Hi Zafar, I think your problem is that you're not making use of other resources, specifically the wiki.

For especially notable posts I'll try to put a link to those in the wiki, for example you can find links to several tutorial posts there:
http://moi3d.com/resources

Also on the top part of the wiki's resources page, there is a link to Petr's MoI page which contains a collection of all the v2 beta release notes, that is available here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

Probably when v3 betas come out I'll try to maintain a wiki page that contains the release notes rather than relying on Petr to collect them up as I did for v2.

In general though I think that having notable posts indexed by the wiki is a good strategy and deals with your most significant issues.

Note that the wiki is linked to from the main moi3d.com web site, it is the "Resources" link on that main page.


> A novice user wouldn't think of using "" in the search field,

Well, Google works pretty much in the same fashion, so that's a good one to learn to make better use of any searching mechanism.


> and it also seems that the search mechanism doesn't look at thread titles,

Yes, I think this is correct. That's probably something that can be fixed in the forum and most likely does not require just switching to a completely new forum.


> I can only guess why there haven't been more complaints, but
> you may be missing out on lot's of ppl - it is a realistic
> possibility IMO.

I doubt it - before the last forum update I did it was definitely mentioned more frequently. Your post here is the first gripe I've heard about it for quite a long time.

It would be odd for there to be a sudden and persisting drop off in negative comments if there were still significant issues.

It's certainly possible that I'm wrong, but based on all the information I have seen, it seems unlikely.


> I'd agree that the forum is indeed user friendly, but only to a
> certain degree. It's easy to "get going" and get a overall look
> quickly, but very limiting if you are interested in certain type
> of content.

Well, it's easy to post a question to and get an answer, and to read new topics... Those are the most important functions for the forum to accomplish.

Could you give some examples of which "certain types of content" you would be trying to find?

You mentioned my beta announcements, but as I've already described those are collected up in another place already.

If you look back over the past 100 posts or so, I think you'll find that there are quite a variety of things being covered - I don't think it is feasible to break things down in to like 50 different categories with a trickle of stuff in many of them and then a whole lot in one "general" category. For the most part you will still run into the issue that you are complaining about, with having a lot of threads in one category.


> and as mentioned above, the search feature isn't helping much.

In general it actually works very well, I use it very frequently to find previous discussions. I do agree that it could use some tuning to include the title in the search results, that would have probably solved your problem.


> It's very much like having a book without a table of content.

The problem is, that you can't easily have a table of content when the content is widely varying and not easily lumped into nice neat categories.

Official announcements makes up something like less than 1 percent of the posts.

WIPs probably make up less than 5 percent of the posts.

Unless you can suggest some organization method where there would be a nice even distribution of all the discussion topics, your overall suggestion of having a table of contents mechanism just simply does not fit with what is actually happening in the forum...


> A mixed list does have benefits, but it's just that it's the only option here.

Well as I described earlier, it actually has benefits _when_ it is the only option, because that's when there is no ambiguity or mistakes that can happen about posting to the wrong category.


> Another thing on that note - tabs are rather common these
> days. I don't like the back and forth thing myself, so I use
> tabs (I also use new/latest posts features frequently, but
> far from exclusively).

Yeah, certainly I use tabs a lot when browsing the web as well.

But for something that has a nice already ordered list, it makes more sense to have some kind of UI that tries to make working with the list easier.

You can certainly use tabs as well, but it is just not as orderly or as simple for the primary case of just reading several threads - having the whole screen jump to different states when you want to switch is far more jarring than this forum UI.


> > re: people posting in the wrong category
>
> I agree that it requires some effort, but you can have
> volunteers that you trust as moderators - many do this
> including professionals.

Well, you're not quite getting the whole point - it's not just the fact that it takes moderation time to do that administration work, it's that it just clutters up the discussion and makes for people to have to see extra text, think about extra issues, rather than just post something.


> but having a forum gallery/wip section would have made
> much better and easier to get a "real life" impression of the
> application. Current forum forces me to dig harder and not all
> thread titles indicate what they may contain.

Sorry, I don't really see how the current separate Gallery does not totally solve this - there are a whole bunch of examples there and it is already separated out into its own section of the web site.

That's really why the Gallery exists - it solves this exact problem about giving you an overview of a lot of different things that were produced with MoI.

Why do you consider it so important for the forum to fulfill this task when the Gallery already is doing it?


> One final note: I think you are underestimating the
> importance of a proper forum - I've seen bunch of sites
> using old forums.

Sorry, I just don't really get it - this forum is easy to use and is serving the purpose of discussions about MoI very well... That means it is certainly a "proper" forum.

Additionally it is easier and also nicer to use than the forums that you are suggesting - the overall mechanism of a separate thread list and the way that you can easily see only new posts is superior to the UI in the other forums that you are mentioning.

Switching to a different forum would be a significant downgrade, not an upgrade or an improvement...


I still may do a couple of categories in the future, but like I've mentioned there is not any really good organization method that comes to mind that would evenly distribute messages. So the thing you seem to think is the main problem - having a large number of messages in a single category - would likely also be the case in a different forum as well.

As I've already mentioned, this forum does have a way to organize things into categories as well, so there is not any need to actually switch to a different forum to do that.

Thanks for your feedback, but I'm sorry I find your conclusions to be largely incorrect so it is not likely that I will be able to act on your recommendations.

- Michael