Improving the Forum

[wadestriebel]

@anon71687268 just put together a good tutorial, conpleting both the basic onboarding and the advanced will give you those badges

Interactive Forum Tutorials

When you join here on the forums, the first message in your inbox is from “discobot”. Don’t trash it just yet! The message leads you through a series of tasks as an interactive tutorial. You’re encouraged to give it a go! You’ll learn some helpful tips for using the forum and you’ll even earn a badge or two along the way. If you already deleted that initial message, no worries – here’s how to start the tutorial. Step 1: Click your avatar at upper-right, then click the envelope icon twice to op…

[wadestriebel]

Also good points about the forum guidelines, we will include a link in the welcome message to that too

[anon71687268]

@MrLucky

So the home page could have a link to the Onboarding. But instead of calling it by an obscure name, call it “How to use the forum” So in order to find you don’t have to somehow magically know (or remember) to send a message to somebody called discobot.

There’s no need to guess what discobot is… It is explained in the welcome message that every user receives. It also put a notification on your avatar to make it more obvious that something was waiting there. You may have deleted or overlooked it.

@MrLucky

In fact there seems to be quite a bit of obscure terminology such as meta and governance. Those are categories which need to have a description to tell you what those terms mean. I would be infavour of just using straightforward plain English or it just seems like jargon.

Open source communities revolve around software and, since that isn’t your primary focus, there’s going to be terms you have to look up. It would be the same for me if I picked up a saxophone and wanted to play it and have it sound anything like music. I don’t know every term mentioned in every post here…but, if I’m interested, I look them up. Those terms you mentioned – onboarding, meta, and governance – are a prime example. You may not know what those things mean, but, looking them up will reveal that they’re actually common terms and are not specific to forums, or software, or ClassicPress.

Let me try to give this some perspective.You teach sax, right?

If you had a new student, I presume you wouldn’t refer to a saxophone as “that golden horn with all the pretty embellishments”? More likely, you’d call it an alto saxophone (or whatever) because that’s the term for it. It’s up to the student to either already know it’s a saxophone before they contact you for services, or, at the very least, to look it up (or ask) and find out what it is. It’s the same thing here…we call things what they are…and some of us have to look things up from time to time.

[MrLucky]

OK, I was just trying to be helpful and suggest how to improve the forum as requested, not have an argument.

@Interactive Forum Tutorials General Discussion

When you join here on the forums, the first message in your inbox is from “discobot”. Don’t trash it just yet! The message leads you through a series of tasks as an interactive tutorial. You’re encouraged to give it a go!

I didn’t get that

@anon71687268

There’s no need to guess what discobot is… It is explained in the welcome message that every user receives.

Nor did I see any explanation.

This is the message I got, which just tells me to learn more I should click on the ellipsis.

So I did that and all that happens is an X appears next to my name and a plus sign then shows next to Add or Remove Nothing about a series of tasks

[anon71687268]

Do the advanced tutorial.

[MrLucky]

Also it would be useful to have pages, in order to get to that very 1st message I got, I had to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…

[wadestriebel]

Yes, this is what I have referred to above. The default message isn’t clear that you are starting onboarding by bookmarking the message.

If you click the ellipse and then click the bookmark icon another step will start.

As mentioned previously, I understand that isn’t clear so I have since updated that message to provide more context.

[anon71687268]

@wadestriebel

Yes, this is what I have referred to above.

It must’ve been lost in the scroll as more sub-topics were added to the thread.

[MrLucky]

@ozfiddler

MrLucky about his opinions and I had pinged him a few times to get some feedback. He will now come back and find the thread closed and I’m pretty sure he will give up on us. I’m also giving up on this topic/conversation/subject/whatever.

Getting very close!

[wadestriebel]

@MrLucky

Getting very close!

I have to be honest, I am not really sure why… what else could we do other than apparently tear everything we have down and rebuild with a new system?

@anon71687268 and I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand and offering advice and help as required.

If you have not completed the onboarding I don’t think we can really help with anything else. Yes, as we have said all along we value the input, and we hear the feedback and are making adjustments, but these adjustments will take time, they are not overnight fixes.

[timkaye]

@wadestriebel

have you completed the basic user onboarding for Discourse?

1. Can’t remember.

2. Have been using Discourse for several years before ClassicPress began, so why should that be necessary? (Could it be because the moderators on that forum let the discussion flow?)

3. What a baffling suggestion anyway! A ClassicPress forum should surely be immediately ready-to-use by anyone who knows how to make a comment in WordPress/ClassicPress. Why would we want to expect users to read a manual just to be able to use the facility? I am genuinely stunned by this notion.

@james

someone has to do the work behind any such fundamental change. And trust me, it would be a huge amount of work to do something like this and not just end up in a worse (more confusing/fragmented) place than when we started.

Without specifying any criteria of what features would be expected, it’s impossible to know whether you’re right or not. But, at its root, a forum is really just posts, categories, and comments (or another post type). Nothing hard there. Want an edit capability? Check. Want text formatting? Check. Want user role management? Check. Want email notifications with hyperlinks to the relevant comment? Check. Want avatars? Check. Want search? Check.

None of that is hard. So please tell me what is.

[anon71687268]

@timkaye

Can’t remember.

This badge is awarded for completing the basic tutorial, and this badge is granted after completing the advanced tutorial. I appears you’ve completed neither tutorial.

@timkaye

Have been using Discourse for several years before ClassicPress began, so why should that be necessary? (Could it be because the moderators on that forum let the discussion flow?)

It could be any number of things. Pondering a question is not a definitive answer.

@timkaye

A ClassicPress forum should surely be immediately ready-to-use by anyone who knows how to make a comment in WordPress/ClassicPress. Why would we want to expect users to read a manual just to be able to use the facility? I am genuinely stunned by this notion.

The vast majority of users have expressed no trouble using the forums.

@timkaye

Without specifying any criteria of what features would be expected, it’s impossible to know whether you’re right or not. But, at its root, a forum is really just posts, categories, and comments (or another post type). Nothing hard there. Want an edit capability? Check. Want text formatting? Check. Want user role management? Check. Want email notifications with hyperlinks to the relevant comment? Check. Want avatars? Check. Want search? Check.

None of that is hard. So please tell me what is.

Simply, you’ve left out a lot…such as (but not limited to):

1. putting it together in a cohesive way that is usable without crippling forum administration, and
2. handling support, feature requests, etc, and
3. it’s essentially reinventing the wheel.

[timkaye]

@anon71687268

The vast majority of users have expressed no trouble using the forums.

The classic fallacy!

It’s like universities who ask their students what features they like about their university experience. The students reply “the personal interaction with faculty”, so the university has faculty calling prospective students as part of the admissions process. But there’s one problem with that, as they’d soon find out if they asked those students who rejected offers of admission (which is a far larger group).

What do the latter say? “I’m not going there. They have faculty making phone calls. They must be desperate.”

You need to be asking those who don’t participate in the forums to get a proper picture.

[anon71687268]

@timkaye

You need to be asking those who don’t participate in the forums to get a proper picture.

Under this logic, your own opinion wouldn’t count.

[wadestriebel]

@timkaye

I am genuinely stunned by this notion.

Same - I am stunned that you think by changing to a new forum software you some how won’t need to onboard users. Regardless of the software, someone somewhere will have no experience using it, just moving to a forum software you have used in the past doesn’t solve that issue, expect for you.

@timkaye

But, at its root, a forum is really just posts, categories, and comments (or another post type). Nothing hard there. Want an edit capability? Check. Want text formatting? Check. Want user role management? Check. Want email notifications with hyperlinks to the relevant comment? Check. Want avatars? Check. Want search? Check.

Who do you suppose puts that all together and make sure it stays running and operational?

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Unfortunately, your specific issue - in regards to the forum software, is not one as community team lead I am willing to look at changing and James above, as infrastructure team lead, has said the same thing.

So, at the end of the day all we can do is iterate on what we have - like we have all been saying all along. Spending time arguing about how to build a forum is frankly pointless.

[timkaye]

@anon71687268

Under this logic, your own opinion wouldn’t count.

Wrong again. It’s not that anyone who’s currently using the forum has an opinion that doesn’t count. It’s that without also taking account of those who don’t use the forum, you can’t get a proper picture.

@wadestriebel

I am stunned that you think by changing to a new forum software you some how won’t need to onboard users.

Which is exactly why we shouldn’t be using such software. QED.

[anon71687268]

@timkaye

It’s that without also taking account of those who don’t use the forum, you can’t get a proper picture.

There’s no viable way to do that. Message every person? Do a poll that gets votes/comments from the 10-most-active users? If someone doesn’t use the forum, I put less weight on their opinions of how it should run.

[wadestriebel]

I am confused, and I can officially say this thread is so far gone I don’t even know what we are arguing about anymore.

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What we will be doing…

We have already said, numerous times, we have heard the key pieces of feedback (thought it really only boiled down to 3 things) and will be implementing changes based on that feedback.

We already have a pretty much completed draft of the new welcome message and will be updating that in the coming days.

To reiterate:

@wadestriebel

we value the input, and we hear the feedback and are making adjustments, but these adjustments will take time, they are not overnight fixes.

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Thank you to everyone for their input, we do appreciate the feedback and know we can make improvements. We will be rolling out changes gradually and will try to take a data driven approach to track improvements.

[wadestriebel]

On that note, I have just implemented the new welcome message: Welcome to the ClassicPress Forums!

If you have any feedback on the message, please start a new thread in the meta category.