OTOY Forums

Hi all,

It has come to a point where the current forum is too time demanding to maintain.
A lot of posts are posted on a daily basis, and if i were to read them all, it would be working full-time on the forum,
and as a result a lot of questions (including support requests or technical questions) lately are not answered, or answered too late.

Hiring an extra person to do forum support is not that easy either as most post are quite technical and it's not easy, probably impossible to find an administrative person who knows about PCI-E slots and cuda toolkits.

Maybe a reorganization where we try to funnel support posts into less forums and some abstraction (although i'm sure new users won't follow it) would help.
Any ideas ?

Radiance

Hi,

first sorry for my terrible english.

Imo the keywors "although i'm sure new users won't follow it". I think if you decrease the number of boards/forums not a solution because some of the users not search just make a new topic as you wrote.

My opinion the support is great. Nice peoples, quick replies and solutions. So im totally pleased.

Maybe a strict forum rule about posting subject ( eg. Please help, Octane crash, can't run etc), dupes.

Another source the octane community. Ask some experienced peoples for help maintain the topics ( answer questions, delete or close ). I know its a sensible problem because octane a commercial product but a cleaner forum is much more usable for customers.

Anyway its an ifinite problem...

* The forum needs a way to avoid repetitive threads about help & bugs. A bug tracking (help-tracking, feature request-tracking, resources-tracking...) mechanism would come in handy.

* Threads that satisfactory solve a problem (or define a bug) should be archived somewhere by Octane version / field (GUI, material pipeline, rendering, export...), and made easy to search, so that future users could first search that repository if their problem was already solved.

* Make a special sticky thread (in various sub-forums) for all sorts of quick questions that don't need it's own thread.

* Do a tutorial-making "competition" (interested contributors would pick a pre-defined subject, create a tutorial and receive some compensation for the work)

* Make a FAQ on various subjects (could be edited by experienced users with special rights)

* Encourage new users to read the manual and search the forum before posting... (this might be quite futile )

Also, as Aenima said, strict posting rules & guidelines must be defined and applied:

* No undescriptive thread titles like; "help", "please", etc.. Thread title should make it obvious what the subject is about, like; [version][Bug report][GUI] Inverted zooming does not work, or [Feature request][Material pipeline] Implement tiling procedurals.
* The poster must clearly describe his problem, add visual reference and post an example if possible and applicable.
* Everyone has to put system info into their signature.

One thing that falls in the category of community organization is the ability for users to have feedback from the developers.

Because of lack of time, devs don't respond to feature request threads and don't involve themselves much into such debates. This way it's impossible for users to know what ideas have been acknowledged, accepted or rejected by the devs -> thus people stop posting ideas or (like me ) continuously nag for the same thing. A feature-tracker will help collaboration & communication between devs & userbase.

Well said matej.
My use of the forum is push the 'view active topics'.
Sticky threads could be efficient... and other matej's ideas as well
F

I also confirm every point matej mentioned.
Nice summary mate.

To be honest, the forum definately needs a "new" structure in my view.
In my view, it is really confusing and totally untidy.

A better structure fore sure...


kian

imo the forum is OK as it is...
but if it does need any improvement (matej's suggestions are good) maybe following:
- separate category for reporting bugs etc: it will be easier for devs to go thru them (of course one cant prevent usere posting bugs everywhere else in forum- will need moderation)
- separate category for feature requests: this is currently combined with 'general discussion', and could be segregated

- on the forum front page- there can be a new column highlighting/ flashing the new posts/active topics (with only the header, author and time)...this will save a few clicks going into 'active topics/new posts' section. will make it a bit easier. I have seen this working very well in some other forums.
- resources and sharing section- is it still required? (considering we have liveDB)

anyway, a forum is all what its users make it. and thay way- its one of the best ones

I think i will ask for some help from enrico and phil on this as i don't think i'll have much time to do all this right now...
Thanks for your feedback, i will think some more about it.

Radiance

I think all you need is a bug tracker, and for the default response to support requests to be "please file a tracker request." JIRA is a very nice tracker, but there are of course many others.

I would merge General Discussion and Commercial Support Forums in one, because almost same things are discussed in those two. Having person moderating forums, would help it most.

Cheers,
n1k