[Just giving this its own thread so we can keep the ‘Work in Progress’ as an announcement and as a place for anyone who wants to join me in thanking Ifan for his work.]
I am quickly getting used to it, and I have a couple of questions.
(1) I find that when browsing through the forums, I’m clicking the link to view all the messages. Is there a way of setting it (per user?) to do that all the time?
I’m not sure I get what you’re saying here - sorry!
(2) Could there be a way to subscribe to new messages, as there was on the old forum? (Aran, you’ve just answered that this is a possibility, but hinted that it’s not that likely, that’s fine).
I’m currently thinking we might be able to do something here that limits how many emails per day per user - looking nervously in the direction of larger language communities and multiple subscriptions - so it could still happen…
(3) Will old messages be ported over? There’s loads of amazing things there, about bootcamps, tattoos, S4C, Radio Cymru… etc etc!
Was chatting about this with Louis today - several different ways we could do it, but probably not until we’ve implemented several of the ideas we’ve got to make finding things massively easier and better here than it was there…
Right, gotcha! Yup, we could easily have all messages displayed by default - as long as you’re willing to help counsel the new users who stumble across an old thread that opens up several hundred messages…
What might be a better conversation would be the current (fairly arbitrary) number of 8 messages that open - would you like to up that a certain amount, maybe?
Will the threads with questions and answers related to each lesson be moved onto this site? I have found them immensely useful when struggling with the odd difficult lesson or feeling that I’m just not ‘getting’ something. Of course, they may be here somewhere. I’m absolutely not a ‘techie’ - my IT skills are strictly ‘need to know’ only and I’m finding this new set up a bit tricky to get to grips with.
That’s a great question, kime - they’re not here yet, so it’s not because of you that you can’t see them! We’ve got a few different options - maybe pull the best of them into a FAQ per lesson - or have discussion running actually on the lesson pages - but whatever we do, we certainly won’t just throw them away…
And in the meantime, of course, you can still search for them on the old forum, and we’ll be keeping that functionality open indefinitely (if possible in read-only).
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… message at the top of a thread:
It’s not clear which of the three options is selected by default, in fact - that is, when I open a thread, I can’t tell by looking at that list (or in any other way) whether I am already looking at one of those three things; or something else entirely.
Would it be possible for the presently active option to be a title. but not a link (for example, to be bolded, but not formatted like a link, to distinguish it from the two not currently active options)?
What we’ve actually got happening here, Mark, is a communication hiccup - haven’t found a definitely clear way of phrasing it yet! - but none of those options is the ‘default’, because they’re about opening more posts, in addition to the (currently) 8 posts that open by default…
We’ll try a different wording at some point and see if we can get it to be more intuitive…
Search within a thread would be tricky but potentially interesting - in what sort of situations do you imagine yourself using it?
But the current default is that the most recent 8 posts show, isn’t it? So that would be that the default is “Show last 8 replies.” I try to keep up with the forum (and now will do the same with this, since I have discovered it is open) but e-mails that someone has replied to something I’ve posted in are VERY useful to me, as well as being able to go to the first post that I haven’t seen - neither of which works here (at least not yet). Will anything like that be available. The e-mail notifications have always been optional, but they are very useful for me.
Gary: search-within-a-thread is easy: just make sure all the messages are displayed (using the paging buttons), then you can use your browser’s built-in search function
Sionned: yes, both those things will be available. At the moment, the ‘first post I haven’t seen’ feature is top of the list and absolutely indispensable to me. I never really used email notifications on the other forum - speaking as someone who did, how essential would you rate it as?
I have found that I get very behind on reading the forum if I’m not reminded that people are posting there all the time. So when I stopped getting e-mails from the forum, I found I’d forget to check in and see what was happening. That’s why I didn’t realize until today that this one was even open to everyone! As long as I have those e-mails, I check the forum every day, and the e-mails make it easy for me to see the things that I’ve posted in first. The first post I haven’t seen is much more important, but the e-mails are a big help to me.
And one more suggestion… When I add a reply, and click post (or whatever it says) it jumps up to the TOP of the thread so that I have to scroll back down to the bottom to see my post. I know a lot of people (apparently) never actually read their posts after they post them, but I want to make sure I haven’t forgotten something … Would it be hard to have it stay at the bottom with the new post visible?
Sionned: I have found that I get very behind on reading the forum if I’m not reminded that people are posting there all the time. So when I stopped getting e-mails from the forum, I found I’d forget to check in and see what was happening.
Yes I have the same problem too. I know Aran mentioned on a different thread that large numbers of emails create a traffic problem for the server, but having the email reminders was very useful.
I’m thinking that we can probably do something along the lines of a daily digest, so if someone is subscribed to multiple threads, they’ll get one email per day (when there are new posts) telling them which ones have got new posts…
Gary Stokes: Once you log in though, it’ll be obvious there’s new answers because your screen will be green. The message could be simplified I feel…
But it’s the nudge to log in and see who has answered what that I need. And (so far, anyway) I can’t tell which ones are ones I posted in that someone else has answered, as opposed to other threads that I haven’t read. I really prefer to read the former first.
I tried something this morning and it did not work, but I suspect it’s because it isn’t (yet?) designed to do so.
If I click on a user’s photo, I see their profile, but then I had half-hoped that either (a) the little photo might appear larger, or (b) that I can then click on the little photo to make it appear larger.
I never really used email notifications on the other forum - speaking as someone who did, how essential would you rate it as?
Really vital - I’m only subscribed to a couple of threads, but knowing as soon as someone has posted to them is important. A digest wouldn’t help here, it’d come too late.
(mail notifications on the old forum seem to be somewhat hit and miss, and it’s infuriating)
(mail notifications on the old forum seem to be somewhat hit and miss, and it’s infuriating)
Usually because we were getting throttled. This is one of the big issues for large forums, and we need to be very careful about getting it right at this point, while we can still cope with a bit of variation - because if we grow good forums for other languages, the model will need to be able to cope with numbers.
I think the key here is that we’re not trying to provide a messaging application (although maybe we can do some integrations with third party stuff later on) - so a daily digest would actually fit the patterns of the majority of our users, as well as being less vulnerable to growth.
@David - yup, expect prettification of various kinds in due course! But functionality is much higher up the list…
