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Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 3:20 pm
by johanar
I think groups could be used more efficiently. Currently it seems a little like people join groups just to get a badge showing "hey, I'm interested in this topic" and then forget about it.

As I see it the problems are:
* Groups are inaccessible, in that you first have to go to your profile, scroll down a little and then click the group logo.
* You don't get any indication of group activity, so you manually have to check each group for new posts. I don't want to have to use RSS for this.
* Groups doesn't provide much additional functionality compared to the forum.

So heres some suggestion (which might not work together, so pick the ones you like)
* Your group list (on profile) shows number of new posts, next to each group.
* Add a big Groups button at the top of the page. It could take you to a stream of posts from all your groups and of course a link to the page with all groups.
* Remove Group Posts entirely but automatically create a subforum for each group. These would show up in a category in the regular forum. A nice feature would be if it by default only displayed the forums belonging to groups that you're a member of, but you could toggle "display all group forums" easily.

Re: Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 6:56 pm
by jonathan
Some additional comments:

1. Group post formatting doesn't work too well for long posts.
2. I need to get notified of replies to my comments or activity on my groups in a better way. I don't have a particular suggestion for how but there are some good ideas above.

Re: Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:12 pm
by trousers
The same is true of project comments and the same solution would work well there: every group and project should automatically get a sub-forum.

The groups and comment functionality isn't well integrated and is feature poor compared to the forum.

Re: Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:20 pm
by jonathan
I have another suggestion: members of XMOS should have a little flag next to their usernames indicating this.

It's customary to do this online (see twitter and almost every other electronics community forum targeting a specific technology) as it gives some context to their comments, and helps users understand that they are truly connected to the company through the website.

If they want to post anonymously, they should have separate accounts.

Re: Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:28 pm
by jason
Thanks guys for the feedback. I have already figured there is not enough integration with the groups currently - I am on to this!

This is the first release of XCore Exchange so to speak, so naturally there will be a few things we need to build and improve upon with time - especially notifications when new posts are made. This is already in my to-do list, so fear not this will be addressed and will be integrated in time.

Re: Improvement suggestion for groups

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:56 pm
by johanar
Another nice-to-have for the groups would be some kind of notification when group posts are edited, perhaps bumping edited and commented posts to the top. And stickies, that would be neat. Though I suppose both these would be remedied if groups were merged into the forums.