It's so simple, why change something who works :)
I am alas on many from :D and this one is the more speedy : no superfluous!

PS And don't forget that for the moment just one guy manage it so...it's the best for him :)

The tagging system would need to be maintained as a very small "controlled" tag set. Otherwise, it degrades into a useless pile of goo. Community softwares utilize this and i have to run for the hills when I see it. Uterly useless. But the way you just described it, if controlled a bit, could be very usefull!

Michael:

My apologies for not giving you a proper reply to your comments and questions, because it may seem like I put forums very high, and I don't - I strongly think it would be a wise move to implement sub-forums/sections though, either by adding them through the current forum or a new one. That doesn't really matter. I was primarily interested in expressing my opinion on the matter, and I hope more will join in.

I will be sending you a PM with few notes.

Hi Zafar, well what categories would you suggest?

Ones that have come to mind to me would probably fit something like 6% of the total number of threads, leaving 94% all in one big area, not really much different from the current situation really, just with some new complications.

In the v3 timeframe I will try to put more effort into putting particularly significant notifications on the wiki instead of only in the forum, I believe that will handle your original issue of wanting to track down the beta release notes.

And as noted previously, there is already a separate Gallery section on the web site. There is no need to try and separate out something for that in the forum, it is already separated out.

- Michael

General (can be any topic that doesn't fit into the other categories)
Gallery/WIP's
Help (an isolated place to ask for assistance)
Feature requests (if u'd like. Could get crowded fast - such sub-forums always does :) )

That's only 4 and from the top of my head - but browsing would be much cleaner already and make more sense - as a MoI noob I'd be most interested in the gallery and help sections, and have already filtered out many irrelevant threads. A 100% clean forum can't be guaranteed but as long as ppl do their best to stick within the proper category, this forum will already be heading the right direction.

I understand there may be plugin support later? If that's the case then you might want a category for plugin developers. Perhaps one for development and one for releases.

Those 6 and 94% can very well have to do with the forum not being organized so ppl don't care about how they use the forum. Since it's all one big pile to begin with, it wouldn't make much sense in keeping each thread clean and that, I believe, can turn into a problem in itself - like reflecting as those 94%.

I didn't include announcements/news - if they are available from the site, then that's fine. I used the beta announcements as an example - but it's not the same with the gallery for the reasons I gave in my PM.

Edit: I almost forgot - don't wait till/after v3. You should do it now! :)

Hello,

I actually like the current format, it is simple to navigate and fast. Categorizing is good and bad. It may make it a little faster to get to relevant information, but on the downside I have seen each section and userbase become isolated from the other, so it is always possible to stifle information sharing.

One thing I think that would be good is the ability to tag and follow posts and have those show up at the top in case I want to follow a thread to its conclusion.

As far as demo goes, a timed (8 hour), no save version would be fine. SketchUP was not free until Google bought them, and as I remember SU was more expensive than MoI is today even at version 2. MoI is a steal at $295, nothing else comes close to this number in terms of value for dollar spent. It's just a matter of budgeting and prioritization of funds.

I agree, the current format seems fine to me. You could probably get away with splitting things up into a small number of categories (e.g. "Announcements / Beta Updates", "Bug Reports / Tech. Issues", "Feature Requests", and "General Discussion"). I'm not sure a tagging system would be a better idea for this type of forum, though. It works well for stackoverflow.com because of the extensive range of languages, frameworks, utilities, and so on.

Anyhow, you already mentioned what I consider to be the best way to "upgrade" the forum. A well maintained wiki would do wonders for people simply interested in the random tidbits and nuggets of information that are often hidden in rather dull looking threads. Many of your replies to mundane questions/problems are so perfectly detailed and illustrated that it's a real shame for them to go unreferenced. I bet many people here already keep an extensive list of bookmarks to such posts.

Hi Zafar,

> General (can be any topic that doesn't fit into the other categories)
> Gallery/WIP's
> Help (an isolated place to ask for assistance)
> Feature requests (if u'd like. Could get crowded fast - such sub-forums always does :) )

I really doubt that it would work as well... For example a lot of posts contain stuff that would fit into more than 1 of your categories here, like someone asks for help and also has a feature request in the same post, that happens frequently.

It seems like it would add some complexity to the forum, without enough gain to make up for the negative qualities of the added complexity.


> but as long as ppl do their best to stick within the proper category

That never really happens, instead what happens is a lot of continual noise and additional traffic pestering people about going into the right category.


> I understand there may be plugin support later? If that's the case
> then you might want a category for plugin developers. Perhaps
> one for development and one for releases.

When the time comes for plug-in support, I would expect to branch that off into its own separate forum, that one is easier to do because a plug-in developer is very different kind of user. If there is a clear way to separate one group of users from another group of users, that's the kind of thing that I would agree can make for a good separation into different categories.


> as a MoI noob I'd be most interested in the gallery and help sections,

Well, there already is a gallery section, it's here: http://moi3d.com/gallery/

Why do you think having a second gallery section would somehow be useful for someone new who wanted to browse gallery stuff. I mean why would they not just go to the current gallery to browse gallery stuff?


Sorry, but I just don't see much value in what you are proposing, instead it seems likely to add unneeded complexity to the forum and impeding the flow of discussion.


A tagging system as I described previously would probably be a lot better, since it would allow an organization method but as an overlay system on top of the current discussion stream without impeding it.

- Michael

Hi OSTexo,

> One thing I think that would be good is the ability to
> tag and follow posts and have those show up at the
> top in case I want to follow a thread to its conclusion.

Actually that is already supported. To use it, you need to edit the options for a thread, you can do that either by clicking on the little icon to the left of the thread title in the threads list, or there is an "Edit thread options" link at the bottom of the thread's message list.

There you can mark a particular thread as "interested" or "subscribed", and in the View dropdown at the top of the threads list you can pick to show only High interest (marked as interested) or Subscribed threads to filter the threads list.

I think that when you post inside of a thread it will automatically get marked as high interest, there is an option for disabling that under Options > Forum options > Display > "Automatically mark threads I post in as High Interest" .

- Michael

Hi vodkamartini,

> I'm not sure a tagging system would be a better idea for
> this type of forum, though. It works well for stackoverflow.com
> because of the extensive range of languages, frameworks,
> utilities, and so on.

Well, stackoverflow.com is just one example - often times blogs will have a similar tagging system even when there are not a huge range of tags like in stackoverflow.

The part that's good about a tag system is that it allows a main UI that is a linear stream of content, but then gives some organization / filtering available as an option when you want to search and browse older stuff.

That's instead of trying to rigidly separate and impose categories on the discussion from the very top level.


> Many of your replies to mundane questions/problems are so
> perfectly detailed and illustrated that it's a real shame for them
> to go unreferenced.

Yeah, I should do a better job of linking things on the wiki.

Sometimes though an answer may be very particularly tailored for the specific project that the person is asking about.

- Michael

What I envisioned with those categories probably fits in with how you see the tags working. Right now you have a "View" dropdown at the top of the threadlist pane that filters threads based on how old they are (and if you're logged in, whether they have unread posts) and so on. I was thinking along the lines of having a "Category" dropdown above that, which would filter the threadlist by category as well. The default value for the dropdown would be "All Categories", so the forum would still work the way it does now, but people would have the option to browse with a more narrow focus..

So I guess the only real difference would be the one to many relationships (ie. A thread could have many tags, but only belong to one category). My argument against tags was simply that I couldn't see enough overlap in content to warrant needing the tag system. I know you've given the example of a "can't get this working" thread turning into a "feature request" thread, which I realize suggests a tag system would be more beneficial. At the same, however, I can't see people wanting to browse on a great deal of tags. Topics like "bugs", "feature requests", and "beta announcements" are typically the ones I would want to narrow my focus on, and for the most part they are mutually exclusive. In cases like the one you presented, I would personally prefer if the thread was moved to wherever it fit best (perhaps renaming the topic or making it more descriptive).

In all honesty though, I'm pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. I'm just tossing ideas out. Either method is useful in the end.

Hi vodkamartini, yeah what you are describing with a category dropdown is pretty much the same kind of thing that I was referring to as tags.

> My argument against tags was simply that I couldn't
> see enough overlap in content to warrant needing the
> tag system.

I was thinking along the lines of someone posts a WIP of a robot model, that could have 2 tags: "WIP", and "Robots".

Maybe stuff like "Architecture", "Jewelry", "Vehicles", as tags would work. So for example you could target architecture and get everything related to that including WIPs, bug reports, feature requests, whatever.


But another way that is kind of similar in some aspects is to just have a convention that some kinds of threads should start with a keyword, like WIP threads start with WIP: in the title text, then make it possible for the search to search by titles only.


Maybe having tags / categories would be a bit better to integrate with search instead of elevating it to a prominent dropdown like you were describing though. It's more of a searching kind of a thing rather than a daily reading activity kind of thing.


Probably just getting a title only search working would get a lot done in this area though, searching just titles for WIP for example would probably do a lot.

- Michael

The only thing that erks me about this forum at times is the pagination.

For example if there's say 14 posts and then I reply at the end. When I finish, I'll only see my post and the links at the bottom will say 1-14, 15 with mine being the 15th on the page by itself.

I've set the forum to display 30 posts but it still paginates with the 1 odd page left at times.

I really wish I could set it to display all and not paginate at all. I don't mind scrolling down for 20 minutes to read everything. Scrolling horizontally is usually the annoying one.


I do like the idea of Tags, Michael, that would allow me to easily find threads that I consider informative; the animated GIFs are always great for learning how to accomplish things, and at times I'm too lazy to copy the posts or page links into my organizer program.


-Will

PS - Even just now, after posting this, the pagination was 1-10, 11-40 and mine was the 41st all by itself - just give me ALL the posts without pagination!

Hi Will, I've set the max number of posts per page to 100 now, so you can increase that option under Options > Forum options > Style > Posts per page.

When you're doing regular browsing that should make most threads fit all in one page now.

As you noticed, when you post a message you get a different pagination on where you land immediately after the post.

The way that works is if you've replied to a specific message, it sets up a page with the first post in the page being that replied to message, which will probably be a different pagination than one from regular browsing which starts at post #1 and then breaks from there.

When you do a "reply to all" instead of replying to one specific message, that's when you'll land on the page with just your new message in it, with messages being clustered into pages going backwards from there.


The way it works when there is a "reply to" message I think is kind of good actually, I think it has helped sometimes to see posts that may have been added in at the same time you were composing your message.

Probably the "reply to all" one would be better having it broken into pages starting from #1 but navigated to your new message in that list. That may be a bit tricky to set up though.

- Michael

Subforums cause missing of Q & A that can be valuable for advancement even if it does not pertain to active interests. For example, my prime interest is with archviz stills and, due to time constraints and habit, I would probably only visit relevant subforums. With a continuous list of threads, it may include an animation or materials or lighting thread which occasionally I will check into to develop skills. The idea the user is given the choice to sort as either a continuous list or by subforums is a good one.

I believe the comments are valid regarding pagination and a second window in order to respond to a post. Otherwise, this spartan forum is the appropriate companion to the app which is like a tool box containing quality tools for the job arranged in a simple but very accessible way.

Cheers.

Leonard