I'm primarily an answerer, which means I spend my down-time looking for questions that I might be able to answer and providing help to people who are seeking help in the domain of my expertise.
Unfortunately the forums software is not doing enough for answerers, and therefore doing a disservice to people who ask questions because answerers are having trouble.
The forum software has crippled me from answering questions in the following ways:
- My Forums Threads or equivalent is gone. Selecting forums doesn't seems to "stick" either (the set of selected forums is volatile / ephemeral). And there's no way to quickly select "my forums" all at once to get it back to
"my forums threads". This was the best tool I had to be able to find relevant questions for answering. Now it's too difficult to direct relevant information my way.
- The normalized/organized information is redundant and the critical information is buried. I don't care if threads are answered or not if I have filtered already on unanswered threads. Also I don't care how many votes the thread has, I'm just
as willing to answer a thread with no votes as one with a hundred.
- The rest of the critical information is displayed poorly: Who replied last and when? Am I the last replier? --- all are displayed in non tabular form at a font that is extremely low contrast (happens to be #AF9595 over white on my computer.) This
slows down my workflow of determining which threads need my attention.
- The ubiquitous controls to group, sort/order, are gone. Only filtering is available. This further hinders my ability to work on groups of similar questions.
- Too much vertical space is used. At normal zoom, I get 9 messages per screen on my 1920 x 1200 display. My ability to scan information manually is critical because there are just not enough automatic tools to bring relevant information my way.
All in all, it now takes too long, and is too frustrating for me to sift through users posts to find issues I can help with. The forum software is not doing a good enough job at connecting people who have questions with people who have answers.
As an answerer, I'd like to provide metadata about my expertise and have relevant questions be brought to my attention. Previously I could do this only at the highest granularity by creating a set of "My Forums", but now that functionality
seems to be gone, or greatly crippled. I'd be willing to provide a lot more metadata about my skills, too. Such as language familiarity, areas of research, technologies, keywords or tags that I might be able to help with etc., all in hopes that
relevant questions might find their way to me.
There are thousands of questions that I might be able to answer each day, but as it stands I see very few of them. I've resorted to just scanning the top few posts and only of a couple of forums. The amount of noise that I have to sift through
has surely increased tenfold.
All this is compounded by spam that I regularly complain about. In a time when reducing noise is the most critical aspect to me finding relevant questions it's deeply disappointing to have to deal with spam as well.
I expect answering has gone way down lately. I'd like to know the statistics if msdn would be willing to share them. [EDIT: Richard Mueller manually
collected some stats.]
As of the forums redesign, for the first time, I feel strongly compelled to write a forums reader app to try to deal with this problem. And I shouldn't have to!
