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Community site becoming unwieldy

Posted May 30th, 2007 by Kevin Blouin
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I've noticed this site is becoming unwieldy. Sorting forums within the site by recent posts looks at the number, not the control factor (e.g. 1 Year sorts before 12 Minutes). Plus there are so many forum topics popping up that are all getting posted under one major heading, like "Emerging Technologies" that it takes more time to find anything than it does to read it.

 Can you look into correcting the columnar sort to actually sort by minute? Another really good feature would be to allow at least an Advanced search to seach based on date range (if input). For example, search for "iMIS 15" and your get tons of forum topics most are very old and involve the Beta releases. It would be great to be able to search for "iMIS 15" where new posts "within 90 days"

It would also be greatly useful to add more subdivisions within some of these broad topics. (e.g. Forum = Emerging Technologies, Sub-Forum = iMIS 15, Sub-Forum-Category = iMIS Casual User)

That may be too much to ask, but general usage issues/comments/queries for core iMIS 15 are getting buried by a billion posts on iBO.NET under "Emerging Technologies"

-K

enSYNC Corp.

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We are currently looking at

On May 30th, 2007 Sara Hardison says:

We are currently looking at ways to make the site more usable and rework the organization so comments are welcome. I have actually been grappling with ideas for better organization of the forums .... let me ask you this. How do you feel about the current grouping naming conventions?

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My suggestions

On June 14th, 2007 JB says:

I guess I am to blame for the billions of iBO for .NET topics. so instead of being a problem I will try to come up with solutions.

As far as naming conventions ... I personally do not like them. For first time users you do not really know what this community has to offer. because instead of knowing the project name you have to know what type of project it is and who is developing it to know where to look.

the current top teir directory structure for projects are as follows

ASI Sponsered
Contributed
Emerging Technology Previews
Open Source

take the openLDAP for iMIS project for example.. it is an open source project so why isn't it in the Open Source Project folder? to find it I will have to know that ASI is actually developing it. If I don't know that going in I will be confused

another example of what I feel is bad naming convention is the Emerging Technology Previews personally I whould try to steer away from naming a folder that is time sensetive... when iBO for .NET and i15 is not longer emerging, those projects and forums will have to move out of that folder again causing confusing I think for users.
Lets not even go into the thought that iBO for .NET is an ASI sponsered project so why isn't it that folder.

I am not sure what kind of content management software this site is using, mediawiki? but the project type demographic is a good reason to use "Tags" since it is clear that a project can be in multiple category and types.

Right now there are only 5 projects but there are 4 different project type folders. I know the ratio will grow but I suggest on the Project homepage where it displays the Project Types go ahead and list the actual projects as well. When the number of projects makes the page longer then take them out.

I like Kevin's suggestion. Instead of having each project type have their own forum as what I believe it is setup to be. Have each project have it's own forum. It will be easier to filter out the noise and focus on what your trying to learn or develop...

I whould also rethink the top nav bar as well which currently is as follows

Home
Blogs
Projects
Development
Implementation
Forums
About

If you drill down in the Implentation section you get "iMIS Community Books" one of them being "iBO for .NET" with a page title of "Welcome to the iBO for .NET" with no link to the actual project page.

I suggest we just get rid of the both Development and Implementation and move the various documents under the actual project page that matches it and have the top nav menu.

home
blogs
projects
forums
about

the driving force of this site I believe is the projects. Users go to the site to find information about a project the more content is associated with a project the easier it will be to find what I want.. ie when creating a forum topic or blog display a select box to attache the content to a particular project.

Don't get me wrong I love this site as you can see by the number of topics I have created. it just needs to be organized better. These are only personal suggestions and how I invision things being organized based on why I go to the site

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Great feedback that will

On June 18th, 2007 Sara Hardison says:

Great feedback that will definitely help us rethink the projects area. I agree with you that the types of project are confusing. Creating the seperate forums by project is something I have been considering.

Not sure about the suggestion for removing the devlopment and implementation areas because they actually do/will provide a lot of guidance that will cross all projects AND other development efforts such as APIs and standards for UX and CSS. That said, we can cetainly look into reframing the wording but i think the need still stands seperate of the project oriented work. We also need a way, and we are thinking about this, about the best method for filtering forum traffic and questions/answers into more knowledge-based guidance in the dev and implementation books.

keep the suggestions coming!

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Headings and labels and naming conventions are hard to pull off

On September 20th, 2007 Kevin Blouin says:

I do agree with JB on naming conventions being a problem for a wide commmunity. Perhaps, wince everything is "tagged" we can have a very prominent and easy navigation through a multi-tier tag search. This may be a faftor of the platform this site is on, but if it is "wikied" it should have multi-thread tagging available and allow for powerful searches, not just general text searching.

I do agree that there should probably be an area for emerging tech, but that all of that content should be moved or re-labeled once the technology is actually out there. Then it becomes part of the general iMIS realm.

-K

Kevin Blouin - enSYNC Corp.

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