Thank You Bob Beatty
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When I look at the categories on the homepage I see 3 categories that have at least 10x more threads than the other categories.
Water Closet
IT Discussion
NewsWater Closet is fine because its just random junk, but it would be helpful to be able to sort by popularity. I realize you can do that by using the sort by on the right. I know you can also view popular threads for the entire community. I think it would be nice to have something clickable in this white area. MangoLassi is a very fast community and it slows down the speed when you have to to click the drop down box and sort. Not to mention that it saves your setting so you have to do it again to sort it back. Icons somewhere in the whitespace on the middle of screen may help streamline this
IT Discussion really needs sub categories. Its difficult to browse and I rarely myself searching for old threads to find useful information. Searching is difficult.
News is pretty much fine the way it is since you want it to display newest to oldest.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ one thing I know that is needed is having the ability to see recent, popular and unread in the existing categories rather than only as an entire site.
lol... look at my feedback
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@IRJ said:
IT Discussion really needs sub categories. Its difficult to browse and I rarely myself searching for old threads to find useful information. Searching is difficult.
That's the biggest two things to me. We need sub categories and much better search. Search is probably the worst part of the site.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@IRJ said:
IT Discussion really needs sub categories. Its difficult to browse and I rarely myself searching for old threads to find useful information. Searching is difficult.
That's the biggest two things to me. We need sub categories and much better search. Search is probably the worst part of the site.
I prefer quite a few subcategories. Maybe not as many as SW, but along those lines. When things are categorized nicely, its much easier to find stuff without using the search feature
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I think somewhere in this whitespace would be a good place to add buttons to organize within categories. Somewhere on the breadcrumb bar would be ideal.
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Subcategories exist in the platform but they are complex and would, I think, make the site really hard to navigate.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Subcategories exist in the platform but they are complex and would, I think, make the site really hard to navigate.
You have to think of the occasional users who just want visit ML to find information and may or may not contribute. They just want to find information while on the site.
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It doesnt matter to us, because we are on here almost everyday so we can actually keep up with all the threads so subcategories is no big deal
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@IRJ said:
You have to think of the occasional users who just want visit ML to find information and may or may not contribute. They just want to find information while on the site.
Do occasional users actually look for categorized information in that way and, if so, how would that work once there is any volume? There are already tags so if someone is interested in say Windows, SaaS or ERP they would find everything associated with that topic in that way. Subcategories force everyone to dig deep to find topics and it is really easy to lose things.
Learning from other communities... in tech, lots of categorization is tough because the people making posts can't figure out where things go and you spend all your time moving things around. Someone wanting to ask about why something is broken is often confused if the issue is hardware or software, desktop or server, system or network, vendor or generic, etc. It's nearly impossible to come up with categories that doesn't create significant limitations. That's why we went for tags, so things aren't as strict, and can be multiple things.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
You have to think of the occasional users who just want visit ML to find information and may or may not contribute. They just want to find information while on the site.
Do occasional users actually look for categorized information in that way and, if so, how would that work once there is any volume? There are already tags so if someone is interested in say Windows, SaaS or ERP they would find everything associated with that topic in that way. Subcategories force everyone to dig deep to find topics and it is really easy to lose things.
Learning from other communities... in tech, lots of categorization is tough because the people making posts can't figure out where things go and you spend all your time moving things around. Someone wanting to ask about why something is broken is often confused if the issue is hardware or software, desktop or server, system or network, vendor or generic, etc. It's nearly impossible to come up with categories that doesn't create significant limitations. That's why we went for tags, so things aren't as strict, and can be multiple things.
I think it would at least be good to have categories for certain technologies, Say Windows Client OS, Windows Server, AD/Group Policy, Linux, etc.
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I'd love to have a mobile app with push notifications but that's probably asking for too much.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
You have to think of the occasional users who just want visit ML to find information and may or may not contribute. They just want to find information while on the site.
Do occasional users actually look for categorized information in that way and, if so, how would that work once there is any volume? There are already tags so if someone is interested in say Windows, SaaS or ERP they would find everything associated with that topic in that way. Subcategories force everyone to dig deep to find topics and it is really easy to lose things.
Learning from other communities... in tech, lots of categorization is tough because the people making posts can't figure out where things go and you spend all your time moving things around. Someone wanting to ask about why something is broken is often confused if the issue is hardware or software, desktop or server, system or network, vendor or generic, etc. It's nearly impossible to come up with categories that doesn't create significant limitations. That's why we went for tags, so things aren't as strict, and can be multiple things.
I find myself forgetting to use tags. When you have to select a category to post in it at least makes you put it somewhere. I am sure there are some ML users that might offer to be mods or just have rights to move categories. We aren't seeing huge volume right now. Even if we saw 100 posts a day and 25% of them were categorized incorrectly there would only be 25 moves. Many visit the site more than 25 times a day so it really wouldn't take that much effort.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I think it would at least be good to have categories for certain technologies, Say Windows Client OS, Windows Server, AD/Group Policy, Linux, etc.
Those are really tough. It's actually pretty rare that any topic goes cleanly into any one of those. Something that is Windows is likely both workstation AND server and sometimes neither. AD and Group Policy normally overlaps with any number of things, including both Windows Server and Windows Desktop. It's much more complicated than it seems and I've never seen a community where it works. The community that you are thinking of has people constantly missing things because they are in the wrong category or not able to be in enough of them.
I think that tag subscriptions would be idea. That way you can subscribe to "Everything about Active Directory" rather than just "things so obviously about AD that they didn't get put anywhere else."
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I'd love to have a mobile app with push notifications but that's probably asking for too much.
Agreed and that is more likely than most things.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I think that tag subscriptions would be idea. That way you can subscribe to "Everything about Active Directory" rather than just "things so obviously about AD that they didn't get put anywhere else."
The occasional visitor doesn't want to subscribe though. At least that is my opinion.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I think it would at least be good to have categories for certain technologies, Say Windows Client OS, Windows Server, AD/Group Policy, Linux, etc.
Those are really tough. It's actually pretty rare that any topic goes cleanly into any one of those. Something that is Windows is likely both workstation AND server and sometimes neither. AD and Group Policy normally overlaps with any number of things, including both Windows Server and Windows Desktop. It's much more complicated than it seems and I've never seen a community where it works. The community that you are thinking of has people constantly missing things because they are in the wrong category or not able to be in enough of them.
I think that tag subscriptions would be idea. That way you can subscribe to "Everything about Active Directory" rather than just "things so obviously about AD that they didn't get put anywhere else."
Then many mandatory pre-denfied tags in addition to user-defined tags would be the way to go.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
The many mandatory pre-denfied tags in addition to user-defined tags would be the way to go.
That would be nice.
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@IRJ said:
The occasional visitor doesn't want to subscribe though. At least that is my opinion.
Probably not, but if they are going to take the time to go through a hierarchy of subgroups, why not just call tags "subgroups" and get the same effect?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I think it would at least be good to have categories for certain technologies, Say Windows Client OS, Windows Server, AD/Group Policy, Linux, etc.
Those are really tough. It's actually pretty rare that any topic goes cleanly into any one of those. Something that is Windows is likely both workstation AND server and sometimes neither. AD and Group Policy normally overlaps with any number of things, including both Windows Server and Windows Desktop. It's much more complicated than it seems and I've never seen a community where it works. The community that you are thinking of has people constantly missing things because they are in the wrong category or not able to be in enough of them.
Nothing has to be categorized perfectly. It just needs to be matched to the best category. I would say workstation that wont get group policy updates should be under AD and Group Policy since it has to do with Group Policy. Even though the issue may lie in the workstation itself.
Nobody is going to critique the categorization down to a T. In fact Microsoft forums have issues with it too. Its understandable and acceptable to general place topics in the best match category.
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@IRJ said:
Nobody is going to critique the categorization down to a T. In fact Microsoft forums have issues with it too. Its understandable and acceptable to general place topics in the best match category.
It's not about critiquing, it is that if the subcategories are useful then they have to be accurate. If they aren't accurate, then they aren't useful. Does that make sense? If you are using them for filtering, and they filter out things you should have seen, they fail. And they make it far more complex for someone who is posting a question, because the person least prepared to know what category something should be in is the one more or less forced to pick where it goes. At least initially.
