Improving the Forum

When you joined the forum, the very first message you got in your forum inbox was from @discobot. It contained an interactive tutorial that walked you through a whole series of forum tasks.

Because it teaches you how to do a variety of basic forum tasks without having to read the manual.

The process of bringing a new person up to speed with how things work. It’s a general term, not necessarily just a forums thing. For example, when you start a new job or hire a new employee, there’s usually an onboarding process.

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@MrLucky, here’s how to access the interactive tutorials.

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!!!

For the first time in my life I’m tempted to write WTF !

Discobot?

Yes. Maybe you deleted the message. It was the first one on your box…and it was from “discobot”.

Ah. Who is discobot?

I’ve never heard of that. Is it different to induction or orientation?

It’s just an automated bot built into the forum.

Pretty much the same thing… to familiarize with.

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This last bit of discussion brings up a point. One thing I think would improve the forum is if things were more obvious.

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.

Also a link to rules/guidelines. I found them the other day and they are really well written and useful. But I can’t remember how I found them and I can’t find them now.

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.

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Ah, found it in the second (mobile) menu on the home page.

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

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

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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.

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. :slight_smile:

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

I didn’t get that

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

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Do the advanced tutorial.

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…

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.

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

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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.

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  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.

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.

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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.

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

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

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.
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