Discussions have been pushed to the next page
I had 10 discussions originally. Since a recent update where the system appears to have inserted a new topic "Headlines & Links Discussions" which pushed my 10th discussion to the next page. I fixed it by deleting the discussion.
The issue here is that it was apparent that a potentially important discussion in my group can disappear from members' sight. Members wont know and wont care to be searching for it, and it will diminish in activity. It is important to keep certain things visible, and some things more readily visible than others. Items at the top of any webpage get more visibility than at the bottom. Center gets more visibility than left or right.
Solution:
We need more control over order and display:
1) Quantity of items can appear on the first page before paging occurs: 1-all
2) Ordering
3) Positioning (at least basic positioning: left, right, top, bottom)
| Topic | Replies | Likes | Views | Participants | Last Reply |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What's Coming Next ... | 25 | 0 | 4325 | ||
| Chat Room participants | 1 | 0 | 1212 | ||
| "Tagging" photos in the galleries | 3 | 0 | 1333 |
Are you referring to the main forums page or the discussion topics page? If you're reffering to the discussion topics page, as a manager, you can highlight any discussion topic that you feel is important. This will do two things: 1) it will put the discussion topic on your group's summary page; and 2) It will make the discussion topic sticky so that it remains at the top of the of the topics list for that forum.
To combat the problem of forums leaving the main page, we do plan to enable ordering via drag and drop. We planned to implement this feature but decided to put it off until we could address other areas of the software. We will address this issue soon. We'll also allow for more forums to be displayed on the main page.
Also, let me point out that the "Headlines and Links Discussions" forum is automatically created if it does not exist whenever a member starts to discuss a headline or a link. Deleting it is allowed, but the next time a link or a headline is discussed it will be created again.
Also, I like the idea of letting users have a dropdown to pick how many topics appear in a forum per-page. Although, I don't think we can always offer "All". Large groups may have thousands of topics. Something reasonable like 50 or 100 per page should be sufficient, in my opinion. What do you think?
Also, ordering topics is currently done by "Last Post Date", except that sticky topics always stay at the top. What types of ordering would you like to see?
And, I'm not really sure what type of positioning you're after. Are you talking about the topics list inside of a forum? It's supposed to display as a list, I'm not sure if moving list items around the page is a good thing from a usability standpoint. It would cease to become a list and look more like a collage. I'm sure I'm missing the point of your idea here....
Thanks again for the reply Joe.
Everyone at CollectiveX should really play with an installation of VBulletin to see what they are offering. They are a competitor, and have powerful functionality that you can -steal- -copy- imitate. You could also look at Orkut and see how many discussions they list per page. I know that in all cases the max is greater than 100. It may not be practical in some cases, but in others it definitely is.
Also, when I spoke of positioning I was speaking about selecting where discussions appear and in what order. 2nd block in left column? 1st block in right column? Second block in 3rd column? I would make sure you all check out www.goingon.com and review what they allow users to do, particularly in the layout choices. They are a strong direct competitor.
Finally, the fact that Headlines & Links discussion is automatically generated creates an urgency around the ability to order discussions because it interferes with the visibility and thus the priority of discussions.
This is getting moved into the Feature Requests forum.