Forum (Discuss) Enhancement suggestions

I would very much like to see the name of the OP in addition to the name of the most recent poster -- as in the old forum. I found that very useful.

I also think there should be a profile setting to determine the default setting for the email checkbox (honored for posts, replies, and modifying a post). I never want emails because I read the subject of every message and can select unread replies, but obviously some folks want email for all replies.

BTW, the email checkbox has been off for posts and replies, but is always checked when modifying a message. I keep forgetting to uncheck it.

I guess this thread should have been a Discussion instead of a Question. Oh well. If items are added to the tracker then I'll mark it Answered. I'd do that myself but my tracker access is still in limbo.

Another enhancement item: Add the date to the board summary. "Forum Maintenance today" was the last post to the Announcements board, and that was posted 3 weeks ago. It's helpful to be able to skim down boards to see the latest posting in each.

Quote from: BobRay at Jan 08, 2013, 03:50 AM

I would very much like to see the name of the OP in addition to the name of the most recent poster -- as in the old forum. I found that very useful.

I second that.

Quote from: captainstarbuck at Jan 14, 2013, 09:36 AM

Add the date to the board summary.

And that as well.

Two enhancements:
Not sure how these can get implemented properly but the idea needs to come first...

Every suggestion in these forums should be entered into the tracker for consideration and work by whomever can take on the task. It doesn't matter if a suggestion is implemented but it should be given proper consideration. Right now we post notes into the forum, hope that they're considered by "someone", then later we all forget over time. Things get lost, good ideas go unprocessed, people get discouraged. Some ideas get implemented, bugs get fixed, but we don't know about it.

Enhancement#1 is to allow a Discuss forum administrator or someone with the correct role assignment to assign a tracker ID to any specific post (not thread). The fields would be the trackerID, ID of the person setting the data, and a timestamp. With this we can go to the tracker via a link to see the current status of the reported bug/feature.

For extra points, it would be nice if tracker items linked back to the forum postings (not threads but individual posts) but given that that's Confluence and the environments are different I understand the disparity. I'm just thinking an automatic bi-directional link would be cool. As it is, someone maintaining a tracker item should be able to manually link to the forum to reference discussions.

Enhancement#2 is to allow per-post ratings. This will eliminate a lot of "me too"s, and make it easier for those making decisions on tracker items to determine the severity or popularity of a change. I think the Facebook "Like" and Google+ "+1" mechanisms are deficient and would suggest that right up front this should be a +1/-1 vote option. Individuals should be allowed to change their vote later, as forum members are allowed to modify their content.

I've said recently that I think it's a shame that Discuss is just going to duplicate functionality available elsewhere. It would be ideal if StackOverflow functionality could be built-in here, but this is what it is.

Enhancement#1 is to allow a Discuss forum administrator or someone with the correct role assignment to assign a tracker ID to any specific post (not thread). The fields would be the trackerID, ID of the person setting the data, and a timestamp. With this we can go to the tracker via a link to see the current status of the reported bug/feature.

Silly suggestion, I know, but can't whoever adds an item to the tracker, like, post the link to the created issue in the thread? I'm not seeing why we should complicate/slow down the process by requiring admins to add an ID which gets turned into a link.

Enhancement 2 sounds like a great idea to try out the process of enhancement 1.

I see what you're saying but that creates a situation where a suggestion is made at the beginning of a thread and everyone needs to read through the entire thread to see if any tracker items were posted for it. We've been using forums like that for decades. I'm just thinking it would be neat to have the report and trackerID in one place. We don't see that anywhere else. People choose software based on business needs as well as innovation and value-add features. If this idea doesn't fly, the discussion can move on. Thanks.

Another enhancement I'd like to see is the automatic creation of a Forum thread (either a support thread or an announcement -- or both) when an Extra is submitted or updated.

There's no reason it can't be automated. We can create code in Discuss, and we have an API to the bug tracker, Redmine, which is actually a Ruby app. There's certainly merit to it, and no reason not to consider it. (I think I even have a todo filed in the Basecamp project for something similar in fact, that I've not pushed out to the tracker yet. Something similar has certainly been discussed in the past.)

I personally think it would certainly be convenient IMO to be able to discuss a topic in the forums, when consensus by a group of folks was reached, to use something similar to the tech support template when creating a question topic to essentially fill out the details of what you wanted then to create an issue in Redmine. Both tools are better at different things. For Discuss, talking about ideas, debating them and brainstorming. For Redmine, managing a software product.

Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas.

Adding to the list (with a few separate postings...):
- Ability to Mark All as Read for the entire forum, not just individual boards.
- Ability to Mark All as Read for a parent board And its sub-boards, where currently we need to go into each sub-board.
- Ability to Mark Unread as-of a given date/time.

I'm thinking about how different people are asking for different rendering features in the forum. What about allowing per-user templates?

As an example, this modx.com implementation of Discuss doesn't show last posting date/time on the main forum page, and shows the original thread date Above the last post date on boards. I personally would like to see a last post date for each board on the main page, and the last date Above the original date on individual threads. Of course others might not want that and it's unreasonable to ask for this as a site feature. But if each of us can tune our own chunks that the site uses for rendering, then we can get it to look exactly the way we want. That's something that this CMS wrapper can provide around the forum which other environments cannot.