I would like to give another nudge to sort this forum out.

The Q&A section is a real pain it is basically covered by me, Keck and Feet1st. But it's basically reitterating what is talked about over here and then a hint to goto the number crunching forum (which is not really what the number crunchign is meant for!)
So bring it over into the message board area, it's just a pain in the butt. I've rearly seen the admins giving help in there and even the mods don't seem to visit and help out.
If it was with this section ALL would see it, ALL Q&A people would see the other sections.
It would also mean you could remove a link from the ever crowded front page.


Also consider pulling the application problems and boinc problems out into there own area to make it much easier to see what is happeneing and what problems we have.
I would also (personally) add at the top a FAQ section so the many FAQ posts in the thread could be sorted out and added to much easier.

We know you can do it, since a test was done at Ralph@Home and have a look at Docking@home someone that has the right idea http://docking.utep.edu/forum_index.php

All in all just make it easier to use, give help and find information fast.

It is needed, these 3 sections are a jungle of stickies and information in different places.

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Team mauisun.org

What FC is suggesting would be better than the current set up.

What would be even better still, in my opinion, would be to keep Q & A as a separate message board from NC, but listed on the Message BOards page, as they do on Einstein, throwing away the extra link from the main page.

A third option would be to list the Q&A both as it is now (where newbies will see it) and also on the Message Boards page where us old hands will see it to answer it. This would be my favoured approach - best of both.

Sadly, any of these three needs a code hack to the BOINC package, it is more than simply making changes via a database. In my opinion any of these three options would be worth the programmer time.

R~~

What FC is suggesting would be better than the current set up.

What would be even better still, in my opinion, would be to keep Q & A as a separate message board from NC, but listed on the Message BOards page, as they do on Einstein, throwing away the extra link from the main page.

A third option would be to list the Q&A both as it is now (where newbies will see it) and also on the Message Boards page where us old hands will see it to answer it. This would be my favoured approach - best of both.

Sadly, any of these three needs a code hack to the BOINC package, it is more than simply making changes via a database. In my opinion any of these three options would be worth the programmer time.

R~~

Seperation even with links makes it harder to find. I'm not saying remove the Q&A style just have everything in one page. Newbies will find it just as easy AND they will find the main 'chat' just as easy.
In fact they will no no difference, since there will only ever be one place to go rather than the two we have now.

What is your reason for seperating them, what is the benefit of that ?

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Team mauisun.org

I agree that using the message board style for Q&A would make things much easier. I wanted to encourage Fluffy (and anyone with constructive ideas) to elaborate on the points about the stickies and better organization and creating new informational threads. These are things we can do now, without any programming changes. So, I'd like to keep the two ideas seperated.

I created this thread to get some ideas going on how to better organize the boards and information. Please add the thoughts about stickies, and FAQs and etc. to that thread. And we can focus this thread on the idea about creating new boards and elimination of the Q&A boards.

One of the things the moderation staff has discussed and is trying to sort out is how we might create some multilingual resources and how to organize things in way that an English user can search down a relevant answer, and aid a user in another language in getting to the language appropriate content. I realize that this sort of thing can be done with PHP and the programming of the site, but the moderation staff does not have that level of control to create new webpages, just new threads and posts.

The shared Mod.Zilla user ID will allow us to better control and revise and share the work of making these project resources.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Seperation even with links makes it harder to find. I'm not saying remove the Q&A style just have everything in one page. Newbies will find it just as easy AND they will find the main 'chat' just as easy.
In fact they will no no difference, since there will only ever be one place to go rather than the two we have now.

What is your reason for seperating them, what is the benefit of that ?

I think it would be a bad idea to merge the NC board with the Q&A board, if by that you meant have one longer list of threads with both kinds of subject in them.

I do think it would be a good idea to have the forum index (I mean this page show the Q&A board as another forum, with time since latest post etc. If I saw recent posts there I'd be inclined to look at the individual board; at present I rarely look as I tend to forget about boards that are not listed on the forum index.

The other advantage of having them referenced from the same index is that people wanting to ask questions would be more likely to choose the Q&A board than they are now.

So far what I am suggesting os what Einstein have done, and it works well over there, imo.

At the same time, I think there is still merit in having a direct link from the main page to the Q&A board, in addition to having it linked from the forum index (which itself has a link from the main page).

Giving people multiple paths to the right place makes it more likely thay will get there. I never understand this compulsion people have for making websites like a tree with only one way to get to the leaves. Good for first design, but then also add short cuts for where you want people to go.

R~~

I mean like I posted in the first post
http://docking.utep.edu/forum_index.php ;-)

Having only one place to go to to get to where you want to ask a question is much simpler.

I think we maybe saying the same thing ?

You wouldn't need a direct link to Q&A, since it would be merged with the message boards, so a direct link to that does the first bit <tonge tied wording>

e.g. Remove [/i]Message board[/i] link & Q&A link, replace with Chat, Questions and Answer Forums link.

It would be even better it we brought RALPH chat in to here as well, since what happens there is directly related to what happens here. Get all talk and chat into one place where all the people can see what is happning, what is being asked and what needs doing. I can give one example of that... when we flipped to a different credit system, and another being that peopel will know what is being looked at and what is in development....

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Team mauisun.org

thought i replied to this thread yesterday!

Basically, I agree wiht FC, and would like to suggest all BOINC project's forums have integrated links to the central BOINC forum as if it were part of each of the forums. That'd help people with BOINC problems get help from the full userbase and would reduce the number of duplicated threads between the different boards.

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If I hear the idea properly, I believe Fluffy's main complaint is that the current Q&A area is NOT a "message board". And it does NOT place the threads with recent updates at the time (you have to select whether you want recent questions, or recent answers). And it does NOT show you which posts you've previously read, and which you have not.

So I believe the suggestion is to remove the current QA area, and add additional "message boards" for questions. So it would not be intermixed with crunching. We'd have:

Science
Crunching
Cafe
FAQs
Q&A - configuration
Q&A - getting started
Q&A - BOINC
Q&A - Rosetta problems

...something like that.

So then the question becomes how many Q&A (and other) sections is best. Presently, since I don't run Mac or Unix, I only very rarely look at those boards, and yet a lot of the questions asked there are general to BOINC or not specific to a platform. So, I think we're doing somewhat of a disservice by having a seperate area for each platform. It looks good on paper, but then if it's really such a great idea... why don't they put a "Problems with Rosetta vx.xx" thread under each seperate platform?

Also the current QA area for "web site" very rarely sees any actual comments/suggestions about the website, because people don't understand how the various areas are seperated. They think of where the WUs come from as the "web site" so if they have a problem getting work, they often post there.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

thought i replied to this thread yesterday!

Basically, I agree wiht FC, and would like to suggest all BOINC project's forums have integrated links to the central BOINC forum as if it were part of each of the forums. That'd help people with BOINC problems get help from the full userbase and would reduce the number of duplicated threads between the different boards.

That was a different post in Cafe https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=2636 about a bad review BOINC got, I've just been reading the dev list and it's caused quite a little rush of ideas suddenly (our sesident Astro will know better)

This one is basically about Rosetta@Home ignoring the BOINC part of it for the moment ;-)

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Team mauisun.org

If I hear the idea properly, I believe Fluffy's main complaint is that the current Q&A area is NOT a "message board". And it does NOT place the threads with recent updates at the time (you have to select whether you want recent questions, or recent answers). And it does NOT show you which posts you've previously read, and which you have not.

So I believe the suggestion is to remove the current QA area, and add additional "message boards" for questions. So it would not be intermixed with crunching. We'd have:

Science
Crunching
Cafe
FAQs
Q&A - configuration
Q&A - getting started
Q&A - BOINC
Q&A - Rosetta problems

...something like that.

So then the question becomes how many Q&A (and other) sections is best. Presently, since I don't run Mac or Unix, I only very rarely look at those boards, and yet a lot of the questions asked there are general to BOINC or not specific to a platform. So, I think we're doing somewhat of a disservice by having a seperate area for each platform. It looks good on paper, but then if it's really such a great idea... why don't they put a "Problems with Rosetta vx.xx" thread under each seperate platform?

Also the current QA area for "web site" very rarely sees any actual comments/suggestions about the website, because people don't understand how the various areas are seperated. They think of where the WUs come from as the "web site" so if they have a problem getting work, they often post there.

You have the idea.
I wouldn't say it's not a message board is my main complaint, since it gets used like a message board and not a Q&A anyway ;-)
I would say my main complaint is that people go there ask questions and assume they should get a reply, they don't they get no reply quickly unless by chance me or you happen to go in there, especially when most the information they would need is tucked away in another area.
Fully agree with the Mac/Linux/Windows part, no reason for it since they are all basically the same problems anyway.

After all we volunteers are the general support team around here, surely it should be adapted to aid us in helping and keeping people stay here and make our lifes simpler.

Honestly, how many of you actually pop in to Q&A every time you visit here and try and answer questions?

(oh I would so love to have the posts flag up with new posts rather than guessing by the tome since last post).

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Team mauisun.org

It certainly takes the flags to get me to look somewhere.

Whatever solution is adopted it needs to have flags on new messages. Any proposal that does not have falgs will not generate very much new volunteer input.

The other thing that needs to be said is that in this discussion (and altho I still mildly disagree with FC for the reasons we both stated eralier), in all fairness the people already doing the job have more right to the last word in this, especially when they indicate, as FC has, that they feel they are left with a larger share of the work than they want.

R~~

Hi,

I mostly drop in there when I am on the forum, but as I am a Windows user only I cannot say much regarding other OSs and have little knowledge on certain network issues. And it has been pretty quiet there recently. [Although I do not think the reason is that there are no questions anymore. I rather think that even Newbies pretty quickly realize that the Q&A area is rather one where warm desert winds may flow unheeded, sometimes rolling some dead bush along.]

I would also like the whole Q&A thing made more like a "real" forum (or several fora) with the same hints on new and unread threads.