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Author Topic: Forum Organization  (Read 1756 times)

mountainfair

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Forum Organization
« on: March 16, 2006, 04:45:40 pm »

First, another thanks for this great program.

I wanted to offer a suggestion around the forums and see what others thought.

I really think that a few more catagories would help the forums and peoples support experience immensely. 

Right now so much stuff is mixed together it is very chaotic and often difficult to sift through to find what you are looking for, even with the search tool.


I hope you might consider some categories with separate forum areas along these lines (maybe somewhat different, but you get the idea) inside Media Center area of the forums:

Technical Support Category    

1. Need Help? Get answers to questions about using Media Center.
2. Need Help with Device Synchronization?
3. Other specifit help category
4. Another specific help category
5. Bug Reports

General Discussions Category

1  News and Other Stuff.  Discussion about anything that might be of interest to Media Center users.
2. Media Center Wishlist and Development. Any ideas about how to improve Media Center? Let us know!
3. Off Topic.  Community forum for discussions completely unrelated to Media Center.


I think that more organization will not only make for a much better support experience for those seeking support, but help you build a stronger community around your product, which I would imagine has some significant impact on brand loyalty and the bottom line.

Just my two cents.
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mcevoyc

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Re: Forum Organization
« Reply #1 on: April 05, 2006, 02:20:23 am »

I agree, I have searched for a way to contact support, perhaps just a simple email address but cannot find it, I don't even know if I am searching the right place!
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JimH

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Re: Forum Organization
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2006, 07:06:19 am »

I don't even know if I am searching the right place!
You're in the right place.  This is support.  If you haven't read it, please try the FAQ here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=10029.0
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lalittle

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Re: Forum Organization
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2006, 07:32:53 am »

I disagree that more categories would be better -- I find the current forum stucture to be adequately categorized.  In my experience, splitting groups into too many categories just makes the situation more complicated than it needs to be.  It can become difficult to know which category many questions would best be placed in, and many times the responses to a question will end up dealing with other "aspects" of the subject at hand, which results in different "parts" of a discussion belonging to different categories.  It's often not logical to "split" a conversation since the entire conversation might be necessary to keep things in context.  The end result is a situation where any given subject might be found in any number of different forums, which confuses things.

I personally think that these forums are already spilt into an adequate number of groups.

Larry
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glynor

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Re: Forum Organization
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2006, 12:48:16 pm »

I disagree that more categories would be better -- I find the current forum stucture to be adequately categorized.  In my experience, splitting groups into too many categories just makes the situation more complicated than it needs to be.

Same here.  Not to mention that it simply doesn't work.  People tend to congregate and flock to the "main forum" and getting them to regularly check the others is a challenge.  Already if your particular troubleshooting thread happens to get moved anywhere else (except maybe the Portable Forum), it might as well be a death sentence for the thread.

Maintaining an adequate balance between the chaos of one forum, and the confusion of many sub-forums is a delicate task.
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