Help with using the Community Forum

klortho
 August 30, 2008, 05:19 AM posted in General Discussion

Is anyone else severely underwhelmed by the "community" feature here?  Why don't they integrate some proper forum software, instead of this kluge?

I'm having lots of problems, but very fundamental is:  how am I supposed to keep track of the conversations that I'm participating in?  How do you do it?

For example, I'd like to get automagically informed of when there are updates to this thread, but I don't see that feature anywhere, other than subscribing to this thread's RSS feed.  I'm a "member" of this "ChinesePod Inner Circle" group, but that doesn't seem to buy me much in terms of visibility into the threads that I'm interested in.

Thanks for any advice!

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lostinasia
 August 30, 2008, 04:44 PM

klortho, you're right, there are significant weaknesses with the community features of the site (the RSS feeds have lots of issues too).

To look at conversations you're participating in, in the Conversations tab, you can select "My Conversations" - this shows all Conversations you've participated in. Unfortunately, it doesn't show if there's new content or not.

As I said elsewhere the other day, as far as I can figure the "ChinesePod Inner Circle" has no real purpose - so why not use it for tech support.

Other now-buried threads that deal with the community/ forum issue:

The Role of the ChinesePod Forum

New Features for a New ChinesePod

(Just to clarify: in general "Community" or "Conversations" refers to things happening HERE, with ChinesePod; "Forum" refers to a separate site, the ChinesePod forum, which has much more powerful features than the community here, and used to be used a lot - perhaps it's revitalized a bit now, but I seldom visit.)

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klortho
 August 31, 2008, 02:09 AM

Wow, thanks!  You've been a huge help, I really appreciate the time you've spent.  I had no idea the ChinesePod forum existed, I'll definitely check it out.  They should have a link to it somewhere here.

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light487
 August 31, 2008, 01:19 PM

Yeh there's a link at the bottom of each page, under the Community title.

The forums are up and running and we are seeing it coming back into use more and more each day. During the the "meltdown" we had a few weeks ago, we had to lock it while the forums were upgraded and the spam removed but it seems to be doing well now. Just need to get all the people back who were using it before.

At the moment it looks a little generic, I'm hoping to eventually get the cosmetics of it updated when I can find the time.. but the functionality of the forums is still there.