A Proper User Forum

[gavinNZz]

Personally I am over this forum format. It doesn't deliver what I want as an Archicad user. Surely there are enough of us to start a new forum? We have given Graphisoft more than enough time to implement changes that would have appeased the majority of complaints

So, I would like to ask the user community what forum system would best suit the their needs? There are a multitude of plug and play systems out there that would provide the type of functionality that we are all looking for. No doubt a lot of us are active on multiple forum platforms so lets decide on one and then get on with working together to become better Archicad users.

Even if only a 10th of the current forum members join we will probably get more from it than persisting with this system.

Maybe some are happy with the current structure and that's fine because it seems like Graphisoft is happy to keep it as is so good luck to them but if you aren't happy lets do something about it ourselves!

[Barry Kelly]

The 'Most Recent' list is sorted by date, we just see the date and preview of the original post, not the last post to that thread.

'Most Viewed' is useless in my opinion.

It just shows the posts that heave been read the most - does not been they have even been replied to necessarily.

Although the more replies, the more they are read and therefore more views.

But no,

I see no way to view the most viewed within the last wee/month.

It might be nice to be able to specify a date range.

You can search the entire community or individual forums by date.

The threads you have not read will have bold titles, the ones you have read will be lighter.

Personally, I just read all of the unread posts.

That way I don't miss anything.

Links to all of the unread posts can be found here.

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/What-s-new/Shortcut-to-Unread-Posts/td-p/306435

The first one is the entire community, the others are for specific forums.

I have bookmarked that thread (options - 3 dots next to the thread) so I can find it again easily through my profile.

I have also bookmarked the unread for entire community page in my browser and have the link in my browser title bar.

So at any time I just click that link and the forum opens with unread posts.

I hope some of these suggestions can help.

Barry.

[Gordana Radonic]

Dear All,  

We took time to read your comments and thoughts, and I want to reflect on them and share with you several things that we are working on as they might not be visible to you. Since the Community launch, Graphisoft’s dedicated community team has been continuously seeking more efficient ways to speed up the delivery of enhancements, as it is in our mutual interest to protect the heritage and built-in knowledge of our Community and make it more accessible and enjoyable.  

We are finalizing several UI related improvements, and they will soon be in their last version on the Community: 

• The search bar is accessible at all times and always positioned in the top menu bar, 
• The top menu bar is locked when scrolling, 
• Pagination is implemented on forums instead of the ‘Load more’ option, 
• Both ‘My subscriptions’ and ‘My bookmarks’ are accessible from the User profile menu. 

We are working on several other areas at the moment: 

• Supporting multi-language Community (Japanese and Portuguese languages are in preparation, we are currently testing the knowledge base content migration) 
• Launching Graphisoft blog channel as a single point of communication for our product and service news, various events, training, and other information (we will reposition and improve the ‘Announcements’ section and free ‘What’s new’ forum from Graphisoft related news) 
• Improving signatures - more compact signatures 
• Reorganizing labels on Forums - Labels are especially important for structuring and organizing the content, as several have mentioned. We will use the existing user proposed label structure as a base, clean it, and set a ‘predefined’ label list to help with subscriptions. 
• Enabling live broadcasting for Event feature - we are working on enabling broadcasting in the form of user webinars and live events to share information and make conversations in a video format as well. 

Work yet to be done, where we have several requirements collected in place, but we will appreciate and rely on your further input on these: 

• Search improvements 
• Filtering: most recent/most viewed etc. 
• Various UI improvements (smaller font sizes, more compact forum threads) 

In further replies, please tell us what is from the already mentioned improvements in your comments a top priority improvement for the Community you’d like to see implemented. 

I thank you for sharing your concerns and your patience, and I hope to hear more comments from your side. 

Gordana 

[DGSketcher]

@Gordana Radonic As has been mentioned previously... Compatibility with Apple Safari. At this time we can't even edit a post once submitted, let alone the various other menu control issues which ignore user input.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

The forum problems would probably be fixed if the best effort were made to reproduce the effect of the previous structure. All the webinar and blog channel and blah are unrelated to the lost forum functionality; a knowledge base is not a forum; both were fine before; of course things can be improved, but the forum was destroyed, and that is the problem. 

[Miha_M]

I'd suggest a vertical side menu (maybe with an option to be hidden or pinned) with drop-down sub-levels, which could resemble the old forum structure based upon the new tags/labels. The main screen (frame) could remain in current conversation mode, but if somebody selects one main side menu label (or any drop-down sub-level), the conversation main frame would change into a tag/label filtered mode. Each menu selection option could have an indicator how many running or closed (?) topics are available and how many solutions are on offer. The state of the opened sub-levels should remain active for each user.

[Erwin Edel]

I miss this a lot from the old structure. I am opening new tabs per subcategory every morning to have a quick glance, this is not ideal at all.

[thesleepofreason]

I appreciate the status update and look forward to seeing the work implemented online.

I do however miss any mention of the new wish/idea feature - what is its status? It might seem as a small and perhaps self-entitled thing to keep bringing up but I currently hold it as the best indicator of where AC is heading. If you in seven months can't get such a feature in place - why should we feel confident that the development of AC is done with the user in focus?

There is a plethora of legitimate wishes/ideas put forward and discussed by users. Most are for simple enhancements of current features, some are for the introduction of features ubiquitous among modern CAD/BIM applications and a few are for more ground breaking features. What they all have in common is that they reflect how an actual current user would like to use the application. I'm confident that if I were to pull a few at random to fast-track for the next version it would give a better result for the user than the current process. What I don't know is if this is due to the influence of commercial factors in the process or due to a dissonance between the developers and the users.

[Lingwisyer]

Multi-language implementation? Well, that is one reason a forum should not be directly integrated with a knowledge base...

[Jp1138]

How about go directly to first unread message when clicking a post? As far as I know it doesn´t work this way right now, and it´s an option in every forum in existence. Or maybe I´m doing something wrrong, as the forums remain fairly unintuitive and different to standard forum conventions 🤔

[jl_lt]

Sorry, but i havent seen a single positive comment about the label system. If anything it has been lambasted by many users including yours trully. Why the insistence of sticking to it?

Like many here, i think the knowledge base and the forum are two separate concepts:  the forum reflects and comments on a knowledge base. The knowledge base is fixed but grows and evolves overt ime but it has to be correctly organized, otherwise, you cannot search for what you do not know (thats why the same kind of questions keep popping up lately).

The forum is dynamic by nature but also needs to be organized by topics and subtopics to filter intersted users to the correct place. If you have both features dynamic and unorganized, chaos arises. Sometimes inovation, just for the sake of inovating, is not a good a thing.