingly and will perform a thorough audit at a later date. No further action is needed at this time.

• On Monday, August 8th, the NI Discussion Forums will be temporarily unavailable at some points throughout the day. At the end of that Monday, August 8th, the platform hosting the NI Discussion Forums will additionally host the user groups, blogs and documents previously held on the NI User Group Community, and the unified NI Community experience we have been striving for will be complete!
  • Update: This stage will not be completed until the migration begins.
    

Edited: August 1, 2016 - We have delayed the migration until a later date. We want the best experience possible for our users, and will use this time to work through any outstanding issues. Updates will be made to this post when more information becomes available.

When all of these stages are complete, we will have a single, unified NI Community!

Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.

As a part of the upcoming renovations in the community, the NI Community will experience intermittent outages on July 25. This maintenance window is necessary to complete the unveiling the updated community with its new look! More information on these efforts can be found in the announcement here. Please also be aware there will be be maintenance being done on ni.com during this same timeframe.

UPDATE: We've had overwhelming amount of feedback regarding our plan to archive user groups. At this time, we have decided to migrate all user groups over accordingly and will perform a thorough audit at a later date. No further action is needed at this time.

As you may know, the NI Community is currently undergoing some major renovations. We're creating a single, unified NI Community, as well as updating the look. During these renovations, we will be migrating the content and experiences -- documents, user groups, and blogs -- from the NI User Group Community onto the platform currently used to host the NI Discussion Forums.

As a part of this effort, we have performed an audit on the 1,600 user groups and 200 blogs found in the NI User Group Community. We reviewed all user groups and blogs that had no activity for more than 6 months, only had 1 or 2 members, or had no content at all. We then verified which of these groups and blogs are now inactive. We want our renovated community to provide the best experience to our users and therefore, archiving inactive groups and blogs is necessary to ensure our freshest and most used content is easily found.

One of our goals with the upcoming renovations to the community is to provide a consistent experience for our users across all of ni.com. As such, we have been working on overhauling the design of the NI Community. The targeted date for these changes is Monday, July 25th.

The new design is uniform with the changes that came to the rest of ni.com earlier this year. The community pages are easier to scan, read, and navigate, and information is easier to find with the new community navigation available on the page. We've also ensured the community is optimized to work much better across screens of all sizes. This is known as "responsive design" and allows for a single version of the community to be available for browsing via desktop, tablets, or mobile phones.

Last week, we learned that DennisKnutson passed away on February 21, 2016.

Dennis was the first NI Community member to reach 10K posts and to be knighted by Jeff K. He was one of the original LabVIEW Champions. And he shared his knowledge, expertise, and humor with the community in nearly 39,000 posts over the past 15 years.

Join us in remembering Dennis here: The start of a new era dawns with The passing of the first Knight.

This week marks a significant milestone for National Instruments – our 40th anniversary!

For four decades, NI has been a catalyst in driving significant shifts in engineering innovation. As we step into the next decade, we’ll continue to push the boundaries to empower our customers.

We are very excited to announce upcoming renovations to the NI Community! This project represents a major improvement that will greatly benefit all of the NI Community members!

What is happening?
We are working to create a single, unified NI Community experience that is easier for our members to understand, use, and gain value from. To do so, we will be migrating the content and experiences (documents, user groups, and blogs) from the NI User Group Community onto the platform currently used to host the NI Discussion Forums.

Why are we making this change?
We have consistently heard from our members that hosting the NI Community experience through two systems has made the experience confusing and difficult to use. We can improve every facet of our members’ experience of the NI Community by setting up a more unified, usable system. You will no longer have to go between two sites to interact with your peers, and this will enable the NI Community Team to be more responsive in building out more improvements to the experience.

Are you new to the NI Discussion Forums and hesitant to make your first post because you don't know how to explain your problem?

Are you a long time user of the forums and hate coming across posts that simply say, "it doesn't work..."?

If so, we've created some new documents for you to refer to (or to refer others to)!

• Help Us Help You When Posting New Topics
• Tips for Posting Code