Liferay.com Forum improvement ideas

[James Falkner, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

Hey everyone,

Aside from Liferay code, our forums are probably the most active part of the community. At DevCon last month, one of the side conversations I had with several active forum contributors was around discovery of interesting threads, and how best to do it, to maximize the chance that you get answers to questions. Many of you use the "Recent Posts" link to see what people are talking about, or just browse individual categories of interest. While that is indeed useful, there were other ideas on what kinds of posts people were interested in and how they find them. We get around 150-200 posts per day across all of our public forums, so finding relevant threads is very important to our forum's health.

I'd like to hear from you on how we can improve the forums on liferay.com to make it easier for you to find the topics that interest you, aside from just using the built-in search (or google). Things like a dashboard showing various categories of threads, e.g. "Unread posts only", "Unanswered only", "Threads I participated in that have recent activity" or "Threads that just have the same person asking for help over and over with no responses", or sorting based on votes, showing answers at the top, turning on social activity points (and ranking posts based on it), that kind of thing. Or my personal favorite, "if someone asks a question similar to one that I asked and got an answer for in the past, email me and encourage me to share my knowledge". So let's hear your ideas! And the best news of all, we already have a couple of community developers who have volunteered and are willing to help implement this stuff, so you can rest assured that your ideas will be heard and possibly implemented. Open source communities exist to serve their members first, so my goal is always to serve you. And if you are also interested in contributing some of your time to help improve our forums, let me know. Always looking for volunteers!

Here are some more specific questions I'd like to get your feedback on, in addition to ideas you may have:

1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?
2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?
3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")
4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?

Some reference material:

The now-deprecated suggestions wiki
Ideas Dashboard

[mohammad azaruddin, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

Feed Back
1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?
ANS:click on My Post
2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?
ANS:MyPost and Recent Post
3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")
ANS: Yes..And it Boost up our interest to participate
Suggestion:Rank should be based on Number of question answered by THE USER...and for ranking we should not consider thread started by him
4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?
ANS:category
hierachy:never,
keyword:always

[venka reddy, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?
I will see "Recent Post" and "My Post" .

2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?
Will look into the subject of the thread. If i assume i know something about it , I will click on the thread to look into that.

3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")
Yes, I always look into status. when ever i post a message.

4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?
I always use search by keyword.

[Jack Bakker, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

James Falkner:

1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?

a) I subscribe to many categories in forums, so I receive by email where I have a mail filter to put incoming emails in a folder ; I then check the folder periodically to learn and reply to those where I might help.
b) to find ideas: I use almost exclusively Google to search

James Falkner:

2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?

see #1 above

James Falkner:

3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")

Yes, tho there are many valuable posts by those who have not posted much

James Falkner:

4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?

Mostly Google searches

[Victor Zorin, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?
Same as others:
My Posts - to check if anyone has asked for additional information
Recent Posts - once or twice a week, to go through every post that came up since my previous visit (headings mostly and content if heading is relevant to me)

2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?
- if I can produce an answer in less than 5-10 minutes
- if the person who is asking a question has shown that he/she has already done some investigation and has seriously stuck or it is a complex subject.
Having trouble to convince myself to provide answers in those threads where the forum participant did not bother to google for an answer and is clearly expecting a spoon-feeding, the same level of attention is paid for posts with title in capital letters or 'urgent help is needed'.
(On a positive note , these posts provide a greenfield for those who would like to become a Liferay Legend within 2 weeks from initial subscription)

3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")
Sometimes, especially when I do not know the person. however as it is already mentioned this rank is sometimes misleading...

4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?
google, never liferay topic of liferay keyword search as they are still pretty much useless, i.e. the same status as 7-9 years ago.

[Jignesh Vachhani, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

1. When you visit the forums, what's the first thing you do?
Ans : I looks my post section and gives answers for the thread for which i already involved previously.
Also Looks the category on which i am more interested and have better knowledge and puts my bets answer over there

2. If you are looking to contribute, how do you find threads to contribute to?
Ans : Mainly i am contributing my answer for the category for which i have better knowledge to share.

3. Do you pay attention to and value a user's "rank" (number of forum posts, e.g. "Liferay Legend")
Rank doesn't matter as a individual but yes if community members looks this rank then they can at least decide that which post he/she needs to follow first for the solution.

4. When looking for a particular topic, do you use the forum category hierarchy, or do you search for keywords? or both?
Mainly I concentrate on specific category where i can really give best fit answers.

[Jan Tošovský, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

For our community moderator it is a pain to work with Message Board as he is used to use StackOverflow (SO). From his point of view the SO system is the only viable option for Q&A stuff. What he is missing most is ordering the answers according to votes.
I am grateful for planned improvements, but I strongly suggest developing in parallel a completely new Q&A system which could be used alternatively to MB. Besides SO there is also http://www.osqa.net/ platform.

[James Falkner, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

Thanks a lot for all this valuable feedback! Rest assured it is not forgotten - we are working on improving virtually everything touched upon here (social ranking, message ordering, finding relevant posts quickly). It will take time, but I hope to keep everyone updated on progress once we have a concrete proposal (currently a couple of us in the community are working on some proofs-of-concept).