Forum organisation

[thomaskilian]

And one very simple request: can you choose another color for new posts in boards? This light and dark blue is not very good to distinguish  :-/

Thomas

[thomaskilian]

One more thing - it would be really cool to have some kind of voting mechanism for enhancements. The current way of sendind posts is a good start, but you loose overview which features are really needed. Probably the ability to sort for # of readings would be better. However - I'd prefer some kind of voting mechanism.

Cheers,

Thomas

[CJ]

G'day g'day,

I'm with Thomas on the voting mechanism thing.

Maybe something like:

• Is urgent
  
• Would be nice to have
  
• Would not be useful
  

[thomaskilian]

Just to keep this topic somewhere on the first page  

[benc]

Hi All,

Thanks for your comments and suggestions- as always they are much appreciated.

Jason's idea of marking posts with categories is a good one, but will require a certain amount work to implement.

Our short term solution will be to introduce additional boards to gain some structure and assist searching. Then, if we do move toward the category approach later on, existing posts could be readily assigned a primary category- by virtue of the board they were posted in.

Regarding the 7-day default on searching: this doesn't appear to be necessary. We may just make "Max Age" a required field to be entered manually prior to searching.

We'll keep you posted with updates.

Regards,
Ben

[thomaskilian]

Hi Ben,
very much appreciated   Is there already some kind of deadline when this first step will be taken?

[MichaelHanson]

Don't mean to throw a spanner in the works, but what about switching to News Groups, then we can all use our preferred News Reader which provides all of the filtering and sorting people are looking for, also means we can download stuff for offline reading.

Once a root news group has been established there would be no limit to the number of sub groups Sparxs could host

[benc]

Hi All,

Sorry for the delay in updating here.

For the moment, the forum will remain "as is". Rather than patching the existing structure, we will be looking into a longer term solution to correct the issues raised in this thread.

Minor note: you may have noticed, the "Max Age" field in the search page was made mandatory, rather than using a 7 day default. This default did catch a few people out, myself included.

Regards,
Ben

[thomaskilian]

Hi Ben,
could you please check whether there would be a simple way of sorting the posts according to number of reads/replies. Many boards have this option (sort according to one of the title columns) and probably YABB isn't different here. Having that it would bring the most interesting topics right to the beginning of the search list.

One step further: adding a filter directly in the title column could ease search a lot.  (E.g. show only posts with no reply; started by someone; in a date range.)

[mikewhit]

Came to this via ThomasK's recent post.

'Losing' valuable knowledge inside forum postings is something that has exercised me in the past - so often after a longish period, the same subjects and questions recur, as the previous answers and threads vanish from visibility inside the forum.

Another thing is unanswered questions - you wonder if the questioner ever found out a solution, and if so, why couldn't he have let us all know !!

Keyword searching of old posts can help, but what is missing is semantic filtering - the person making the post is in a good position to categorise the information in  the post, but doing this every time might become tedious.

Perhaps the "subject areas" is a good idea, but rather than forcing a post to go into one particular 'box', hereby presupposing the post is only applicable to one area, if the posting form had all the possible subjects as checkboxes at the bottom, the poster could tick all the categories felt to be appropriate.

Therefore if a post showed how to use EA to link requirements to a use case, the ticks might go into 'EA HowTo', 'Requirements', 'Use Case' ...

Then you could search / read by selecting one or more of these categories, in one browsing mode.

This might be adequate to improve things sufficiently, while not requiring undue effort from the poster. Of course, posters could just ignore it, but then they would be denying us the fruits of their labours !!

I suppose in a true collaborative spirit, we would be able to vote posts into additional categories ...