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Community/Discussion/General/Forum software/List of Posts
Forum Topic - Forum software: (5 Items)
   
Update
Rick Duff(deleted)
09/14/2007 11:35 AM
post1212
Forum software   
I don't know how much control you have over the software which is used to provide the forum functionaility, but there 
are some areas of improvement which I think would make it much easier to use.

1.  How can I tell which posts are new and which I have read before?  By default they appear to be in some weird sort 
order (yes I know I can click the column sort buttons).  Regardless, I would like to be able to filter or at least tell 
at a glance whether there is new posts in the forum, and/or new posts in a thread in the forum.

2. When reading a longer thread (I know there aren't many yet), I would like to be able to return back to the listing 
without having to scroll to the return button at the bottom.  Imagine you are scrolling through the list of threads in a
 particular forum and see one that looks interesting.  You click on it and realise you have already read it (see point 
1) or you aren't interested and want to go back to the listing.  Again I know I can use the back button the browser, but
 it would be easier to click the return button if it wasn't 10 long posts down the screen.

3. Can we get an option that is more subtle with respect to indenting when reading in threaded mode?  I would prefer to 
read in threaded mode (if we can solve point 1) but a large post late in a thread tends to only use 1/2 the width 
available because of the indenting.

4. I know I asked this already, but I think it would be nice if we have some way of telling whether the poster is a QNX 
employee or not.  Right now you have to hover over thier name and look at the link to see if they have a QNX email 
address.

5.  I am not sure we all necessarily want our email addresses exposed that way either.  It would be easy enough to write
 a program which grabs all the web pages here on the forum and data mines the email addresses.  I personally have 
learned to live with the fact my email gets out into the wild and I get lotsa spam (that's what email spam filters are 
for) but not everyone may be aware that their email address is exposed.

6. A preview button before I post would be nice as well - especially if I can embedd links into the post.

I am sure there is more, but I wanted to get my first experience down in writing before I automatically started to work 
around the "features" and forgot to report them.  Overall guys (and gals), great job.  It is nice to see QSS moving back
 this direction again.

Rick..
Frederic Plante(deleted)
09/14/2007 4:07 PM
post1234
RE: Forum software   
Hi Rick,

Thanks for the feedback, that's exactly the kind of feedback we are
expecting in this forum.

1. Although I agree it would be nice to offer a list of new articles, I
think most of the pain you are going through vanishes when leveraging the
monitoring capability of the portal; details are available from the Portal
Usage Guide - see "Subscribing to a forum" (
http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.community/wiki/PortalU
sageGuide#section-PortalUsageGuide-SubscribingToAForum ).

2. The back button works for me; but I agree it would be better to have the
return button. I don't really suffer from this since I use my e-mail client
thanks to the monitoring feature. :-)

3. Would effectively be nice.

4. I must admit that I disagree here. At the community level, QNX employees
are normal community members. In the context of a given project, some people
may have certain privileges; e.g. committer, but that's about it.

5. We will see what we can do here.

6. The preview wouldn't give much since the forum editor does not support
any kind of smart tag handling to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks again for the great comment. As you alluded to, in many cases these
are enhancements to the SourceForge Enterprise Edition backend we are using.
I'll see what we can do to get some of the proposed enhancements
implemented.

  - Fred
Rick Duff(deleted)
09/14/2007 4:18 PM
post1237
Re: RE: Forum software   
> 
> 1. Although I agree it would be nice to offer a list of new articles, I
> think most of the pain you are going through vanishes when leveraging the
> monitoring capability of the portal; details are available from the Portal
> Usage Guide - see "Subscribing to a forum" (
> http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.community/wiki/PortalU
> sageGuide#section-PortalUsageGuide-SubscribingToAForum ).

One slightly long URL which didn't wrap nicely. ;-)  Of course I don't want to follow the whole forum through email - I 
get enough email without adding to that pile.  I want to chose to visit this site at my conveinience and see what is new
.  Also this is not a new concept - just about all the forum software (except apparently this one) have some sort of 
support for it.
> 
> 2. The back button works for me; but I agree it would be better to have the
> return button. I don't really suffer from this since I use my e-mail client
> thanks to the monitoring feature. :-)

See my answer above.

> 4. I must admit that I disagree here. At the community level, QNX employees
> are normal community members. In the context of a given project, some people
> may have certain privileges; e.g. committer, but that's about it.

Ok, I can live with that choice - an easy way to recognise the contributors and such.  Most forum software (again except
 apparently this one) provides a way to tag the poster with a title as well as their "handle".  You also often see the 
number of posts listed somewhere - although that just some people didn't have anything better to do but write posts to 
the forums. ;-)

> 6. The preview wouldn't give much since the forum editor does not support
> any kind of smart tag handling to the best of my knowledge.

Even just a view to see what it is going to look like helps with formatting and structure.

> 
> Thanks again for the great comment. As you alluded to, in many cases these
> are enhancements to the SourceForge Enterprise Edition backend we are using.
> I'll see what we can do to get some of the proposed enhancements
> implemented.

I know - but it is important that we give the feedback if we want any chance of it changing (improving?) at all.  Plus I
 wanted a chance to try out the forum software and see if it worked better in practice than it looked.

Rick..
Xiaodan Tang(deleted)
09/15/2007 12:41 PM
post1256
Re: RE: Forum software   
I kind of agree with Rick. This "forum" right now, is more like a web version of "news group". 

I also want the capibility to be able to modify/delete my own post, after I posted it. This is also common in a "forum",
 but I see it somehow confilict with the "monitor" idea.
Pavol Kycina
09/28/2007 7:24 AM
post1669
Re: Forum software   
[snip]

> 
> 5.  I am not sure we all necessarily want our email addresses exposed that way
>  either.  It would be easy enough to write a program which grabs all the web 
> pages here on the forum and data mines the email addresses.  I personally have
>  learned to live with the fact my email gets out into the wild and I get lotsa
>  spam (that's what email spam filters are for) but not everyone may be aware 
> that their email address is exposed.
> 

[snip]

I second this idea. Now everyone can read all mail addresses even without being logged in.

E.g. have a look at source of http://community.qnx.com/sf/discussion/do/listForums/projects.vmware/discussion

If this is not possible, would it be possible to enter 2 email addresses, one for official communication (license codes,
 ...) and second one for community.

Thanks, Pavel Kycina

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