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· Sep 19, 2017

DC: Improvement Ideas (NOT OFFICIAL)

#Other

Hello all.

I think the forum experience is great as whole, but it could improve even more if we had somewhere to share our ideas. So that's why I'm creating a thread dedicated for that purpose. Maybe this way someone from InterSystems could catch something good?


Now let me begin.

 

  1. Reduce reply shrinking ratio. Shrinking too much can make the reading experience a pain on mobile devices as the discussion goes on. Even normal browser can suffer with this layout if a single post gets more than 5 replies.
  2. Allow a single reply to be selected as the answer. You'll notice that the first WYSIWYG you get is to REPLY the OP, and replies don't support answer checks.
  3. Set a sticky note that advices the user to choice an answer so that he won't forget.
  4. Allow the user to update it's Answer choice.
  5. This one is related to no 3, instead of showing the reply editor right from the beginning, hide it untill the user clicks on Add new comment. This way, the first editor the user will see is for answering.
  6. Drafts should be versionable if the user wants to, this is probably the hardest feature to implement, but long posts would really appreciate it. The amount of versions could be limited though.
  7. Tutorial tag? Seriously... there'are sufficient tutorial threads to deserve a tutorial tag. I wouldn't consider Online Learning the same as tutorial.


Anyone else for a follow-up?

Thank you for your patience.
 

Discussion (11)1
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Robert Cemper · Sep 19, 2017

my full support to 3 !!!!   and to 5, 2, 4 in this priority.

The difference between   ANSWER and COMMENT  causes  more confusion than being helpful.
Especially in the actual sequence.
Comment to Answers eventually may make sense. 
More than once I found myself in a Comment where it should have been an Answer.  

My suggestion:

 -handle all editing just in a modal pop-up .
- allow deleting (or hiding) your entry if you don't feel it appropriate anymore.

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Rubens Silva · Sep 21, 2017

Hello Evgeny! Sure!

 No. 5 means that instead of showing the editor that creates a reply, leave it hidden untill the user clicks Add new comment. This way this editor won't appear before the one that creates an answer. 

Doing that, it's possible to prevent replies that should be an answer, so that they can be checked by the OP.

 

No 7. is simple, but I'll elaborate it to explain the why. I have noticed that the community contributes a lot with tutorials (including mine), but there's no way to classify them in that way, leaving them mixed with unrelated threads. Several times, these tutorials get lost because they disappear from the user's visibility, since they get pushed down by newer threads.

So if you introduce a tag or even a group to correlate them, it would make easier to search them.
 

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Rubens Silva · Sep 21, 2017

Nice, but to prevent flooding the OP's e-mail inbox you could introduce an internal timer that gets triggered when a new answer is posted.

e.g., if I post a new thread asking for help with something. And someone posts an anwer, as I'm the OP I'll be notified by e-mail if I don't see the thread again within 15 minutes. If I still don't see the thread, wait another day and send the e-mail again.

Well, something like that.

Actually... forget my idea, I guess it would complicate and annoy OPs even more needlessly.

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