This forum is a mess!

I'm interested to see where this goes, I have thought this for sometime. I've only scanned the thread but I get the idea. My main issues was with general discussions being full of support requests. I think it would be really helpful to try and build the general discussion section into an area where people hang out. This then acts as starting point to go off and explore other areas. I'm on a couple of forums which are organised in such a way that I have a decent idea of whats going on in each sub-forum and which users are likely to be hanging out there. I don't feel that here, but in fairness I haven't been on the forums much recently.

Strange... it's always been unchecked for me. Ok, now I see it check when I modify. Not when I post.

So, if Jay is busy, maybe some of the "trusted" community members can recieve a copy of modx.com-flavored Discuss and take care of it?

whitebyte,

I realized this may be in another place in the Discuss code. That said, I am going to throw in a huge tangent and ask what everyone might think about product Q&A shifting to StackExchange and leaving discussions only at MODX.com and perhaps on yet another forum platform (Discuss 1 is painfully slow)? Just putting it out there for now but we're seeing more and more people seeking answers about MODX at Stack Overflow.

Something we're hoping to do is lighten the infrastructure burden for the MODX team and we don't really want to dump the burden onto the MODX Community. One key problem we have with Discuss is that the forums are in a Context of MODX.com and therefore, handing over the keys to community members is not something we can readily do.

Just putting that out there for thoughts.

Jay

shifting to StackExchange

Sounds good, using StackOverflow as an "official" QA board is a common practice these days.

I suspect that it would be harder to find things on StackOverflow, but I can see why you'd want to do it.

With respect to the Discuss code, I assume that you have a private GitHub repository somewhere for Discuss (or could easily create one). If selected people were allowed to fork that, they could probably tell you how to fix the issues (or better yet, issue pull requests to fix them). That shouldn't compromise the modx.com site at all, and if you don't give them rights to modify the repo directly, it can't hurt Discuss either.

There are only a couple of problems in Discuss that I still care about. I suspect that at least one of them would be a pretty easy fix.

Using StackOverflow for things like tutorials, howtos, best practices, other *finished* contents would be perfect. I wouldn't prefer Q&A over there, though.

For Discuss, I am happy to help if I can.

nuan88, i thought Stackoverflow IS the QA service primarily, not a place for tutorials etc. On the other hand, Discuss is already here, although it isn't perfect, it does the job.

whitebyte, my (minor) complaint about the forum is that its hard to find updated info. For some reason when I want to figure something out and search on google, I seem to always have to wade through 4 year old posts to find newer contents. For some issues it doesn't matter of course, but for a lot of things it would be better if the collective knowledge of the community was sort of distilled and made available in a simple form. Susan is doing that with her cookbook, maybe everyone should whip up a recipe and send to her haha.

I used the example of the multi-lingual site for Russian and Chinese and other languages, when setting up a new install its crucial to make sure the mysql is set to utf-8 before setting up the databases, otherwise the tables have a wrong collation, and its a pain to fix. Fixing it later is not the same as helping users do it right the first time and get on with their projects. And we just learned that, in Class Extender, if you forget a field you will have a lot of work to add it to an existing table, its great to know in advance but most users probably won't find that info in time (might be wrong on C-E because its new and won't have too many hits, but you get the point).

My thing with Discuss has always been, document steps and bugs and issues, and create best practices, get all the needed info in one place so people can get up and running smoothly, and so on. Its not perfect but that's the goal.

But that's just me, heck, if you want, turn SO into MODX Q&A and this forum into tutorials haha! I just want the information organized to some extent, which is hard work I know given all the areas and extras and so on.

I agree that SO is supposed to be Q&A, kind of forgot about that. One time I posted my own solution and people got angry with me. ;-)

I agree, there are a lot of obsolete topics, and i don't see any moderators at all to sort them out. On my second thought i see some potential issues with using SO as the primary QA service, one of them is non-English-speaking users.