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A rant of forum issues RRS feed

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    Recently we were told about a new recognition system, great. I really hope it will amount to more than people just abusing the system and generating bogus content to get medals and such.

    Anyway, there are several problems with the current forum system that should have been given a much higher priority than some silly achievement system. (Yeah, the new recognition system might be bigger than just the forums, but this is just from my point of view.)

    Many of the following issues may have been mentioned here or elsewhere, I'll mention them anyway. Some are bugs of some sort, some are my opinions. Almost all of these issues have been around since I've started lurking around these forums, almost two years ago. Here goes.

    Add Image Support

    • On many forums this would be extremely useful.
    • Uploading an image to a third party site and linking it here is just silly. Sooner or later the links get old and some people may be behind a firewall at their work or otherwise that prevents them from seeing the image anyway.
    • Low bandwidth issues
      • It would be simple enough to have a checkbox in the profile to enable / disable showing the picture or showing just a link to the picture.
      • Most browsers have a built-in option to disable pictures for better performance.
      • (this double indented list was impossible to do without "edit html")
    • Please don't tell me this would hinder the forums performance, this is NOT too much to ask for from one of the biggest IT companies in the world.

    (pressing enter after closing the list added a new line at the top of the post)

    Editor

    (pressing enter after ending styling from the toolbar mysteriously resumes the previous style)

    • Custom styling should not be allowed.
      • It should be up to the forum managers to maintain a good stylesheet for the posts.
      • Cut & paste from a web page for example retains styling sometimes. Many posts are a mess because posters cut & paste from different sources and the styling gets mixed.
    • "Edit html" button should be useless, but most of the time I end up writing the whole post using it. (Mostly to get rid of out-of-place <p>, <br> and such.)
    • At the moment the font size when editing is too small to be comfortable.
    • Editing a post adds a new <br/> tag to the end of the post.
    • It's impossible to break out from the <pre> (code) tags if it's the only things in the post or adding text under a code snippet if it's the last item in the post. (Have to use the "edit html" button.)

    Code Snippets

    • Code window is resizable, but the text areas do not resize.
    • Several nested scrollable areas appear when previewing long pieces of code.
    • Code preview has a fixed width font, why not the actual snippet in the post? At the moment code snippets are almost undistinguishable from the actual post. This should also fix the issue with indenting code with spaces (the indents are very small.)
    • Editing a code block impossible to do properly. Often creating a completely new code block only viable option.
      • Post editor almost completely useless for anything other than a typo fix.
      • Using the "edit html" for this is difficult due to the syntax hilight styling messing things up.
      • Sometimes the code layout explodes (extra empty lines appear in between code lines) after editing a post. (This may or may not have been fixed recently since I can't seem to reproduce it. I've had it happen to me within a month, can't remember which browser.)

    Search

    I'll not get into this too much, AFAIK there are some improvements planned...

    • Using google should probably not be a better option than the forum search to find relevant posts.
    • There should be an "advanced search" GUI that enables people to search for things like "Posts started by <user>" and "Posts answered by <user>" and "Posts that have replies by <user> and are not answered by <user>" WITHOUT those crazy meta search strings.

    General

    • Remove the useless "Propose as answer" feature. Marking as answer and voting as helpful are enough. Or at the very least remove the self-propose possibility.
    • Marking own posts as the answer should probably not add to the "Top Answerers" list.
    • Voting helpful should not add the helpful poster to the "Recent Visitors" list. (The same may be happening with propose as answer.)
    • Quoting should be possible for a selected piece of text only. Also, the quote should include some information on the source of the quote (name, date?)

    Thanks for reading.

    Friday, April 29, 2011 9:10 PM
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    Image support: we know, we are going to be working on this sooner than later probably.

    Editor: Currently reevaluating the editor and all the trouble it has, we are considering our options. <br /> is known bug. Custom styling is something you want removed, many others use and like it. We'll take a look at the edit size, there are lots or problems with code editing, these aren't super easy to fix. Can you send some examples on the code resize and scroll bars issue? Editing code is a poor experience, we know this but it has been tricky to get just right. Can you send some examples of other editors that do this really well that you have seen? I would appreciate that.

    Search, totally agree, we are working on these things, both the advanced search and just fixing it all up, it will take time though.

    General, we have no plans to remove propose as answer. People don't historically use voting. Propose answer is designed to enable 'everyone' the ability to show moderators potential answers making it easier for them to evaluate and confirm them. I understand there is a problem where answerers consider a thread already answered if it is proposed, they shouldn't be though, so we are looking at ways to solve that problem. But getting the community to help answer markers identify real answers is useful.

    Agreed on Top Answerers list, that's a bug. Voting shouldn't be adding the helpful 'poster' to the recent visitors list, if it is, that is a bug. We'll check that out. Recent visitor is simply a list of recent people visiting, should have nothing to do with actions in the forum. Quoting, agreed, this is something that's been in the backlog for a while.

    The recognition work is being done for a lot of reasons, including (but not mainly) to help resolve some of our back end issues just keeping the current ugly points system running. Moving to the new model should enable us to then get more momentum on some of the issues you have highlighted above. 

    Thanks for all your input, it really does help us.

     

    Community Forums Program Manager
    Saturday, April 30, 2011 3:51 AM
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    Answerer
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    Thanks for replying,

    Custom styling is something you want removed, many others use and like it.

    Just to prove a point, I did not remove the styling from this quote that you added to your post via whatever method you used to write it. The font is too small. I've seen a lot worse though. The only time I've seen custom styling used to an advantage is someone trying to fix the way code snippets look like. The vast majority is unintentional and messes up the post.

    Can you send some examples on the code resize and scroll bars issue? Editing code is a poor experience, we know this but it has been tricky to get just right. Can you send some examples of other editors that do this really well that you have seen? I would appreciate that.

    Whenever you use the preview pane, you get scrollbars (looks like the preview only works when a language is specified) even if the piece of code fits the area. If it does not fit, you get another pair of scrollbars. It should be simple enough to test. I'm using IE 9.

    With the resizing I mean the area where you write the code. If you have a long piece of code to add, it would be helpful to see more of it at the same time. However the code and the preview areas are fixed width. Resizing the window only adds more gray padding.

    I don't have experience with other editors, I did test the one at stackoverflow, which seemed to work. The automatic preview was nice. Lots of help visible next to the editor too.

    Tuesday, May 3, 2011 10:39 AM
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    > Image support: we know, we are going to be working on this sooner than later probably.

    This is a very bad idea. (Besides which you can already add images - which I then as Moderator remove and replace by the URL to them).

    There are still some people in the world who have slow lines. Providing image support means that these people will be opening posts that contain images that will take time to open. People on slow lines want to be able to choose which they can do if only the URL to the link is in the post.

    Even those of us with fast lines at home will sometimes find ourselves in hotels either working in the Wifi zone in the hotel lobby along with everyone else (and thus in effect having slow lines) or working in Intenet Café and in hotel computer areas on slow pay-by-the-minute PCs and we don't want them to be made any slower by having images opening all over the place.

    Then there are still people who pay for a certain number of GBs of data in their IP contracts. They too don't want their limits to be reached because they have opened a forum post to discover that it contains a massive image. (or a large number of forum posts that all contain images)

    As for the reason given. The forum URLs will typically be valid for the time required until the OP has received his answer. So we are only justifying this by later searching. In most cases by the time a search takes place the image may no longer *as an image* be valid as the software has moved on and there will be in any cases other similar threads where the explanation used did not rely on an image.

    Mike Walsh

     

    SP 2010 "FAQ" (mainly useful links): http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx
    WSS3/MOSS FAQ (FAQ and Links) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx
    Both also have links to extensive book lists and to (free) on-line chapters

    Sunday, May 8, 2011 5:22 PM
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    This is a very bad idea. (Besides which you can already add images - which I then as Moderator remove and replace by the URL to them

    Yes, people already add images (or links to images) to their posts, might as well enable them to do it properly.

    Adding this functionality in the forums software would also give more control over the whole feature. Things like showing a thumbnail instead of the whole image, restricting file size, etc. Also the checkbox-in-the-profile feature I mentioned would effectively fix all of the bandwidth issues you mentioned. It could even be implemented before the whole image support to change any existing <img> tags to links, if the user so wanted... I don't want to get too technical, since I know nothing of the forum software, but it seems like a fairly simple feature.

    I also feel any possible bandwith problems a tiny minority(?) might have concerning this issue are small compared to the benefits of many people getting better answers faster. Due to the fact that many times an image would explain the whole problem clearly whilst people don't add images because they can't see a tool for it. This is especially true for forums such as the Chart Controls Forum.

    Another unrelated issue with the forums that came to mind is that posts in locked threads cannot be voted as helful. This may be the intended behaviour but it does not work well with the habit of some moderators :) locking the thread as soon as it has an answer.


    Monday, May 9, 2011 9:21 AM
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    > the habit of some moderators :) locking the thread as soon as it has an answer.

    This is another issue but I'm doing that in order to avoid thread spread (which is otherwise a major plague in the forums).

    Firstly when it's a newish thread I only lock the thread as soon as the Original Poster (OP) has either marked a post as an answer or has said "Thanks, that solved my question" (or both).

    I don't in newish threads lock a post just because another moderator has marked a post as an answer in it because the OP still for imo several weeks has the right to come back and say "No, that didn't help me".

    I lock old threads (say from 2010 or earlier - especially earlier) if a post has been marked as an answer (typically a long time earlier) + the OP hasn't come back and said that answer didn't help him + some person has just revived the thread with a new question or new suggested answer. [I delete the new question before locking and mostly leave the new solution before locking].

    The Stats are really messed up if a thread contains several questions and it's in any case difficult sometimes to find where in a long thread the useful replies are.  Plus the thread Title often has little to do with the second and third (etc.) questions in the thread.

    If people wouldn't add new questions in threads after the OP has marked a post as an answer, there'd be no need to lock the threads. But they do, so locking a thread because the Op has his/her answer is therefore easily justified even if it means no further posts can be marked as helpful. The forums are after all first and fourmost there to provide help not to provide points.

    Mike (who knew which Moderator you meant as soon as I saw the :) ...)

    P.S. I've both "worked" the forums when on holiday using slow pay-by-minute PCs and shareable (thus slow) Wifi connections. Especially in the first case there is a noticeable waiting period before even fairly small images open. Plus of course you don't when paying by minute want to spend time setting the browser to ignore images (if that was the solution you planned to offer :) ). So I've become even more sensitive to the slow lines people (mine at home are fast - even my 3G links where I can use them are fast enough) than I was before.

    SP 2010 "FAQ" (mainly useful links): http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx
    WSS3/MOSS FAQ (FAQ and Links) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx
    Both also have links to extensive book lists and to (free) on-line chapters

    Monday, May 9, 2011 11:55 AM
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