A few weeks ago, I sent Captain and Skipper some ideas I had for improving the forums around here and we wanted to bounce some of my ideas off of y'all and see what you all had to bring to the table as well.

I guess the thing that's most obvious to me is how these boards are relatively hard to navigate for a newbie. There is a lot of redundancy, and since this board has been a growing, evolving thing, some parts have grown while others have withered.

I'm thinking of doing a forum overhaul to eliminate some of this redundancy and help new people navigate the zones, forums, and-subforums easier.

I was thinking of replacing the current forum zone setup with this one:

Announcements
MonsterCommerce Software Topics
Small Business Resources
Merchants Only
VIP
Documentation
Staff

All applicable forums and sub-forums would end up under these main headings.
For example, instead of SEO having it's own zone, we'd just put it under Small Business Resources, since that is basically what it is, Merchants Only would include Feature Wish List, Tech Spot, etc, Documentation would house links to all of the online docs and software notes, and so on.

Keep in mind, we're just talking about changes at this point, this isn't a list of things that for sure will or won't get implemented, we're just trying to streamline the forums and make the experience easier for everyone around here. Personally, if I didn't spend most of my day on the forums and have a "view new threads" button, I'd be totally lost.

So tell me what you think of re-structuring, and tell me what ideas you've got!

Are you planning on removing sections, or just reorganizing them?

Mainly re-organizing.

We don't want to lose functionality, just mainly re-arraging things so they make more sense. A few things might go away, like for example, we're considering making all of the web design forums (web, coding and programming, design aspects) into one forum instead of several seperate ones, or the Using MonsterCommerce Software will include the How Do I and Storefront Admin since a lot of those questions are very similar or at least related.

IMHO, I think it makes sense and would be beneficial.

I also think it's necessary for take some time to go through all of the topics in the "Storefront Administration" and the "How Do I" sections and create many more quick guides for the basic questions that have been asked a million times. There's a lot of basic things missing from the documentation and the categories and FAQ's could really be taken up a notch. Without that, I doubt the redundant questions will stop.

That's my 2 cents. Great idea Clint.

Not only is updating/ re-writing the FAQs and QuickGuides a good point, the duty would fall squarely in my lap.

I think I'll start a seperate thread for FAQs or QuickGuides that need updating or complete re-writes.

Good call!

Idea of more and improved manuals, guides and faqs is excellent! Andrea's brought us a lot more quickguides recently. Great!

Once again (ignored in the past) I would ask that you date each page (with an edit date) so we can tell if anything's changed from one we may have printed previously. Sounds simple and worthwhile to me!

Back on topic, yes the forums rearrangement is a great idea too! Often there are similar posts in different forums making them all hard to follow.
Good luck, Clint

Sounds like a winner to me. I also would be lost without the " View New Post" option, as that is all I use when I come to the forums to check on new post and updates.

Having said that, I know I am one of those people that come here and ask a question that has been asked a thousand times because it is easier to get a quick awnser rather than sifting through tons of documentation and faqs. Of course I am lazy too

And also make sure you put a link to Undejj scripts and others that they have written. I am looking for one right now. Maybe they even deserve there own topic area.

Thanks,

Hey y'all, good news!

I was just informed that our QA team has just recently updated all of the FAQs and QuickGuides! If you've got a question and haven't been over to the kb site lately, check them out!

http://kb.monstercommerce.com

Here are few examples of the FAQ section and why it's painful to find things.

1 - The search function is just as bad as this forum. Unless you know the title of the FAQ, you are most likely out of luck finding something:

2 - Here's are some examples:

under Site Settings category in the FAQ section:

What does a site being slow, and running a trace in the command prompt have to do with Site Settings?

under Site Design category in the FAQ section:


There are plenty more, but that's just a taste. Hope that helps.

I'll forward the idea of using dates over to QA. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'll forward these on too.

Keep 'em coming folks! We apprecaite it!

Let me sound the opposite note.

I agree with some of your line of thought. However, combining multiple forums (for example all design related as you suggested) will make finding specific old posts etc. more difficult and complicated. (Unless of course you plan to improve the search functionality atthe same time.)

Basically, I think everyone uses the "new posts" feature for daily reading. So the current org is not a problem. However, it does help greatly when you want to try to find an old resource (since I've never found the search to be worth much). So I don't see much upside, but do see a downside to the reorg you put forward.

A second thought is that I'd want to be sure none of the current "merchant only" sections get opened up. I realize that crawled forums is something of a marketing tol for . However, us current users don't care and are much more interested in keeping any idea/advantage we get to ourselves (and avoiding having notes we want kept private from being visible to customers/competitors).

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
Ed

Very good points Ed! I didn't think of that.
I have a lot of posts bookmarked, and would hate to loose them.

What about a better search feature? This would make the info easier to find which in turn might weed out some of the "redundant" posts.

Good points.

None of the merchants only sub-forums will be opened up. In fact, we'll probably move some of the current unrestricted forums to the MO forums for that very reason- google spiders. We would rather our content pages be crawled than our forum pages, so it isn't really a problem for us in that sense.

I totally see your view on moving things around- it doesn't obviously help the experienced forum user much, if at all. However, I get tickets and emails from people who are just totally confused when they first set foot in the forum. I admit, I was. There's just so much information staring at you on the main index, it's hard to figure out where to start if you're a newbie. The "view new posts" works fine if you've been following along for a few weeks, but it doesn't do much good when everything is new to you. That's basically why I proposed the change. However, it's important to note, that it is just still a proposal. We really want a lot of feedback on this subject before we move on anything!

In regard to the search function, that's all Invision as far as I know. We didn't write this software, and it probably is in the EULA that we can't modify it without permission. I'm not 100% on that though, I'll check on it and let you know what I hear back. I'm also not sure if the threads themselves (and therefore your bookmarked addresses) will actually change locations, or just the path to them through the board will change. I'll check up on that too.

Thanks for the input!

I will look into purchasing an enterprise search application for the forums... I agree, the greatest weakness of the forums is search. I also agree, nothing that has been closed before should be opened to the public for search engine reasons.

I agree. Unless I'm looking for something posted in older threads, this is the only way I read the forums.

We've had some great suggestions here, folks... Anyone have some more?

Anything happen over the weekend that you'd like to talk about?

Me personally, Monday is always the toughest day getting back into the forums. I've been going back home on the weekends to get the house cleaned up and ready to sell, so I don't check the forums all weekend, then on Monday morning, I've got a whole bunch of "view new post posts." Would be nice to get this stuff re-organized...

2 Suggestions:

1 Since the search is so poor in locating specific posts, could we have the forum post # at the top when we print a topic? I have many printed pages of useful posts, but when I want to refer someone I haven't a clue how to find them to pass on.

2 To eliminate the almost daily confusion and posta about viewing merchant only forums, could something be put in place by your sales team to change a member's forum permissions automatically when they sign up and become a merchant? It seems such a page and time waster for forum members have to deal with this so frequently.

You mean like an absolute number for the posts as opposed to the current relative number to the thread? I don't know. I'll check with some of the folks around here and Invision to see if that's possible with this board.

I agree with you on the Verified Store Owner thing. It should just be automatic. Ditto for the VIP memberships. I have to think this is some kind of integration problem where we can't make our software log into the messageboard software and make this automatically happen, but I'll check just to be sure.

Good ideas! Keep them coming folks!

One last thing, there's all these people on the boards and only one guy so far feels like we shouldn't restructure the forums? Is it that good of an idea or are that many people not reading this thread?

I, too, think that restructuring the forums is a waste of time. No matter how they are structured, View New Posts will always be the #1 method for users to find threads to read and post in.

The greatest thing that you could spend your time doing would be to locate an enterprise solution for searching the forums, and Captain suggested he supported that idea. If the search function actually worked, there would be no need for a different structure.

My 2 cents ..

I agree completely! When doing a search, one has to be a mind reader to get to the correct area.

I also find this to be true in the kb section and other areas of that offer the search function.

Anne

That's true. Good point.

I'll check with el capitain and see what he says.

We have chosen to use Google's enterprise search technology for our forum search. One of our engineers is currently coding to assist to crawl appropriatly. Assuming no disasters... new forum search will be deployed late next week. It should be ALOT better.

Hey, just wanted to update on a few of the questions I've gotten answered.

1) About the forum post numbers (absolute vs. relative), if our new search function works as well as we believe it will, this will be a non-issue. If we install the new search and it still leaves something to be desired, we'll check into it.

2) Concerning bookmarks- if you have an actual topic bookmarked, it wouldn't matter if we move/re-organize. I'm told the thread's address isn't dependent on the forum it belongs to. That being said, if you bookmarked a forum (or a sub-forum), that bookmark would have to be updated.

Here is an update for the new search functionality... we are unable to get Google's Appliance to crawl the "password protected directories". We are still working on it but Google has said it is not possible. We are trying to find a workaround. If we are unable to get it to work, we will look at alternative solutions. Sorry for the delay.

Very very easy if you write a login share script.

This may be a dead issue since I am latecomer to this thread, and like many said earlier,” View New Posts“ is almost exclusively what I check and I hope that this is not removed. However my idea for improvement and hopefully less redundancy is with regards to “How do I?”, “MC Plug-ins & Add-ons”, “Ask a - Merchants Only” and probably others would be create a left side topic panel that is static (always there) on the forum that is much organized with the hierarchy of the MC admin panel that we all look at and use every day.

Orders +
-Store Orders
-Search Orders
-View Shopping Carts
-Order Invoice Print Settings
-Order Number Editor
-Order Status Editor
-Order HTML/Email System

Customers +
Order Processing +
Inventory +
-Inventory Manager
-Category Manager
-Warehouse Manager
-Manufacturer Manager
-Product Manager
-Product Group Manager
-Variant Matrix Manager
-Discount Code Manager
-Price Discount Manager
-Price Level Manager
-Gift Certificates
-eProducts

Site HTML +
Site Layout +
Site Information +
Reports +
Admin +
Plug-Ins +
Store Status +

This way as an example if I am an issue with discount codes and need some assistance from the staff or other merchants i know that I should go to “inventory” / “Discount Code Manager” and first check to see if there are any previous post with similar questions and hopefully answers.

Yes it would mean more categories and sub-categories but if it is set up with a similar hierarchy to the admin panel then there should be a lot less confusion on store owners with regards on where to post there question to get the best response.

Besides a better search feature, I'd like to be able to, when confronted with a several page topic, to be able to jump to last viewed entry. We used to have this feature but it disappeared some time back.

Search feature is BAD!!

(Sorry, an error occurred. If you are unsure on how to use a feature, or don't know why you got this error message, try looking through the help files for more information.

The error returned was:
One or all of your search keywords were below 4 characters or you are searched for words which are not allowed, such as 'html', 'img', etc, please go back and increase the length of these search keywords or choose different keywords.)

Does anyone know how to search for any thing in here that really works?

My point of view is:

I agree with Yoda (119.256%), and I would add that the forums can only increase in size, so in order to keep Fresh Data, maybe archive or delete old posts ..


BUT!....


I doesn't matter how "latest and greatest" technology can be added to this forums, if there is NO HUMAN INTERACTION, and I mean Forum Admins or whatever you may call them, this forums would become nothing but a Luxurious Room, where everyone still needs help, heard and taken care of their issues.


Fortunately I don't frecuent this forums too much, as I don't have the need to or have problems, but many merchants do, and what better than to have not just great technology but also customer support.

I like and so far it's been my best choice, and I recommend it to enyone that asks me about e-commerce solutions.

My 2 cents.

Scooter