Help us shape the forums
The Microsoft.com forums team is about to begin Forums 3.0, the next version of theMicrosoft.com Forums. I have read through the various suggestions in this Forum, but would like to extend a personal invitation to help us shape the future of forums and be part of Forums 3.0. Here is what I invite you to do:
- Tell us what we should improve, get rid of, fix.
- What new features do you hope to see in the next 6 months?
- Thinking long-term, what direction, cool ideas, wacky ideas should we consider 6+ months out?
- What should we absolutely NOT do with the forums? What features would not be a welcome sight?
I would love to hear your feedback.
Thanks
Jana Carter
Forums Product Manager
[882 byte] By [
Jana] at [2007-12-18]
Hi Jana,
There are a couple of things I would change.
- The defalt font size is a couple of sizes too small.
- When I do a user search on my name, I get one page and then an error
- Graphics would be really nice. I know there are concerns about porn etc, but a picture is worth a thousand words. If not pictures, an ability to do block diagrams would be helpful.
- It would be nice to have an editor control that would exactly replicate a cut and paste from the vb2005 editor.
- Emoticons that are not bald. These emotions seem tailored for men. Examples of better emoticons might even be androgenous ones. An example of the one that I like is the is the icon used for user templates in VS2005.
Nice forum and thanks for all the hard work!
Renee
Hi Jana!
Happy New Year to you. You asked for feed-back. I guess you know what I am about to say, but here goes anyway:
1. When I subscribe to a forum using the RSS feed, I should be ableto retrieve the whole thread for a given discussion - not only the first post. This is an absolute must.
2. When having retrieved a post/thread, I should subsequently be able
to see future replies/posts for that particular thread.
This is an absolute must.
3. Be able to post to the forum from a non-proprietary, non-browser based tool.So, If you can implement that in version 3.0, I'll be a happy bunny!!!
Niels
Hi Jana,
It's nice to know we have constant updates here in the forum. What's I think lacking are:
1. Private Message?
2. I want to suggest is, spellcheck/grammar features here in the forums.
3. Then a rating system as part of the "answer" mark, this is to distinguish "tough questions" from "easy questions". Probably a 1 to 5 rating system, where users may mark the post a "asnwer" with the rate of "5" if it solved a really hard problem.
This I think may encourage more answerers to "try" to answer tough questions rather than simply scanning for easy questions leaving most of the hard questions unanswered.
Or probably, a category between hard-moderate-easy would do just fine.
Kind Regards,
-chris
Hi,
Here's my new year's, oops, new forums wish-list:
1.) Avatars!
2.) The ability to hide unwanted forum groups (and save it defaultly when a user accesses the website again)
3.) Private Messages
4.) Miscellaneous Forum Groups, where other companies could post Job openings or release of a software. Or simply a place where other users could interact with each other in a non-professional way...
5.) The Ability to search MyThreads.
6.) Extra tools for the moderators (eg ability to mark a post from deletion and having a view to see posts that are marked as to-be deleted)
7.) And all of the other suggestions?
BTW, Jana, when could we expect the Forums 3.0?
cheers,
Paul June A. Domag
Right now I'd like to see the bug fixed where going back from preview clears the edit box, in Firefox and sometimes in IE. Also, the "this post contains a post sample" checkbox is not shown in this browser...
Other than that, some suggestions, most of which were previously made:
- The text editor can be improved at many points, some of which were good in the last version of the editor. See "The new text editor is not good, no it isn't, I don't like it!".
- Answer marking button for trusted answerers ("Answer Marking Button For Everyone?"). Alternatively, moderators could be appointed to do this job (i.e., visiting all topics, ensuring all questions are eventually resolved), as is done on a website like experts-exchange.com.
- "Merge ASP.NET forums to [regular forums]"
The last two are probably more for the long term :)
Fixing post presentation should be the key priority. Difficult to read posts put people off. I've yet to discover why - but even whilst typing posts the fonts and formatting will automagically change. When I view the final submitted post, the formatting has changed AGAIN. A few times it's gone and set entire paragraphs to tiny text - making it near enough impossible to read.
Source code presentation, to be brutally honest, is useless. Syntax highlighting is often broken or non existant, and long code listings are... well... long 
These two threads (one of which is mine) summarise things: Code blocks should stipulate the language at the top of the block and Fixed Size / Scroll Bars for Source Code
FireFox support is a bit broken - but that seems to come and go every now and then. It used to work fine, but now it won't (e.g. you can use the "quote" feature in FF).
Database updates are slow. It's pointless to link to my thread as it's in the moderator-only section, but these are the only forums that seem to have a delay in propogating changes. For example, it can take a noticeable amount of time (30+ seconds) before I'll be listed as the last user to post in a forum. Split/moved posts tend to disappear for brief periods as well - deleted posts stay around in the same way as well.
In my opinion, the underlying technology of the forums needs to be sorted before you start working on any "cool" features.
If you want a cool feature though - an "escalate" button (similar to [MS ESC] in the managed newsgroups) that MVP's, moderators or MS staff can use to get attention to the right threads. Sometimes there are good threads that just can't be answered by the general public - they require one of the developers (etc..) to step in. An easy way to flag these up would be useful.
hth - look forward to seeing the improvements 
Jack
Here's some more:
1. There are times that we come across with questions that are answerable only by Microsoft employees, would it be hard to also add an option for moderators the ability to "flag" a question that it requires attention from Microsoft employees? I think that would help a lot too.
2. The ability for answerers to "subscribe" to particular expertise, i.e., I want to subscribe to Controls Development that would involve VB.NET, C#, WinForms, GDI/GDI+, Designers something like "filtering", then I can check on a daily basis for "What's new and unread in my subsciption?" -- this way, we elliminate the needs to go around checking different categories, since all the categories that interests me are already been merged into a customized "subscription" category, or we can call it "MySubscriptions".
3. About the thread pagination; I think there's a bug in there, when you click on the pages from the main forum, you still end up in page 1. Also, I think it will be good to have these pagination visible on top of page too, so that we don't need to scroll down the page, just to go to the next page. And also, can we add "First" and "Last" links for pagination?
4. How about something that would identify new comers and those who are veterans in the forum, other than looking from their number of posts? Something like an avatar but it's a text beneat our names, it will print like "New Member", "Veteran", "Moderator", "Administrator", "MS Employee" or something else; at-least we can construct better response based on the user's marking, and we can identify MS Employees easily without looking for "- MSFT" after their names.
-chris
I would vote for these features:
-Improvements on the text editor (this has been already explained enough I think)
-Bring the code buttons back (nobody knows the tags to use)
-Auto conversion from VB to C# and vice versa
-Be able to see your own statistics (nr of posts answered, nr of posts helpful etc). It would also be cool to query this info on a timeline, like: what's my rating for the past few weeks?
-I agree with Chris that it would be nice to have some indication of moderator/administrator/MS employee etc.
-I agree with Paul to have a search function in 'My threads'. I spend an awful lot of time searching through my own posts for things I already answered. I do know that you can search by user, but I've changed my name so that doesn't help all the time and it's kinda cumbersome.
-For the moderators it would be nice to see who has deleted posts and why.
-I believe it is currently not easy to contact users if they didn't provide an email adress, not even for the moderators. When someone is abusive in his posts, you cannot warn them easily.
As a general remark, I think that there's not enough guidance for the moderators. I personally think that the moderator's forums don't work really well. Maybe that's because just very few of us want to take the responsibility of certain actions. IMHO there's too much difference in how moderators operate. There's difference in how moderators delete posts. I think some moderators delete posts too easily. There are also complaints about trigger happy moderators who are too aggressive in marking questions as answered. Maybe Microsoft should either offer more guidance on how to moderate the forums, or give users the ability to report misbehaviour of moderators.
As for the answering statistics, I fear to see answering statistics for more people. There are already so many complaints about how moderators handle answering, I'm afraid that'll explode when many people get those rights. I remember saying earlier that you should answer at least 20 questions or so. That might still be a good idea, but maybe there should be a time constraint. Like, answering over 10 or 15 questions within a month. But still, I fear to see that happen.
Keep up the good work, I really enjoy the forums. You're doing a great job here!
To Jana:
1. In general, the text editor is less usable now than it was before (i.e. going back to the old implementation would be a step forward)--take this feedback in consideration of the fact that I'm not after bells and whistles but rather instead after a solid, consistent and elegantly implemented editor.
Instead of many people complaining about the same text editor issues and myself wondering if I should make suggestions on the text editor, could you create a page that lists all the known text editor bugs/features and which ones you're committed to fixing/implementing? This way I know where to apply extra pressure and report issues that you might not know about yet.
2. Make product feedback links and MSDN documentation search available from the forum page. Make the regular Microsoft newsgroups link available also. These things are part of the daily navigation that people in the forums use, and would be especially helpful when directing people.
3. A way to do remote assistance with another user (see their VS 2005 shell live and chat at the same time.) (You asked for wild and wacky!)
4. Stop substituting characters for emoticons (and this goes for MSN messenger too). If I want a bitmap in my text, let me explicitly do so.
Brian
I think overall the forum doesn't look very good, I also agree that forums should be merged.
Also, why there is no international forums available?
I'd like to either see linear threading or the current treeview style shown as an actual treeview: specifically, if someone has replied to an earlier item in the thread, it shows up at that location. In a long thread (several pages) it can be hard to find the new post, as it's not placed at the end.
(personally, I like linear threads - there's the quote button if you want to quote a post earlier in the thread. You can find new posts by going to the end).
I second the avatar suggestion (but don't allow animated gifs! Are those annoying or what?!)
I like the single line signature; I hope you don't allow multiline or graphics in signatures (can you say 'massive animated gif repeated ad nauseum').
I don't mind not having the ability to upload images - at least you allow the ability to link to an image on an external site :) Good enough for me, but I know a lot of people would like this feature.
Overall, I do like the forum layout/style. Good work!
Sorry for re posting but I did not see this thread until I initiated a new thread covering the same suggestion. If you could list threads that are solely based on the framework namespace hierarchy (version specific) it would be really helpful in locating and commenting on specific functionalities/behaviors in the framework. Also the new htmledit functionality needs improved. Can you not get a full featured edit control. What was wrong with the previous implementation of freetextbox? |
Be able to change or custermise the look of the form
Personaly i would like this feture because the grey some times gets old
plusi would really welcome those flash backgrounds you can get in msn and also be able to make your own emoticon using a image and save its name,image path and keyboard shortcut so when you type it in next time it shows up.
Finaly can you add animations to the page for exsample : you click a link and it flashes
of couse you can turn them on or off and what animation eatch thing would do for what event. But of couse you would have to make a option button for this ideas glore thread.
i've already sugested all that stuff but internet explorer crashes every time it deletes
and heres the new stuff :
be able to change the icons that show whats a post and whats a popular post to your own images.
madcowrus
Yes the grey does get old.
OK Jana, I have a suggestion for you. Ten or 20 times a week I see a question like - "Can I run framework v1.1 and v2.0 on the same machine?" or "Where can I buy VB6?"
Something occured to me just a little while ago. Up near the top of the page, you see a grey separator that says <Previous Page Next Page>
I was wondering what it would be like to put tabs on there relating to certain knowledge areas? And a tab can have a tab control. - too.
This could create a very quick reference for those zillions of repeat questions.
Just a thought.......
