Alec, i think forum activity sits at an all time high -- but i could be wrong. with the individual projects forums, etc... i think dialogs are moving at in incredibly brisk pace! looking at the people pages and just glimpsing the amount of karma points being dished out -- something sure is happening and it looks to be pretty positive.
From my own experience, I do think that engagement went up since the introduction of the new forum. I wasn't an active member before July of 08 though, so my experience only runs that far back.
That said, there are a few quirks & things that are missing from this forum, but I don't think it's necessarily any more difficult to use (as a user) than YAF.
@bob Perhaps you are correct but there is no global stats page to tell.
@dan Again perhaps you are correct. And perhaps I am just being silly. I see I have been voted down on this (oh no my Karma!). Don’t get me wrong I am trying to be constructive (in a critical way):
My issues are as follows: 1) There is no place to post issues relating to the forum 2) No email notifications 3) No preview/edit your post 4) Spell check from my browser does not work 5) You can’t paste from office 6) The search results are inconsistent (try paging through results) 7) There are dead links (logon page) 8) No way of seeing last 50 posts for section 9) No decent stats 10) Karma has issues If people don’t want to see any of these things the by all means vote me down. I will close this post when I know where I can officially put my issues relating to the forum.
1) There is no place to post issues relating to the forum
I think there's some confusion here. At least I'm confused. The forums below "our.umb dev forum" I thought was reserved for bugs and features related only to "our.umbraco.org" but it seems to cover everything. Maybe you're right. Let's add another forum for this?
2) No email notifications
You're right. Let's add email notification.
3) No preview/edit your post
I agree. Let's add it.
4) Spell check from my browser does not work 5) You can’t paste from office
4+5 minors.
6) The search results are inconsistent (try paging through results)
Please explain.
7) There are dead links (logon page)
Ok. Is that one dead link?
8) No way of seeing last 50 posts for section
Please explain.
9) No decent stats 10) Karma has issues
9 + 10 suggestions?
I know that everybody is doing the best they can to make our.umbraco.org work. What do you admin guys think?
I think that this post is probably in the correct place
"Ideas, clever suggestions, long-term plans, visions of greatness etc..., it all goes into this forum"
I find it hard to disagree with most of the issues/feature requests you raised, but don't think that they have had a negative impact on the level of activity on the forum. As for number 5, I guess I've had to tell clients to paste via notepad so many times in the past that I just do it as second nature. I still don't trust the "paste from word" button! The best thing to do with the karma is to ignore about the karma, and although your first post wasn't really constructive I reserve downvoting only for obvious spammers. On the other hand, perhaps karma has even increased engagement (classic forum trick) and the "answers" system is great for speeding things up when searching on the forum for some help.
I do think you have raised some valid points and with any luck we'll see a few get implemented over time.
The best thing about the forum are the people. You show that.
@Jesper
What you mention about the place for such posts I agree with. This section is full of non forum related stuff. Perhaps admins could move topics as and when required as with other forums.
4+5 are minors thats ok if you can spell english well otherwise its a pain in the ass. My spelling is not good and I know i am not the only one. People who cant spell often get ridiculed because of it. People like me like computers because spellcheckers help remove such ridicule and decent peowsers can recognise text boxes and help us out. For some reason FFox/Safri dont get the umb ritchtext editor. Other forums somtimes have this issue this is why I and other paist from office. For the hell of it i am not using a spell checker so you can struggle with my typos and plain bas english to see.
6 Search for database (example), now page through the posts at the top nav (1,2,3...) the number of posts changes incosistantly. posts appear you have already seen the wiki disaperas and then reapers 2 pages later?
7 Ok the other dead link is on the main umbraco site cant remember where I have a post on these things (unawnswered on the forum)
8 -10 Feature request e.g. would be nice to see last 50 xslt posts
@alec... voted you back up for your second post with the list of issues... i do tend to side with jesper when it comes to the minor issues and looking for examles and suggestions.
are people being rediculed for spelling? i don't know this for sure... but i think MOST of the contributors on the forum have english as a SECOND language, which actually makes me feel better when i mis-spell things :P
i don't know if this is a feature or not... but i personally would love to see a filter or search to display the top 50 UNANSWERED POSTS...
Would be nice to see a roadmap page on the main site There is one here: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/about/roadmap but not on the main site also the one include is a bit sparse and should it really be a wiki page anyone can edit?
@Alec: We haven't had any performance issues with running Our and Umbraco.org in debug mode. Instead we get nice error messages (as we're in constant beta).
We also like that people can add the ?umbdebugshowtrace=true on all pages so they can see how they're build.
Any reason for not running in debug mode (although we do *not* recommend it on normal production sites where you probably want to hide all the info).
We're indeed watching this space and we'll launch a version 1.2 of Our later this year which will address some of your issues, so we really appreciate any feedback (good or bad).
The community activity have more than tripled in the quarter after the Our release, so I think that people in general are happy.
When the transition of non-outdated content from the books section to Our is done we'll also close the documentation areas on umbraco.org and refer to this space instead. That should hopefully clear out some of the redundant and outdated information.
I think the community search got a bit less useful when more sites were added. It did need updated, but perhaps not to the extent that it has been. It was always a small selection of sites but was very relevant and focused, but now it's so "scattergun" that it doesn't offer many real advantages over using the normal google.
How about adding a WIKI page, add all relevant sites to this and use it as source for community search? The benefit is total transparency and community control.
The forum link now goes to http://our.umbraco.org/forum and I have added a link underneath which allows you to still access the old forum if people need to search for older posts.
I've also fixed some typos in the code snippet section, but I don't have access to the Macros and the other items are more major changes, so I cannot actually fix the functionality, that will be down to Niels, Per or Tim :)
Cheers,
Chris
P.s. I am not part of Umbraco "company" but I help them out correcting typos etc when I spot them so have limited content access :)
Maybe, a little Off-topic but is it only me having problems using Opera on the forum? Have to press "Back" 2-5 times before it reacts, and have problems answering and creating new topics.
I mean no offense to anybody who works on this, Niels, or any of the other core team. I came here looking for an answer to a basic question and have again spent an hour fumbling with this quirky forum, wiki and site.
Sorry to be the guy that always comes here to complain, but honestly another year has passsed by and this forum is still VERY buggy and about useless. The UI is clunky at best and the search function is worse than terrible. I appriciate that many good people volunteer their time to this project but at some point somebody has to realize how utterly bad this is and do something about it. Hell there is still no FORUM for forum related issues, let alone fixes for the long time bugs.
I absolutely love Umbraco and can say without question that this entire site does more damage to the Umbraco experience than it does good. Don't get me wrong, the people here are wonderful, it is just the site kinda sucks.
Honestly, why can't the forum run on vBulletin like every other quality forum on planet earth? Umbraco is not "forum" software, it is a CMS platform. Just because I manufacture roller skates does not mean I wear them to work or force my customers and employess to put roller skate wheels on their cars. Do us all a favor and implement real forum software, please!
"Hell there is still no FORUM for forum related issues, let alone fixes for the long time bugs." You're actually posting this in a thread in the forum that is intended for forum related issues. :-)
Please remember that the forum is a part of "our" Umbraco and not a standalone project. It is not a vBulletin forum because it doesn't offer the integration with the package repository, karma system, wiki, events etc. Everything ties together here, you have ONE login to do everything and, yes, there are faults in the forum that need to be looked at but.. It is good enough, really. And as for your claim that it does more harm then good the number of posts on the forum have been increasing and increasing. Generally, people get what they want out of the forum and deal with the downsides. People get awesome answers really fast and that's what counts. Trust me, I've seen loads of forums that looked awesome and had great products like vBulletin behind them.. and I got no answers, now those were truely shitty forum.
As much as you'd like to, this forum is not going to be moving to other forum software any time soon. That being said, myself and some other community members are also frustrated with some of the problems and have stepped up to help out. In another thread I've seen someone say that it would be a waste of our precious time, I disagree: it's a great oppertunity for us to learn more about different aspects of Umbraco and get a feel for what it's like to deal with the collective wishes of thousands of users.
So, please keep the issues coming, they are being listed and looked at, sorry it can't be at a faster pace.
@William Also, I'm a bit worried about your health after seeing your reactions to these issues, there are loads more issues in the world that are more pressing than this, don't you think? ;-) (disclaimer: please don't take offense, this was just a good humored remark!)
Please fix this forum...
Who is admin of this forum. How can we raise cases for this forum?
I am not happy with this new forum (the 4th one so far I beleave, 2nd using UMB).
I beleave that its lack of features and dificulty of use is causing stagnation.
If an admin reads this they can check the stats #posts per month etc and tell me if i am wrong
Alec
Alec, i think forum activity sits at an all time high -- but i could be wrong. with the individual projects forums, etc... i think dialogs are moving at in incredibly brisk pace! looking at the people pages and just glimpsing the amount of karma points being dished out -- something sure is happening and it looks to be pretty positive.
just my .02
From my own experience, I do think that engagement went up since the introduction of the new forum. I wasn't an active member before July of 08 though, so my experience only runs that far back.
That said, there are a few quirks & things that are missing from this forum, but I don't think it's necessarily any more difficult to use (as a user) than YAF.
Dan
@bob
Perhaps you are correct but there is no global stats page to tell.
@dan
Again perhaps you are correct. And perhaps I am just being silly.
I see I have been voted down on this (oh no my Karma!). Don’t get me wrong I am trying to be constructive (in a critical way):
My issues are as follows:
1) There is no place to post issues relating to the forum
2) No email notifications
3) No preview/edit your post
4) Spell check from my browser does not work
5) You can’t paste from office
6) The search results are inconsistent (try paging through results)
7) There are dead links (logon page)
8) No way of seeing last 50 posts for section
9) No decent stats
10) Karma has issues
If people don’t want to see any of these things the by all means vote me down. I will close this post when I know where I can officially put my issues relating to the forum.
Alec
Hi Alec,
Your issues with my comments are as follows:
1) There is no place to post issues relating to the forum
I think there's some confusion here. At least I'm confused. The forums below "our.umb dev forum" I thought was reserved for bugs and features related only to "our.umbraco.org" but it seems to cover everything. Maybe you're right. Let's add another forum for this?
2) No email notifications
You're right. Let's add email notification.
3) No preview/edit your post
I agree. Let's add it.
4) Spell check from my browser does not work
5) You can’t paste from office
4+5 minors.
6) The search results are inconsistent (try paging through results)
Please explain.
7) There are dead links (logon page)
Ok. Is that one dead link?
8) No way of seeing last 50 posts for section
Please explain.
9) No decent stats
10) Karma has issues
9 + 10 suggestions?
I know that everybody is doing the best they can to make our.umbraco.org work. What do you admin guys think?
/Jesper
I think that this post is probably in the correct place
I find it hard to disagree with most of the issues/feature requests you raised, but don't think that they have had a negative impact on the level of activity on the forum. As for number 5, I guess I've had to tell clients to paste via notepad so many times in the past that I just do it as second nature. I still don't trust the "paste from word" button! The best thing to do with the karma is to ignore about the karma, and although your first post wasn't really constructive I reserve downvoting only for obvious spammers. On the other hand, perhaps karma has even increased engagement (classic forum trick) and the "answers" system is great for speeding things up when searching on the forum for some help.
I do think you have raised some valid points and with any luck we'll see a few get implemented over time.
Dan
@Jesper & Dan
The best thing about the forum are the people. You show that.
@Jesper
What you mention about the place for such posts I agree with. This section is full of non forum related stuff. Perhaps admins could move topics as and when required as with other forums.
4+5 are minors thats ok if you can spell english well otherwise its a pain in the ass. My spelling is not good and I know i am not the only one. People who cant spell often get ridiculed because of it. People like me like computers because spellcheckers help remove such ridicule and decent peowsers can recognise text boxes and help us out. For some reason FFox/Safri dont get the umb ritchtext editor. Other forums somtimes have this issue this is why I and other paist from office. For the hell of it i am not using a spell checker so you can struggle with my typos and plain bas english to see.
6 Search for database (example), now page through the posts at the top nav (1,2,3...) the number of posts changes incosistantly. posts appear you have already seen the wiki disaperas and then reapers 2 pages later?
7 Ok the other dead link is on the main umbraco site cant remember where I have a post on these things (unawnswered on the forum)
8 -10 Feature request e.g. would be nice to see last 50 xslt posts
Thanks for the time to reply
alec
@alec... voted you back up for your second post with the list of issues... i do tend to side with jesper when it comes to the minor issues and looking for examles and suggestions.
are people being rediculed for spelling? i don't know this for sure... but i think MOST of the contributors on the forum have english as a SECOND language, which actually makes me feel better when i mis-spell things :P
i don't know if this is a feature or not... but i personally would love to see a filter or search to display the top 50 UNANSWERED POSTS...
balance has been restored
I did not mean to mark this as solved.. Thats anothe issue, here ares
some more our.umbraco.org/umbraco.org bugs and sugestions...
Error parsing XSLT file: \xslt\filesList.xslt
http://umbraco.org/documentation/community-snippets
Out of date content also coming soon is not good practice, its either ready or it is not
http://umbraco.org/documentation/getting-started
Umb community search last updated: Dec 2, 2006!
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=006828407427845235189%3Au1fygyy_s54
Out of date Umb 3 install guide
http://umbraco.org/documentation/books/install-umbraco-30-on-windows-vista
Brochures coming soon
http://umbraco.org/products
Also page should link here:
http://umbraco.org/tour/sites-running-umbraco
Why does the forum link here:
http://umbraco.org/documentation
link to the old forum
Would be nice to see a roadmap page on the main site
There is one here: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/about/roadmap but not on the main site also the one include is a bit sparse and should it really be a wiki page anyone can edit?
Cannot change avatar
http://our.umbraco.org/member/profile/your-avatar
Another one our.umbraco.org & umbraco.org (come on they are the same site) is ruunning in debug mode...
I've updated the Umbraco Community search. It now automagically adds links to all sites found on http://umbraco.org/solution-providers/find-certified-developers. If there's another page that contains an even better collection, please email me.
/Jesper
@Alec: We haven't had any performance issues with running Our and Umbraco.org in debug mode. Instead we get nice error messages (as we're in constant beta).
We also like that people can add the ?umbdebugshowtrace=true on all pages so they can see how they're build.
Any reason for not running in debug mode (although we do *not* recommend it on normal production sites where you probably want to hide all the info).
@jesper
Ok nice. I am mailing you a list of URL's that I index. I leave it to you if you want to merge them.
Alec
@Niels
Ok that makes sense. Nice to know you are watching this.
Alec
We're indeed watching this space and we'll launch a version 1.2 of Our later this year which will address some of your issues, so we really appreciate any feedback (good or bad).
The community activity have more than tripled in the quarter after the Our release, so I think that people in general are happy.
When the transition of non-outdated content from the books section to Our is done we'll also close the documentation areas on umbraco.org and refer to this space instead. That should hopefully clear out some of the redundant and outdated information.
@jesper
I think the community search got a bit less useful when more sites were added. It did need updated, but perhaps not to the extent that it has been. It was always a small selection of sites but was very relevant and focused, but now it's so "scattergun" that it doesn't offer many real advantages over using the normal google.
E.g, I was just searching for "netpivotal" to see if anyone had mentioned using them for umbraco
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=006828407427845235189%3Au1fygyy_s54&ie=UTF-8&q=netpivotal&sa=Search
None of the sites in the first page are even umbraco related.
Now for search something like "media library", and even now there are no umbraco-related results in page one.
Admittedly these are fairly generic search terms, but what are a lot of these sites even doing in the index for the community search?
Dan
@dan
Thanks for putting that to my attention.
How about adding a WIKI page, add all relevant sites to this and use it as source for community search? The benefit is total transparency and community control.
/Jesper
Great idea - http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/list-of-umbraco-related-sites-%28for-community-search%29
I'll also make a new topic asking for edits.
Cheers,
Dan
I also really hate how you aren't returned to your previous page when loggin in.
Adding comments in Internet explorer 8 also requires multiple clicks on the text area where i write my stuff before i see a cursor
Uploading & Adding images to forum posts would be a big added value, a screenshot sais so much more than text...
Hi Alex / All,
I have corrected one of the issues you highlighted:
On: http://umbraco.org/documentation
The forum link now goes to http://our.umbraco.org/forum and I have added a link underneath which allows you to still access the old forum if people need to search for older posts.
I've also fixed some typos in the code snippet section, but I don't have access to the Macros and the other items are more major changes, so I cannot actually fix the functionality, that will be down to Niels, Per or Tim :)
Cheers,
Chris
P.s. I am not part of Umbraco "company" but I help them out correcting typos etc when I spot them so have limited content access :)
thanks Chris
Hello!
Maybe, a little Off-topic but is it only me having problems using Opera on the forum? Have to press "Back" 2-5 times before it reacts, and have problems answering and creating new topics.
Regards,
Fredrik
I mean no offense to anybody who works on this, Niels, or any of the other core team. I came here looking for an answer to a basic question and have again spent an hour fumbling with this quirky forum, wiki and site.
Sorry to be the guy that always comes here to complain, but honestly another year has passsed by and this forum is still VERY buggy and about useless. The UI is clunky at best and the search function is worse than terrible. I appriciate that many good people volunteer their time to this project but at some point somebody has to realize how utterly bad this is and do something about it. Hell there is still no FORUM for forum related issues, let alone fixes for the long time bugs.
I absolutely love Umbraco and can say without question that this entire site does more damage to the Umbraco experience than it does good. Don't get me wrong, the people here are wonderful, it is just the site kinda sucks.
Honestly, why can't the forum run on vBulletin like every other quality forum on planet earth? Umbraco is not "forum" software, it is a CMS platform. Just because I manufacture roller skates does not mean I wear them to work or force my customers and employess to put roller skate wheels on their cars. Do us all a favor and implement real forum software, please!
"Hell there is still no FORUM for forum related issues, let alone fixes for the long time bugs."
You're actually posting this in a thread in the forum that is intended for forum related issues. :-)
Please remember that the forum is a part of "our" Umbraco and not a standalone project. It is not a vBulletin forum because it doesn't offer the integration with the package repository, karma system, wiki, events etc. Everything ties together here, you have ONE login to do everything and, yes, there are faults in the forum that need to be looked at but.. It is good enough, really.
And as for your claim that it does more harm then good the number of posts on the forum have been increasing and increasing. Generally, people get what they want out of the forum and deal with the downsides. People get awesome answers really fast and that's what counts. Trust me, I've seen loads of forums that looked awesome and had great products like vBulletin behind them.. and I got no answers, now those were truely shitty forum.
As much as you'd like to, this forum is not going to be moving to other forum software any time soon. That being said, myself and some other community members are also frustrated with some of the problems and have stepped up to help out. In another thread I've seen someone say that it would be a waste of our precious time, I disagree: it's a great oppertunity for us to learn more about different aspects of Umbraco and get a feel for what it's like to deal with the collective wishes of thousands of users.
So, please keep the issues coming, they are being listed and looked at, sorry it can't be at a faster pace.
@William Also, I'm a bit worried about your health after seeing your reactions to these issues, there are loads more issues in the world that are more pressing than this, don't you think? ;-)
(disclaimer: please don't take offense, this was just a good humored remark!)
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