My new sentiments are "To heck with Community Server. Stop battling their ideology or lack of paying attention to forum owner's needs and just use vBulletin. It's more mature, a lot cheaper, performs better, and has tons of features that Community Server doesn't have including automatic email notification. So why continue to fight an uphill battle? Switch and you'll be glad you did."
Hi Mike,
Mike Schinkel:Stop battling their ideology or lack of paying attention to forum owner's needs and just use vBulletin. It's more mature, a lot cheaper, performs better, and has tons of features that Community Server doesn't have including automatic email notification. So why continue to fight an uphill battle?
I'm sorry to hear that you've decided to move off of Community Server. As a point of clarification, we have since changed the automatic email notification setting, in part due to your direct feedback and the feedback of others. So Community Server does indeed support automatic email notification out of the box.
That said, since Community Server is more than just a forums package (blogs, media, groups, friends, messaging, ...) we often have to make the tough call on what to focus on. And I would agree with you that forums hasn't been in the #1 spot recently.
We'd love for you to try out CS 2008 and give us feedback on where we're falling short, but if not, we hope you'll check us out in the future.
One is glad to be of service...
Hi Jose,I was the last to weigh in with my comments on Mike's very long thread on Email notifications. But, maybe you are not listening completely to what we are saying. Not only do all email notifications have to be set to "on" for the forum to get started and going, but forum subscriptions default setting has to be "settable" by the admin in my opinion. Why? A couple of reasons which I listed in my last post which I will summarize now:
Therefore, in my experience with CS, it would have been useful to me if you would provide a setting in the admin control panel which sets the default for forum subscriptions (ie. either default is "on" or "off" for every user). Therefore, for the type of users I have who do not want to be bothered with the inner workings of the software or aren't technically capable of following even step by step instructions (some of my clients have trouble posting!) to subscribe to a forum it is really important to be able to set all forum subscriptions to "on" in order to get the forum going. Therefore, for firms who have privacy issues the default setting could be left at "off" and people would have to subscribe. But for the smaller user who runs a charity or community-based forum (no privacy issues) and just wants to get the thing going as quickly and efficiently as possible the default can be "on" . Another thing is that even after you setup your basic forums there is always a time later when you want to add another forum(s) and the users have to remember to subscribe and how to subscribe and go through the whole process again.
I think it has to be recognized that if you want to design to all levels of possibilities and user-competency then the program has to be flexible. I hope someone in cs2008 is listening.
Mike, I'll check out vbulletin as I am frustrated with one of my cs boards which can't get going - the users are having great difficulty turning on their forum subscriptions and getting notified.
Jose, can you tell me: 1. Has cs2008 taken care of the forum subscriptions issue? 2. Also, can you get email notifications when someone replies to your blog?
Cheers,Jeff FryPS. I won't have the money to upgrade to cs2008 unfortunately so won't be able to give feedback in case this has taken care of the above 2 issueswww.birthlightforum.com - working okay (a small percentage of the 300 users have caught on)www.dpccnet.com - failing badly due to users not being able to get going despite my emails with step by step instructions
Hi Jeff,
jsfry:But, maybe you are not listening completely to what we are saying.
To be fair, this thread is almost two years old, and your request is less than two weeks old. Also, as I read Mike's points, he is *not* asking for the same thing you are asking. When I re-read the thread, I found two requests made by Mike:
Your request is a bit different. It sounds like you want something that will automatically send every user every post to every thread in every forum by default. That is not available as a feature in CS 2008, but wouldn't be too hard to implement as a CSModule (extension requiring code).
jsfry:I think it has to be recognized that if you want to design to all levels of possibilities and user-competency then the program has to be flexible. I hope someone in cs2008 is listening.
I'm not sure that it's possible for us to "design to *all* levels..." and that's where we have to make decisions. And with great flexibility comes great complexity (both in code and in the UI).
One train of thought would say that everything should be an option settable by the administrator. Unfortunately, the sheer number of options that that approach would create excludes some folks from being administrators and therefore using/buying the product (some already feel there's too many options). Another train of thought would say that we should have no options and just make a decision about what's "best". That would lead us back into the previous "ideology" discussion. So we land somewhere in the middle. Based on *all* the customer feedback we get (not just here on the forums) we enable some options for things that we ultimately decide should be settable and leave other areas without settings.
So please don't assume that we're not listening just because we choose a different direction.
jsfry:Has cs2008 taken care of the forum subscriptions issue?
As answered above, by default all users have email notifications turned on for all threads that they participate in.
jsfry:Can you get email notifications when someone replies to your blog?
Yes. This feature has been around for quite some time .
Hope that helps clarify some of the issues.
Hi Jose,
Thanks for the clairifications. That is helpful esp. the info about what is and is not available presently.
I will just add one thing and this is probably what I've was trying to say in the last, long reply in a nutshell. what i was hoping to help you guys see is how hard it can be to get a community forum going when right from the start none of your users are subscribed to any of the forums - just imagine that. This results in a situation where if I as admin post to the forums, nobody gets it!! I know you may say that it is not necessarily always like that and you are right - in some environments the users are savvy enough to setup forum subscriptions themselves but in many situations they are not. In that case, the community forum never has a chance to get started and the admin has no way of fixing it - his hands are tied except to send email after email encouraging people to follow steps that they aren't able to execute and probably don't have time to figure out how to execute them even if they could. Most people are getting many, many emails a day and they prioritize them as to which is most crucial. An email requesting the user to setup a community forum isn't going to get much attention. Most users would think to themselves - " the admin should set it up if he wants me to use the forum" but in this case the admin can't. The forums don't even die as they never had a life to begin with.
We have been using the internet and email since the 90's . I have users that are just getting used to email. A good number of my forum users still think that they can just hit the "reply" button on outlook express to respond to an email notification from our CS forums despite my putting notices on the faq section and personally reminding them. This is the level of many users' ability.
Hope that helps,Jeff
Unfortunantly for you, CS has to cater for a lot of very large sites (http://asp.net, http://xbox.com to name a few) for which such an option would end up being counted as spam. Also by using your argument, if they're not going to read an email requesting the user to setup forum subscriptions, are they going to read emails telling them of the latest posts made to a certain forum?
If you want to automatically set users to receive Email Notifications, you may wish to have a look at installing the NewUserDefaults module fromthe CSMVP Module Repository - http://csmvps.com/files/folders/csmodules/entry3479.aspx. For existing users, you may or may not be able to change their settings either throught the control panel, or by directly manipulating the database.
Community Server Documentation
Nintendo Wiikly
@afscrome: Unfortunantly for you, CS has to cater for a lot of very large sites (http://asp.net, http://xbox.com to name a few) for which such an option would end up being counted as spam.
Your argument presumes the falacy so commonly used in political arguments of a false dichotomy. This is not an either/or proposition and there is no reason that CS could not easily offer an adminstrator the option of allowing email notifications to be the default, and that option could even be turned off in the default install.
@afscrome: Also by using your argument, if they're not going to read an email requesting the user to setup forum subscriptions, are they going to read emails telling them of the latest posts made to a certain forum?
Once again you argue with falacies comparing apples to oranges. People are more often to read emails that contain information that is specific to them and one of their actions as opposed to boilerplate emails.
That said, I gave up on CS over a year ago with email notifications being the most important of two reasons for leaving (the other being URL structure), and I can said I'm much happier to be using vBulletin now (which ALSO caters to very large sites yet still has email notifications, thank you very much.)
If you're happy using vBulletin, then good for you. There are many different products out there, and so inevitably some will suit people's needs more than others.
Dear afscrome,
Not everyone is a techie or at least technical enough to even go and set the forum subscriptions (hard to believe but true). While most are, take for example the group that I am working with (and with the number of cs sites out there I'm sure I'm not the only one that has the following characteristics to their site):
1. I have users that are very, very, very much beginners at computers. They are yoga instructors, about 400 of them, who are used to teaching yoga and don't have much contact with computers - only when they need to. To give you an example, I sent a "help" message to them and one of them chided me for using the word "browser" and said that she didn't know what it meant and to stop using such technical jargon! I say this so that you understand the level of technical competency of some of our users. I am in the UK which is much more developed technically and www-wise than probably most of the countries in the world. So, if we have this level of technical knowledge here what is it like in other countries where the internet is not so widely used? Why can't we be a bit more user-friendly and have an option to set the default forum subscriptions to "yes" and not "no". It would make all the difference if you are trying to get a cs site up and running for newbies. It would help these users who have difficulty setting themselves up get started using this community site (in my opinion a user shouldn't really have to do anything to set themselves up - it should run for them out of the box). Maybe then when they see what it can do may they have enough interest in finding out how to turn one or two forums off which they don't find interesting. But if they never, ever receive even one notification of a post (because their forum subs are all set to "no"), then how will they even get started and be able to see how the forums can be used to further their own development and exchange information and learn?
2. My situation is that I administer the site remotely (ie. I have no face-to-face contact with my 400 users which are spread all over the UK and even the world). Therefore, it is difficult for me to instruct them in how to use the site except by written instructions /images via email. Despite many of these messages which have included screen shots of the site, many still are not able to execute simple instructions - eg. they continually reply to email notifications by clicking the reply button of their email client instead of following the link to the forum in order to reply to a post (despite me sending instructions to them with screen shots included)! Another cs site that I administer for a church also has the same problem with many of the users not receiving emails because they haven't turned their forum subscriptions to "yes" for one reason or another. Some which I have contact with face to face I have had to sit down with them and actually do it for them. Why this is so hard I don't know but it is.
3. If it's so easy to add the option, as the telligent employee above stated, then why not just add it. One shouldn't have to be a database programmer or sql guru to use cs. Again this is a usability issue.
We are half way there as email subscriptions have been automatically turned on in cs2007 - now why not go all the way and give the admin a toggle which enables all users' forums to be set to "yes" upon creation of every user.
to me it's a question of motivation - if you don't know what you're missing then nothing happens. For a fair amount of my users of cs2007 nothing is happening!
Cheers,Jeff
jsfry: We are half way there as email subscriptions have been automatically turned on in cs2007 - now why not go all the way and give the admin a toggle which enables all users' forums to be set to "yes" upon creation of every user.
The primary reason you don't see this feature, or others, is that we have limited time/resources. We naturally do our best to prioritize all the feedback we get from customers. Unfortunately, some features that are critical to some are irrelevant for others. We have the difficult job of deciding what to include and what gets left out (possibly making it into vNext).
To be honest, I don't recall ever seeing your specific request on these forums previous to you raising it. That doesn't mean that others don't have the same concern or that it's somehow invalid feedback. It's just a new feature request and needs to be properly triaged/prioritized. So, while it's not uber difficult to implement, it's not something we have chosen to implement at this time.
If you were going to implement it you'd want to hook into both the forums/users creation events so that any new user gets auto-subscribed and any new forum auto-subscribes all users.
I totally understand the inability of certain segments of the population. I have often had to deal with probably one of the most incompitent groups (also in the UK coincidently) - school teachers. A few years back we tricked one of our geography teachers into thinking that his laptop was broken as Google Earth didn't go into full screen when he pressed Alt + F4 , that was once we overcome the shock of him finding the power button, working out how to use the touchpad AND open up Google Earth!!!
Btw, you say one of your biggest problem is people replying by hitting the reply button in their email client. Have you considered Mail Gateway as that does allow users to post to forums by replying to emails. The most likely limitation is that it may be out of your price range, and it does require a program to be installed on the Web Server so you need to have a VPS or a Dedicated Server. For an example, have a look at http://dev.communityserver.com/forums/9.aspx. Create a new post in this forum, and when you get the email notification back for your post, just reply to the email. You should see your reply on the CS.org forums soon after you send the reply.
@afscrome: As for the option argument there is an infinity of options that could be put into a product. If you add too many such options, despite the small overhead from determining each option multiplies and can become quite substantial.
Gotta love the generic dismissal people use when they otherwise don't have good arguments. Email notifications are the first feature I look for in a forum; for those who know US history: "Besides that Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?"
And it always surprises me when people are willing to spend their time to argue strenuously against allows others to achieve the things they need. If you were part of the team that delivers CS I would understand why you waste the effort.
@afscrome: The poster I was replying to wanted users to receive notifications to ALL posts made in the forums,
Well, there's an example of:
@afscrome: regardless of whether they were relevant or not - his example would involve sending out email notifications of the type "w000t, first post of today". How is such a post more relevant than "Please goto http://communityserversite.com/forums/subscriptions.aspx and subscribe to our forums"?
There you go again; judging the validity of someone else's use-cases by your own standards.
One of my use-cases, for example, would need exactly that. I administer a vBulletin for resident communication within our 20 unit condo complex. We get on average one message per week from residents on the forum. For my use-case, emailing everyone about a new post is something I needed to keep people engaged. When I first launched the forum I couldn't get half the residents to use it and stop sending out individual emails (which they typically sent to out-of-date and incomplete email addresse lists, and emails where not archived for history like forum communications.)
Thankfully vBulletin made is easy, and if it hadn't and I needed to hack a solution in vBulletin I wouldn't have had to set up a full Visual Studio development and debugging environment just to implement my solution (and I used to run a company that sold components and tools for Visual Studio, so it's not like I don't know it.)
@afscrome: If you're happy using vBulletin, then good for you. There are many different products out there, and so inevitably some will suit people's needs more than others.
My reason for posting is that I've come to the conclusion that, for many reasons I've either implied or explicitly stated on my posts for these forums that CS is actually a really bad solution. CS is slow by comparison, hard to extend compared to a script-based solution (like PHP), and CS's attitude towards needed feature set always seemed to be "We have other priorities" and those other priorities always seemed to be for things I didn't need and rarely for things I did.
Or maybe I'm just still fumed by the fact that I asked for a refund on my Professional Version as it was not a good solution, and Teligent just ignored my requests. That after I spend over $1500 on software I was never able to use: what a complete waste!
(P.S. I'm curious if they'll sensor this post or not. Or maybe they will actually finally give me that refund! I won't hold my breath.)
Mike Schinkel:And it always surprises me when people are willing to spend their time to argue strenuously against allows others to achieve the things they need.
I would say that's a bit hypocritical. Firstly, look at the length of your own post above. Secondly, I am not preventing you from achieving what you need as given the tone of your posts, I would suggest that hell will freeze over before you personally look at using CS again. Notice how when I replied to Jeff, I have done my best to give suggestions as to how he may improve the situation he's in as he is using CS THIS MINUTE. I'll accept that the help I've given Jeff won't solve his every problem but my priority is to help Jeff with is how he can use CS for what he wants RIGHT NOW. As I'm not on the CS dev team, I am not in a position to say what will and won't happen in the future, although I can give my intepretations of what is going to happen.
Mike Schinkel: 1. CS's poor implementation of their email notifications, especially for threads I participated in a looooong time ago, making it seem like you were replying to me,
Actually, you last replied on Thursday February 28th, I replied on Saturday March 1st. I don't call 3 days a "looooong" time ago.
Mike Schinkel: 2. The fact that you didn't quote the person you were replying to so it wasn't clear that you were not replying to me. IOW, your bad.
You took my post out of the context it was posted in. The context of my post implied everything that it needed to about who I was replying to - it was immediately under Jeff's post.
Mike Schinkel:We get on average one message per week from residents on the forum.
I'd suggest that such a scenario falls SIGNIFICANTLY outside the boundaries the Telligent team are targeting CS at, and so I would not be surprised if CS is not well suited out of the box for such scenarios.
Mike Schinkel:Thankfully vBulletin made is easy, and if it hadn't and I needed to hack a solution in vBulletin I wouldn't have had to set up a full Visual Studio development and debugging environment just to implement my solution (and I used to run a company that sold components and tools for Visual Studio, so it's not like I don't know it.)
Given that the main complaints in this thread came from 2006, and this thread was only revived in the last few months, I presume you used CS2.1. I did give up trying to customise CS2.1 as I couldn't make heads or tails of it but the Chameleon theme engine in CS2007 (and 2008) is significantly easier to use, much more powerful and doesn't require Visual Studio.
@afscrome: I would say that's a bit hypocritical.
Not at all, for two reasons:
@afscrome: I am not preventing you from achieving what you need as given the tone of your posts,
Not you of course where not preventing, but actively arguing against what someone else needed when you said:
@afscrome: I would suggest that hell will freeze over before you personally look at using CS again.
And who was it who just commented on tone?
@afscrome: Notice how when I replied to Jeff, I have done my best to give suggestions as to how he may improve the situation he's in as he is using CS THIS MINUTE. I'll accept that the help I've given Jeff won't solve his every problem but my priority is to help Jeff with is how he can use CS for what he wants RIGHT NOW. As I'm not on the CS dev team, I am not in a position to say what will and won't happen in the future, although I can give my intepretations of what is going to happen.
Two things:
@afscrome: Actually, you last replied on Thursday February 28th, I replied on Saturday March 1st. I don't call 3 days a "looooong" time ago.
I was referring to the last post I made where I actually mentioned things that you could have conceivable been replying to, which was in 2005. My Feb 28th was me saying that I gave up on CS, so your "Unfortunately for you..." comment obviously did not appear to me that it could have applied to my Feb 28th post.
@afscrome: You took my post out of the context it was posted in. The context of my post implied everything that it needed to about who I was replying to - it was immediately under Jeff's post.
It was NOT immediately under Jeff's post in my email inbox, NOR was Jeff's post visible in CS' Reply-To form (which is yet another usability issue I pointed out to Telligent on the forums about CS in the past, but I can only assume they like their tabbed inferace too much to address that usability issue.)
So as far as I was aware, you were replying to me and neither you nor CS did anything to help me understand that my reasonable assumption was incorrect. he problem was you didn't quote jsfry and CS did not show me the several other recent posts in addition to yours in the Reply-To form. Because of the context I was given by you and CS (ironically in part via email notification!) it seemed you were replying to my 2+ year old post, which is why I replied to you. We are both making wrong assumptions and after this email I'll move on from this thread (feel free to leave a reply for posterity, if you must.)
BTW, maybe for the benefit of future CS users Mr, Lema will notice the problem and realize that it would be helpful to include a reply reference in email nofications to minimize misunderstandings like this as I'm sure you aren't the only one who doesn't always go to the effort to quote those he is replying to?
As an aside my experience has been that you brits tend to be very supportive of other brits (I don't mean that as a criticism) so I find it humorously ironic that you are staunchly supporting a US product while being from the UK and I am praising a UK product while being from the US. '-)
@afscrome: I'd suggest that such a scenario falls SIGNIFICANTLY outside the boundaries the Telligent team are targeting CS at, and so I would not be surprised if CS is not well suited out of the box for such scenarios.
I'm sorry, that's just a red herring. Example use-case: Fortune 500 company with 25 sales reps in a division installs a Community Server for the sales team and the manager wants everyone to get every new post in selected forums. That would significantly NOT be outside the boudaries that Telligent is targeting.
But sales managers, being more results oriented and less pedantic than either you or I wouldn't waste their time on this forum begging for the feature nor lecturing others in their opinion why CS is okay not to deliver it. Yes, I am criticizing both of us, myself included.
I'll come clean on one thing; I get extremely frustrated when I'm trying to use a forum to communicate my needs to a vendor and people not with the vendor come along to either tell me I don't need what I'm asking for or tell me convoluted ways to work around it when what I wanted was to get across a message across to the vendor that (I feel) they need to address an issue. And what I want it to be politely acknowledged (as Mr. Lema did) and not to have to explain to someone that I really do need it.
My tone, as you called it comes from me having posted too many suggestions and/or feature request over the years on too many forums where I then had to do battle with someone who wanted to tell me why I don't need it or who wants to give the vendor an out by offering a workaround. Hell, I can figure out almost all workarounds; the reason I communicate is to avoid having to do those workarounds.
The former person is especially annoying because they are presuming the only needs that exist are the ones that they can envision at that moment. To me that is exactly like someone stating without a doubt that there is NO needle in that there haystack. And another who truly understands logic realizes it's essentially impossible to prove a negative. I find it very disrespectful when someone tells someone else they don't know what they need when they don't know the person, their abilities, and definitely not their use-cases and I hope I never inadvertently do the same.
So in summary, you pushed one of my hot buttons.
@afscrome: Given that the main complaints in this thread came from 2006, and this thread was only revived in the last few months, I presume you used CS2.1. I did give up trying to customise CS2.1 as I couldn't make heads or tails of it but the Chameleon theme engine in CS2007 (and 2008) is significantly easier to use, much more powerful and doesn't require Visual Studio.
I forget what version I tried using but it was whatever was current around the time of my posts so if that was CS2.1, then yes.
And you could well be correct about CS2007/08 being better, I do not know. But given that I got what I needed two years ago for $160 and that I sunk over $1500 into a Telligent product that I was never able to use because of it's limitations and then couldn't get a refund I think I'd be a fool to try Telligent again; why throw good money after bad?
P.S. That ~$1500 was effectively my own personal money not a company's money so it was a much bigger deal than if I had just been working for a large company and had authorized the credit card but never paid for it myself. I will probably resent that as long as Telligent is in business if not longer.