Hello All,
As mentioned in other threads, we are working on enhancements to the Keil forum.
As a starting point, we looked at suggestions in these previous threads. We will not be able to add all of these features, but even those that don't make it will server as guidance for us.
- http://www.keil.com/forum/17220/ - http://www.keil.com/forum/17398/ - http://www.keil.com/forum/57375
I shall do my best to summarize these below. If not otherwise specified, assume these comments come from thread 17220.
These are from 10 years ago, so... - Which suggestions are no longer relevant? - Which ones are needed now more than ever? - What new feedback do you have? - What features do you love about the current forum that you would NOT want see disappear?
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Since this is your forum, we want to make sure enhancements work for the community. We'll try to make enhancements that meet the overall themes and goals you lay out (with the resources and time we have).
Thank you again for your participation in this forum, and all the good suggestions and conversations you have given over the years. We hope with these enhancements, will keep our community going for years to come.
Old threads should be locked BEFORE someone posts X years later, not AFTER, which seems to be the current behaviour.
Provide a simple means to ask a SIMILAR question, where the current thread is provided as context, but discouraging just saying "Me Too" by providing a means to provide current/specific details.
Auto-generate a list of related threads/questions asked when displaying the current one. Think Amazon, people who bought X looked at Y. Rank by relevance/score, ideally just as a short title. Perhaps provide for a means to up-vote, or add to the list.
Make sure 'Search' actually works. see SaXlesforce based sites to see how NOT to do it. Typically either completely fails to list threads with known content, or a wall of noise.
Fit forum to browser page width, regardless of how large the screen is. I'll resize if I don't like how it flows, but don't serve a screen with 60% of unused space.
Two or three flags from high karma users will hide spam immediately for review by staff on duty. Sufficient flagging on a single user, or multiple hiding behind a single IP, should be enough to hide content from everyone except the user(s) in question. ie they don't know they are invisible, but their behaviour reinforces internally scoring as a spammer.
Hello Per,
Thanks for the quick reply and good suggestions.
re: SaXlesforce, is it search by metadata that you want to discourage? Ranking results?
re: BB-code - is this something you still use? Should we be looking into it?
Logins: Waiting period: (or similar deterrant) Seconded. Or acctually, make that thousandsted, or whatever a proper English term would be for emphasizing the absolute importance of that.
Captchas simply don't work. It's extremely obvious they don't actually keep spammers from spamming, and they do annoy legitimate contributors.
Moderation by users Again, thousandsted. We've been having spam waves rather evidently synchronized to time windows when there wouldn't be anybody in any position to do about them. That's what you get once spammers realize such windows exist, and the community has no way to help itself.
Finally, after all this time, fix the display of posting times, please? The displayed "most recent" time for a thread differs from the time of the actual posting by some timezone offset. Even though both expliitely claim to be in GMT. If nothing else can be done, at least remove the "GMT" from the one that's not, perhaps?
Just to clarify on the time zones: my previous posting diplays, here, as 14:23 GMT, whereas according to the thread list, it's supposed to be from 21:23 GMT.
Well, those timestamps are both wrong. The post was actually made at 15:23 CEST (i.e. UDT+0200), which would be 13:23 GMT.
Just really it is an implementation that is completely useless and frustrating. Basically sites using this Salesforce "forum" software would be more effectively searched with Google, than sites own resources. Several large corps have migrated to this as it integrates well with back office and CRM systems. Microsoft's system was similarly awful. Jive was reasonably workable, but starved of developers to actually fix anything behind the pretty facade.