forum death?

Community General Discussions
1

Is it me or is the forum death. On some forum the last reply was years ago? :(

2

As a new LMR user, I have to

As a new LMR user, I have to agree that the forum is a bit confusing – especially in terms of the “Post new forum topic” link for a few reasons.

 

  1. The link is exposed and clickable from the main forums page.
  2. While exposeing the “Post new forum topic” link at the main Forums page in itself is an okay behavior, the new post does not have a dropdown which to select forum heading/topic to assign the new posting. 
  3. There does not seem to be a way for regular user to retroactively assign a topic to a forum posting they created. It seems like its a feature the forum supports, but it’s not accessible to me.

Given this information, there are a few solutions I think might make things a little clearer.

 

  1. Remove the “Post new forum topic” link from the main forums page, and only expose the link when under a specfic heading. (eg: https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/other)
  2. Create a new forum heading for all posts created at the top level, such as “General Discussion” or something to nature.
  3. Add a dropdown to allow the user to specify the forum heading/topic which the new post should be assigned, and make the selection default to a heading if the link is clicked within a topic, but in either case it should be mandatory for a post to be created.

I realize all of these things still require some effort and time to implement, however I think it would help to make things easier to find and potentially a lot better user experience. To be clear, I am not suggesting all three of these things need to be implemented – but indivudially they are potentially small enough deliverables that they could  be done as incremental releases over time, so it could be done slowly, and give people time to provide feedback.

 

 

3

Most other forum software
Most other forum software I’ve seen has a a link from the first post back to the particular forum that it was posted in. Here such a post might be listed as “General -> Absolute Beginners” Clicking on this would bring you to that forum and similar postings.

This is one feature I really miss.

4

There IS a (raterh large)

There IS a (raterh large) problem with LMR in general: Tags are not working (as of writing this) And this affects the forum as well as other things.

The forum is build upon tags behind the scenes.

So, obviously things are not 100% dead - or you’d not be able to read this - but something is seriously wrong.

Basically I’ll not write about peoples private lifes in here, but as you know LMR is driven by volunteers, and we are just stuck on ‘someone’s having a life ATM’ - it may take a while to get this (and a couple of other major issues) fixed, but we will - like always :wink:

Thanks for the support and understanding. And hey - at least the server is responsive, do you remember when it took like 2 minutes to load a page? :wink: We will fix it, we always do - and it always takes way too long time, sorry for that part.