Indonesia’s biggest online forum Kaskus has officially launched its new look yesterday after three months of beta testing. The new blue-ish design is welcomed by many users, but they are also lamenting the bugs and problems that are arising with the migration to the new site.
Kaskus seems to be aiming for an overall cleaner and simpler look. This is mainly highlighted with the new site’s homepage, which has removed the numerous columns, features, and banner ads previously plastered all over it. The homepage now shows only two big sections – the general forum section and the online marketplace. The homepage also shows the current hot threads (trending topics) and newly showcased product reviews.
The site’s C2C marketplace forum particularly has improved too as it now provides more search criteria, including a price range option when searching for new or used items. Kaskus is also showing a banner that teases users that the “Kaskus Marketplace is Coming Soon.” My guess is that the marketplace feature will provide better product showcase compared to the previous thread format.
The Bugs
Kaskus, however, is notorious for having routine user-overload problems that often make it impossible to access the site for periods of time. It seems that this migration hasn’t helped much. The first biggest problem facing users right now is a reported bad gateway issue which makes it harder to open some redirected pages on the site. I encountered this myself when browsing the site this afternoon.
Other reported problems with the new look are:
- Overall ‘lagginess’
- Some records such as threads, customer testimonies, avatars, and achievements did not get transferred and seem to have been lost.
- The threads are still unstable as some users cannot post and edit their new threads even after saving them.
- This is rather minor, but some users also commented on the ugly redirected URLs the new Kaskus has, which have a lot of zero numbers in them, such as the very awkward kaskus.co.id/thread/000000000000000016527164.
The team has a lot of work to do with the bugs, but the latest refresh by Kaskus is definitely a good one overall. I’m particularly intrigued by what other plans Kaskus might have in store for its huge C2C marketplace. We’ll pay attention to how Kaskus progresses and improves in the future.
[Via Kompas]
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