Watchlist Conversation List Absolutely Useless
rich
May 07, 2007, 11:08 PM posted in General DiscussionI don't know if posting here will help, but thought I'd try anyway.
I am finding the Conversation lists in the "Connect" page almost useless, or especially the Watchlist Conversation list. Now don't get me wrong, I love this feature, I just feel that it could be improved, hopefully with little effort on ChinesePod's end, but I don't know how flexible the system is.
The main thing, as I said above, is the Watchlist conversation list. Maybe it's because I thought it would be cool to add everyone who at least contributes decent and/or helpful posts to my watchlist. But even before I had lots, it seemed that this list of conversation was just a repeat of one topic. I am assuming that what it is doing is it is finding the latest conversation from everyone on my watchlist.... yet since most of them have made a comment in one or two of the latest lessons, just those two lessons are in the list.
Is it possible for that list to filter out the duplicates? Then I can see conversations that have posts from my "favorite" people. I would think that would be the actual functionality of that.
But I also want to put in a wishlist for other watchlists as well. For my own list, and especially when viewing someone else's connect page, it would be WODNERFUL if it didn't order discussions i have responded to by the lastest post, but did it more like when you put your feed or someone else's feed in Google Reader, etc. I will go to someone's page, like Ken's, and see that some discussion that is on the top of his listed is dated 4:15am (for example), I keep thinking "Ken has made a response to that conversation, and was up at 4am??", then to realize he hadn't made any new contribution to the discussion as I had hoped, and it was some one else making the latest post.
So in short, it woudl be really nice to see those conversation lists in order that the person who owns the connect page responded, not other people's timestamps. Possible? I can only hope, cuz I think it would make the discussions easier to keep up on. Until then... I have to be adding people's feeds to Google Reader...
-Rich
bazza
May 09, 2007, 08:38 AMI agree, it would be nice to be able to edit your watchlist as well. Rich I see you also have a blank entry in your list.
rich
May 09, 2007, 04:32 PMYeah, why is that? Someone get deleted? I did add to many unknown people to my list... was just trying to test V3 and this feature and see if it had any use. As for the conversatino watchlist, I have found Google Reader to be the way I first go to see what new posts are on here. Cooler than I even knew about feeds before (which was, uh, like 2-3 weeks ago that I even started to try to know) Here is a tip that really helps: I originally thought that any feed URL with my personal connect page (i.e. ".../connect/Rich/...") could not be used with Google Reader because it would need to log in as me. That is not true as I found out. If you click on "All Conversations feed", copy the URL, and subscribe to that feed using Google Reader, that makes viewing ALL discussions in summary form very easy. Oh, and make sure you "Mark all as read" so you can see when new ones come in. And the best part, it can be viewed with a cell phone: http://www.google.com/reader/m/. Enjoy! -Rich
rich
May 08, 2007, 11:09 AMWas thinking maybe my post, should it ever reach the top guys who make decision about the website, wasn't that clear. When viewing someone's posts, including my own, it would be really good if the time-stamps were of that person's last message. Like in my example above with Ken's posts, often I will want to see when he, Jenny, John or Amber have posted a response, but it really doesn't do me much good to go to their connect page...it will just show me what discussions they HAVE responded to in the PAST, but not in order of the time they responded. Would be really helpful if it showed only their latest posts and the time stamp of their last post in that discussion, not the last post anyone made. -R