Hey Jose,
I know where you are coming from, but have you been involved in a community where there are so many new posts and replies to posts that a new post to any thread falls off of the first page of threads (50 threads per page) in less than 10 minutes? This is the type of site that they are referring to. This site obviously doesn't even come close to that, but you may be surprised to know that even some extremely small sites do. Try a gaming site and you'll become lost immediately.
We both know that the last post information is stored in the database, but I don't think that Ben has created any Chameleon controls that make use this information for this functionality. What they are really asking for is the ability to have a link (i.e. image link) on the thread list that will take them directly to the first new post since they last visited the thread. Additionally, many would like the ability to jump to official posts (i.e. from admistrators and moderators) and skip normal user responses.
Take it easy,Bill
WGB Enterprises - Freelance Community Server and other DevelopmentopenSourceC.org
Hi Shaan,
TheCADman: 2+ years later and still no solution. Your workaround steps are painful and not even worth trying to communicate as a solution to a large forum membership unless a person wants to be beaten to a binary pulp in hate mail.
2+ years later and still no solution. Your workaround steps are painful and not even worth trying to communicate as a solution to a large forum membership unless a person wants to be beaten to a binary pulp in hate mail.
Sorry for the miscommunication. I wasn't suggesting a workaround or how you should communicate to your membership. I was just letting Tim know how *I* do it since the feature request is obviously not available in the current release.
TheCADman: Suggestion: How about Telligent comes up with a solid and fixed road map based on real customer feedback instead of the focus it seems to have on more complicated pricing, opensource to closed source changes, and shifting sand focus of the platform and forums.
Suggestion: How about Telligent comes up with a solid and fixed road map based on real customer feedback instead of the focus it seems to have on more complicated pricing, opensource to closed source changes, and shifting sand focus of the platform and forums.
First, I'm not sure we'll ever have a *fixed* roadmap as that means any new requests would immediately go to the back of the queue. I would hope you'd agree that that's bad business. That said, we recently published a roadmap. And while you may not believe it, it is indeed based on "real customer feedback". If not, that too would be bad business.
One is glad to be of service...
Jose,
Jose Lema:That said, we recently published a roadmap. And while you may not believe it, it is indeed based on "real customer feedback". If not, that too would be bad business.
Would you please interpret that roadmap for us. Specifically, does it, or does it not, explicitly say when we will see per-post per-user tracking of unread/read status and the ability to bring readers to the first unread post when they enter a thread? If that's on the roadmap, when will we see it?
Thanks,
Marty,
The roadmap does *not* explictly say when we will introduce per-post per-user tracking of unread/read status.
Marty Weinhous:I'm part of another community that has just migrated to Community Server. There is a revolution brewing because users can not "Go to first unread post" but must rather waste their time reading a thread to see where they left off. We are losing members from our community as a result.
We realized that Teligent's priorities do not include supporting midsize private communities where the 'last unread post' functionality is required. The impact on a community of not having this feature is dramatic. After growing 15% per year for the last 5 years, in the 3 months since we switched to Community Server we lost nearly 20% of our members (failed to renew their paid membership) and traffic and posting was down 30%. I won't even try to communicate the tone of the member's opinion of the largely stock Hawaii theme. Community Server's lack of support for these basic forum features was killing our community.
We just completed implementing on our own the unread posts functionality.. Overnight our traffic has jumped 50%. Users are almost hysterically happy. We are now starting an outreach to our lost members.
This implementation is measured in man-months of effort. I would love to invite people to see it but it is only visible in our private paid-membership community. But here are screenshots of the 3 most important screens, the Forum View, Thread View, and Post View.
FORUM view: The "Read All" links go to threaded views of the forum aggregates. "My Forum Choices" allows personalization of what forums appear in this list
Clicking either a single forum or the "Read All" links goes to the following thread view: Clicking on a thread title goes to the LAST UNREAD POST in that thread for this user Clicking on the row headers changes the sort We eliminated the unnecessary Unread and Popular icons Note the 'Mark all "Read"' button Also the friendly date formats - they change to day of the week for previous 6 days and omit the time
Fewer changes to the POSTS View: The breadcrumbs go to the various THREAD views above
Bigger changes at the bottom of the POST view: Note the "View All" and "Print All" options to get entire thread on one page
From what we can see Teligent's roadmap continues to walk away from basic community forum functionality. We are reluctantly resigned to supporting our own UI. To be honest, we now regret not choosing vBulletin instead as this has cost us a fortune. But, at least we now have a great site and happy users.
cnsanford:From what we can see Teligent's roadmap continues to walk away from basic community forum functionality. We are reluctantly resigned to supporting our own UI. To be honest, we now regret not choosing vBulletin instead as this has cost us a fortune. But, at least we now have a great site and happy users.
Hi cnsanford! I understand your frustrations and admire your efforts to have made this feature yourselves. CS is far from ideal for making adjustments, the whole code is just one big maze. (If you see a page, you don't even know for sure which aspx file you would have to open to make any changes)
Since all the hours you have put into to this, I would understand if you don't want to give away the solution (probably isn't simple either, since I suppose you had to change the database in order to store the "read" information. However, if you do not wish to share your solution with the rest of us, maybe you can consider selling it to Telligent, since they seem to be unable to program this by themselves? ;-)
Kind regards and succes with your community!
Agree
Timtim: Since all the hours you have put into to this, I would understand if you don't want to give away the solution (probably isn't simple either, since I suppose you had to change the database in order to store the "read" information. However, if you do not wish to share your solution with the rest of us, maybe you can consider selling it to Telligent, since they seem to be unable to program this by themselves? ;-)
Yah, I've spent a good portion of my organization's reserves on this project so I have a fiduciary responsibility to get a return from it if available. So if anyone wants to make an offer...
Copyright© 2008 Telligent Systems Inc. All rights reserved CommunityServer.com • Telligent.com