Too hard to find the forums
Wed, 2006-11-08 17:42 — timk519
I've come here a couple of times, and finding my way to the forums is too hard.
Shouldn't the discussion area at least rate a tab with home, projects, etc.?
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re: too hard to find the forums
By design, forums are not a stand-alone feature but are part of Groups, so I agree they are hard to find especially when you are not subscribed to any/many groups.
We could add a link to http://oehive.org/forum which shows an overview of all forums.
However, every forum post should be assigned to at least one group audience. For example: a post about Prolint should be assigned to the Prolint audience, so it shows up in the Prolint summary page, the Prolint RSS feed, and e-mail notifications to all Prolint group members.
My concern is that people are likely to forget to assign the appropriate group audience, when they navigate the forums via the /forum link. But apart from that I think it's a very nice overview of all the forums and an improvement in navigation.
Re: too hard to find the forums
ok, done, there is now a "forums" tab.
Re: too hard to find the forums
Hi Jurjen,
> We could add a link to http://oehive.org/forum which shows an
> overview of all forums.
This has been mentioned by site visitors at least two or three times. I think we'd better add a forums tab in the header (linked to /forum, as you suggested).
Sure, why not?
Where? An additional tab along the top?
Re: Too hard to find the forums
I think it can't hurt to add a link to http://oehive.org/forum
somewhere.
Projects
You did notice that there was a Project Tab?
And Recent works well for now for anything new.
Re: Too hard to find the forums
At 09:46 11/8/2006, timk519 wrote:
>I've come here a couple of times, and finding my way to the forums
>is too hard.
>
>Shouldn't the discussion area at least rate a tab with home, projects, etc.?
We haven't conceived the Hive as competing with PSDN or PEG in the
sense of having a page where one goes to look over a list of forums,
but rather that forums were something attached to a project and one
would only be interested in the forum of a project if one was
interested in the project, i.e., the approach is project-centric
rather than forum-centric. However, really the best way to make sure
that one is in touch with what is going on is to make sure that one
is subscribed to the right groups and to make sure that all content
is associated with an appropriate group. Then, whenever there is new
content for that group, you will get notified, whether that content
is a forum post, a new page, new code, or whatever. For example, I
just created a new group for Development Support Tools to welcome the
addition of PCT. I'd like to see any tool that relates to
development include this group, even if it also belongs to another
more closely focused group like code parsing.
=======================================================================
Thomas Mercer-Hursh, Ph.D. email: thomas@cintegrity.com
Computing Integrity, Inc. voice: 510-233-5400
60 Belvedere Avenue fax: 510-233-5446
Point Richmond, CA 94801-4023 url: http://www.cintegrity.com
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Consulting in Architecture-Driven Modernization and Transformation
I don't think the question's
I don't think the question's about "competing" with the PEG or PSDN, but providing a reasonable way for people to communicate about projects, etc. or monitor activity on this site. Making forums project-centric sounds good from a conceptual standpoint, but it's problematic in practice. I've done UIs that were designed that way, and having to drill down then up to get things done was a real pain.
What there needs to be is a central way to check all the forums one's interested in and then be able to navigate to the related project for a forum. Conversely, one should be able to check the forums for a single project and then be able to navigate to all the forums one is interested in.
Forum is just one form of content
The problem with focusing on checking up on forums is that it is only one form of content. Someone may have added a bug to the issue tracker, requested a new feature, added a comment to a page, created a new blog entry, edited or added a new bookpage to some documentation, created a new project, created a userlink, defined a poll, etc. ... all changes in content, but none of them will show in the forums. This is the purpose for subscribing to a group and adding all content related to one or more appropriate groups because then you get e-mail notification of the change and can go check it out.