I use the Notes.Net forums a lot as a source of knowledge for “the unknown” and undocumented, and sometimes I try to help somebody.To my opinion, the forum could use some improvements, some of them not so difficult to implement, especially when the developers are at the source of all Notes knowledge ;-). Here’s my list of suggestions. Any other things you guys are missing here?
E-mail notifications don’t work, so you have to do the follow-up yourself. I notice that a lot of replies don’t get answered, I presume this is the reason.
Some kind of PROBLEM SOLVED stamp, the possibility that the one that posted a question can push a RESOLVED button, then selects the post that answered his question. In the response hierarchy you then can see what answered the question immediatelly. (Now you have to go through all responses and hope to find an answer, without always knowing if something was really helpful).
To me it looks like the responses are not shown in the “order of input”. This is confusing.
Some views are really useless, f.e. “By Author”. I can find my name somewhere around the 5000th screen I guess. If you want this to be useful, a better lookup method than this is needed.
Any other suggestions? Or feedback from the forum team?
I agree - the general usability of the forum leaves a fair bit to be desired. My main gripe is that you can only see the text of one response at a time (unless you open each one in a different tab).
I’m sure Lotus have a point to make that they use their own software to power the forums, but often, the readability of the forum is severely limited by the fact you can only view the text of one document at a time. Almost any other forum out there, you open a thread and you can read every response in chronological order - no need to click on each response - which makes scanning through them very easy.
However, in this forum, the traditional Notes “view” metaphor showing responses to responses actually make it less readable.
cheers,
P
PS - the sort order is indeed odd, as others have pointed out. My response was made AFTER Nathan Chandler’s, and is not nested any differently, so why does mine appear ABOVE his?
I agree with all your points. I too have been frustrated that the e-mail notification feature does not work. I reported it, and someone on the Notes.net team responded to me, but the matter was never resolved.
I would like to add to your list:
The # 1 improvement I would like to see is, if I have done a search and arrived at a search results page, I would like the search results page added to the breadcrumbs up top such as…
developerWorks > Lotus > Forums & community > Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum > Search Results
…so that I can easily go back to the search results page if a topic I have been following turns out to be a dud. Currently, the only way we have to go back is to repeatedly click the Back button in the browser, but that does not work if I’ve folllowed a thread that’s (I believe) 10 posts deep. The Back button only has a limited history. Even when I follow a thread that’s 4 posts deep, and quickly determine that it will not help me, it is still a pain to keep clicking the Back button (or try and locate the Search Results page from the browser history).
Make the Category field useful. There are currently too many choices and to me, all that really matters is that the person posting the problem distinguish whether their application is Notes client or Domino web based.
I don’t see Search Results happening – they’d require a session. The link for search results would require that the query and the page (start & count) be carried from document to document, and the computed thread map would break down with a relatively small document count if you tried to pass the value in the URL. (And contrary to standard practice on at least one platform I can think of, POST is not a good way to GET documents.)
It’s not that Domino can’t do sessions (they’d just be standard Notes documents), but they’re not trivial, and there’d be a crapload of documents created and deleted and lookups galore going on. And then there’s the little problem of people doing several parallel operations in the forum (reading one document, posting a response to it in another tab/window to get around the formatting loss, and looking at something retrieved from a search in yet another tab/window – and, just for giggles, lets say there’s another doc open from another search) – which “back” should the session hold?
Opening docs in a new tab/window is really the only way to fly.
You could beat the problem you describe of keeping having to hit the Back button all the time to go to the Search results page by…
Using FireFox browser…and then from the inital search results page, instead of clicking on a link , Open Link in a New Tab, from any of the posts you want to investigate. then, they will just be in different tabs, and your Search results page is always there over in the left-most tab…inside the one hoss browser application.
Incidentally, this is just one of the many advantages FireFox has over IE…if you start to use it, you will never dream of going back. Also, it takes away one more browser client from Micro$oft…the mortal enemy of Lotus.
The subscription limit is indeed very low; I see some very active people here, and I assume this limit is ridiculous for them.
Now how can we persuade the developers to actually do something with it? We can keep wining for this for years, but what’s the point if it’s not read by those who are in charge?
P.S. I could check “send me a daily e-mail listing new responses…”, but that’s right, it doesn’t work :-). Oh, en I have more than 20 subscriptions too!
There is nothing more frustrating than searching for a problem, finding it and then reading through 5 responses that all say “I have this problem too…did you ever find a solution”
