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I hate this new help "forum" system
Does anyone other than me have problems with this new 3rd party interface?
It sucks!
As poor as the old pbwiki Forums were, at least they were navigable, & usable.
Why, since the employee/responders are still the same, did pbwiki go to this system???
It sucks!
As poor as the old pbwiki Forums were, at least they were navigable, & usable.
Why, since the employee/responders are still the same, did pbwiki go to this system???
I’m pissed off
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Inappropriate?Do you have any specific frustrations about GetSatisfaction? We ran it by a large number of users and pretty much everybody we trialled it with found it a huge improvement. It keeps our staff much better in touch with users, lets us automatically suggest answers to people in need, is *far* more active than our forums ever were and is far more effective in getting people's questions answered correctly and timely.1 Comment
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ok this is 1st time back to check out site ... first thing I see that really displease me is "so & so" replied "n months ago" .... put a REAL date in there! "n" number of months ago has absolutely NO relevance in tracking, pbwiki did it so much better ... and I STILL HATE THIS INTERFACE!
Navigation (as promised by pbwiki) is no better, I'm still having difficulty following threads, I can't flag threads, etc, etc.
Again, why did pbwiki abandon ship to some 3rd party just for convenience?? You haven't done a thing here (that I can see) that really helps us poor users. Shame. -
Inappropriate?Yes, my frustration is that it's not only difficult to navigate the "Get Satisfaction" site, but that it's cluttered with every other organization that they've seduced. All that left hand c__p on the left hand side of the screen is of absolutely NO help to me (as a user needing help). And I truly miss the the "categorization" from the old Forum site.
Big Question ... why is your staff better able to answer questions here than they were at the old site. Doesn't make sense!!! (or is it just that you had lousy help before?)
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Inappropriate?Piney,
We'll be getting a cleaned, gutted, and skinned version of Satisfaction in the next few weeks that should minimize the other random stuff you see on the help site. We're also exploring integrating our authentication so you don't have to have a separate account here.
Those issues you mentioned notwithstanding, I really do think Satisfaction provides a much more usable and satisfying experience than forums. And we're getting literally several times more users engaging here than engaged on forums, so the numbers feel like they support that.
But your feedback has been heard; we'll work on getting a cleaner version in your hands pronto. -
Inappropriate?sounds great ... as long as you can make the threads more visible & easier to navigate.
Otherwise, be sure to find a way to put a "sticky" somewhere that's always visible no matter on what page a person in need of help is, so they can find where to go next. (Get my drift?)
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Inappropriate?I also think it is too difficult to use - there is too much overwhelming on the page - not enough help/information/instruction as to how to go about using it.... etc....
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Thanks for the feedback - as David mentioned, we're working towards a new reskinned version of our community and I think it's going to resolve a lot of the issues that you've mentioned.
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?Another benefit of Get Satisfaction (speaking as one of its creators) is that we're actively refining it based on user input, so it's just going to get better and better. The more specific you can be with your suggestions the more we can address them. Thanks!
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?I find your help forum cumbersome and time consuming. pbwiki has changed so much since I last used it, so I have lots of questions. I spent way too much time in the past week getting 'lost' in the help forum.
I'm an educator, and there is no way my students will be able to navigate your help area.
Maybe you can look at Oracle's 'Think,com' help area. It's very clean and simple.
I’m frustrated.
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Inappropriate?Care to make some of those "numbers" public? Not that we don't trust you, but it sounds vaguely "touchy-feely". -
Inappropriate?Pineywoodsgal, you are not alone. PBwiki loves Get Satisfaction, and that's all that matters. As for the rest of us - good luck trying to find a thread you posted in a couple of weeks ago.
LOL - even now, there are 10 users online in the old forums. I seem to recall a commitment by some PBwiki staffer to migrate all the useful threads from the old forums over here - is that ever going to happen? -
Inappropriate?Shirley, I'm sorry you're having trouble getting the help you need.
I notice that you haven't actually posted any questions (with your current username anyway) yet. You're right though, we have changed a lot and our new community area will only improve as folks start to ask more and more questions.
As an educator, you may also want to head over to educators.pbwiki.com where we're putting together a resource for other educators like you.
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Inappropriate?If it's a topic you posted a few weeks ago, you can find it by clicking the "You" link in the top navigation bar. Your dashboard has all your topics handily organized in one place. We're definitely going to make the navigation clearer.
In the coming weeks we'll be aggressively releasing improvements to every aspect of the interface, so just keep the specific suggestions coming and you're likely to see your issues resolved quickly. In particular, we're working on innovations to help people find what they're looking for more easily.
Mr. Fawkes and others: if you could provide us examples of what you were looking for but couldn't find we can keep that in mind when testing out refinements. You can add suggestions here. We're working our tails off trying to serve you well.
I’m a positive thinker
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Inappropriate?"Your dashboard has all your topics handily organized in one place."
I have 73 posts. Rather than listing them concisely, by topic, they contain huge blurbs, and are spread out over 14 pages. That's not useful to me.
As for suggestions for improving Get Satisfaction: That's quite the sore point. PBwiki has always taken the stance that they will let their users solve their difficult problems, rather than doing the work themselves. Hell, I've actually seen PBwiki employees post questions asking how to do something in PBwiki, hoping that a customer will answer! Customers come here to get answers, not be unpaid employees. It's hard enough working around that, trying to get things done in PBwiki. I have neither the time nor the inclination to help another company do their jobs for them. Presumably, that's what you pay your employees for. This "Web 2.0" notion of getting your customers to do your work for you doesn't sit well with everyone. I can just envision getting an assignment from my boss, then asking him "well, how would *you* do that?"
I’m just sayin'
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Inappropriate?Let's continue this off-topic discussion over here.
I’m happy to give feedback to the companies whose products and services I use.
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Inappropriate?Excuse me, Ms. Muller, but the "topic" here is "I hate this new help forum". Mr. Muller specifically asked for examples of *why* we hate your product, and I provided them. I'm not sure how you consider my reply "off-topic".
I’m shocked and appalled
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Guy, you're RIGHT ON!! Go, dude, keep blasting!
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Inappropriate?I understand, Guy Fawkes. However, since the conversation has diverted to the Get Satisfaction service in general and is now less about PBwiki's use of it I think it would be a good idea to move it over to the Satisfaction area so as not to distract from PBwiki trying to help their customers with their core product.
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Sorry it's taken me so long to reply (I started the thread), but Guy is totally correct and you are side-stepping. This whole entire thread is NOT about "diversion to Get Satisfaction" but about the lack of pbwiki itself in providing the right kind of customer support!!! (I meant to post this "n" months ago, but here it is today. Deal with it. The old pbwiki forums, for all their problems, were SO MUCH BETTER!!!
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Inappropriate?Wow. Just wow. You *really* don't get it, do you? This topic has nothing to do with "PBwiki trying to help their customers with their core product", no matter how hard you try to make it so. It's about "problems with this new 3rd party interface".
I’m hopeful that this is not a typical response
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Inappropriate?If I may correct the record, Mr. Fawkes, I didn't ask for reasons why anybody hates anything, but rather, how we can improve the experience for everyone. The latter is a productive discussion, whereas the former just makes us feel bad :(
The issue you brought up instead was whether community support *in general* is exploitive. I can understand how Amy considered this to be a distinctly different topic, but certainly one worthy of discussion. -
Inappropriate?No one "makes" you feel bad. If that's how you choose to deal with criticism, then you are free to do so. But, as an adult, you are free to feel however you please. Please don't blame others for your choice.
N.B. - *This* reply is probably off-topic, but, as Get Satisfaction lacks the "private messaging" feature provided by more mature/robust forum engines, there's no place else to post it. -
Inappropriate?Appropriately, "Thor" has wielded the banhammer upon me. Apparently, "kindness" is a requirement for using Get Satisfaction (and, by extension, getting support from PBwiki). I wish all the PBwiki users the best of luck.
I’m outta here.
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Inappropriate?You've been banned? I've been watching your replies and agree with them entirely. The whole point of this thread, since I started it, was to let PBwiki know that their original forums were 110% better than this one. It seems they didn't want to implement Captcha or banning, so there were lots of post problems. Now here were are, forced to use this system with both captcha & banning. Go figure. PBWiki, re-implement your own system!!
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Inappropriate?Private Messaging was one of the better features of PBwiki. When "HELP" didn't or wouldn't provide answers, I often got help from other users thru P.M.
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Inappropriate?Hm. I'm sorry that GetSatisfaction isn't, well, satisfying you. As I may have mentioned, we'll be rolling out a more integrated help system (also powered by GS, but with PBwiki skinning, integrated authentication, etc) in the next few weeks. I really hope that helps to address the issues you've had. We really are just trying to provide straightforward and affordable support for our users.
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Inappropriate?How can you affect anything that's here on Get Satisfaction?
It's the original PBwiki Forums that are what we need back again! -
Inappropriate?For the record, Guy Fawkes has not been banned. If he had, he would not have been able to log in and post his reply.
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Inappropriate?For the record, I was told: "So in the event you do participate on the site again, I need to ask you to show the kindness to others that you'd expect returned." I neither expect nor desire kindness in this context, and I am both aware of and comfortable with my tone in this discussion. I interpreted that statement to mean "do not return with that attitude". It was a civil, gentleman's banning, to be sure, but the intent was clear: "This is Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, and we aim to keep it that way."
If he was not asking me to leave unless I play nice, then I apologize. -
Inappropriate?As a reminder to everyone, we do have a set of community guidelines, which we encourage everyone to follow: http://getsatisfaction.com/community_... -
Inappropriate?I am surprised no one from Get Satisfaction linked to their recent blog post about their upcoming features.
These new features include a better search process (already implemented, thank you guys, it's awesome!), merging topics that have the same question, deprecating old topics that are out of date so they don't confuse people looking for information on a new version, and I remember hearing something about private messaging, which may be further down on the roadmap.
Coming at a problem or issue with anger, frustration and hatred is often the least constructive way to solve it. We try to be as positive as we can when trying to explain and fix things, but there's only so far any of us can go if no one's willing to put aside their emotional reactions and listen to anyone else.
And I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. -
Inappropriate?Hello everyone.
I signed-up to get satisfaction.com about 8 hours ago. From what I could pick up just reading some of your replies in this particular topic-thread, it sounds like getsatisfaction is a fairly new site. If that is correct, then I'm afraid it really will take more time for the site to do a better job supporting people in finding the help they're after. That's just how collaborative sites are. Of course, the improvements you're planning to make the site easier to navigate/find help will also help a lot.
But I believe the thinking behind the site (a collaborative help system, if I may style a description) is the right way to go. It will (eventually) be richer and more helpful, and will be all these more quickly, than any traditional "me company, you customer" help desk could ever hope to be.
It is not exploitative because (a) users who contribute to the site do so knowing full well that their contribution is meant to and will be re-used by the site to help others, and (b) any user can always choose not to contribute and simply take what they find useful with no ill effects to their standing as a site member.
Now, so as not to be accused of being "off-topic" I agree with the orginal observation that the interface is cluttered and makes it difficult to find what you may be after. A better (read simpler) search function is a must. An auto-generated context-sensitive list of suggested links might also help.
More power to getsatisfaction! Keep up the good work!
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?Thanks so much for your thoughts and suggestions, Rene!
Get Satisfaction has been around for about a year, however, PBwiki has only recently started using it as a replacement for their forums so they are still working on getting their customers up to speed here and porting valuable content over from their forums.
A "collaborative help system" as you called it is a good way to describe it. There are several companies that have been using Get Satisfaction for quite some time now and have had great success with helping their customers and creating vibrant communities where the customers also help each other -- Timbuk2, Twitter, HubDub, Joby, Pownce -- to name a small handful.
We are constantly evolving the interface and features of Get Satisfaction to best suit the needs of our users and feedback like yours is truly valuable to us. If you have further input as you dig deeper into Get Satisfaction we'd love to hear it over here as that's where our whole team is participating and your input will be sure to be heard.
I’m listening
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Inappropriate?Still a fair amount of clutter... and the biggest problem for me is that it's too hard to quickly read the new posts. With only six topics to a page, I have to load the next page way too often - I usually give up after two or three pages.
Is this something that can be customized by each user? -
Inappropriate?And when the GS staff has their employees "gang-vote" a post as useful, they rise, completely out-of-context, to the top of the thread, further obscuring any useful information. While this may appeal to the vanity of the person whose post is elevated to "People's Pick", it does nothing to enhance the conversation.
I’m expecting a red star next to the words "People's Pick".
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Inappropriate?Yeah, it is super annoying when a post floats out of context to the top of a thread. It makes the conversation pretty useless to anyone except those that are already following it. No good if you're just looking for the answer to a question.
I’m wishing I could read threads in their proper order.
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Inappropriate?The point of the starred posts floating to the top is to provide a quick answer to a question, so users not interested in the conversation get in, get their answers, and get out.
Official Responses also get floated, but if you look closely, not every post by a PBwiki employee gets an official response tag - it's reserved for someone from here coming in and saying what's what.
And if you see those floated posts, there is a link that says "See in Context." As a Support rep, I find floated responses pretty useless, since I'm mostly responding to the further questions down the conversational line, but in the most popular threads, there's normally no more than 1 or 2 floated posts. And that's why there's a space bar or scroll button.
I’m irked people are still critiquing GS's UI on the PBwiki thread, instead of taking their suggestions striaght to GS.
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Inappropriate?"The point of the starred posts floating to the top is to provide a quick answer to a question"
Well, if the makers of GS limited this function to that specific use, it wouldn't suck so much. But even they can't resist the urge to "vote up" their own posts for reasons unrelated to your thoughtful analysis.
"I'm irked people are still critiquing GS's UI on the PBwiki thread, instead of taking their suggestions striaght to GS."
We don't care that GS sucks, per se. We care that PBwiki has chosen to force this crappy system as the only support forum. That is, quite properly, a PBwiki issue. The only reason that specifics of said suckage arise is an apparently vain attempt to lend weight to the argument that PBwiki has made a Bad Decision.
I’m glad I could help you understand the real issue here
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Inappropriate?Hi sraymond. You bring up a really good point! Right now there is a small (-) on the upper left corner of the topic list. If you click on the (-) the topics will collapse to the title and meta info. This makes it easier to scan the topics, but it still only shows 6. It's just a simple change to the interface that sets a cookie and keeps that as your view until your hit the (+) to open the topics back up. We'll look into making this view more customizable. I'm curious in the meantime if you can tell me more about your search for new posts. How were you going about your search (for example, did you try to look at all the posts since you're last visit and did you use the dates for reference, or just the last familiar title)? And what were you looking for (things of interest to you, import issues, or trying to get a feel for what's been happening etc.)?
Thanks!
I’m working hard to make it work best for you!
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Inappropriate?Hi everybody, glad you bring up this issue, funny that.
We recognized this issue a while back, and we starting thinking why on earth would we float replies to the top in a conversation? The value (getting a quick answer as Casey points out) is only needed for Questions, Problems and Ideas. Conversations (Talk Topics) don't need a voting system, and so we've removed "Mark as useful" and people's and company picks from the new versions of the topic pages that are coming out really soon now.
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?The two use cases I'm familiar with are forums (where I can see new unread posts since my last visit) and RSS (where I get the entire feed and mark as read as I see fit.
Here, I'm left to start paging through... I try to get to a point where I recognize the title or see the date is older than my last visit. It doesn't work well, though. I also have a hard time recognizing new replies that are put under what I'm reply to (like this one here).
Am I missing something with the RSS feed? I can't seem to find the feed that provides *all* the posts.
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Inappropriate?Guy Fawkes, could you make the same post about "innapropriate floated replies" on the Getsatisfaction product page too, or just cross-post this one? I didn't find a thread there on quite the same thing.
I agree this feature needs a lot of work, but I think it (along with a lot of other problems) will be more easily tackled over there.
I’m trying to help...
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Inappropriate?Probably not. Leslie's post right above yours admits that they already know it's a problem; "someone" lowered the "mark as useful" count on Amy's post so it no longer dominates this thread, and finally, I have no desire to help improve GS. You, however, are welcome to do so.
I’m in favor of letting this thread lapse into obscurity
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Inappropriate?Okay. It does seem like this particular thread here in Getsatisfaction/PBwiki is running out of steam. But while it was hot, it did in fact provide a lot of useful input for efforts to improve getsatisfaction itself. Thanks!
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?It appears that the last comment on this thread is 5 months old, however I have a few comments and possible concrete suggestions re PBwiki's using Get Satisfaction for comments.
First of all, there is a problem page on the Summer Camp wiki. Then each page has comments. And there is GS. Where are people SUPPOSED to be asking their questions? This needs to be clarified and posted prominently on PB Wiki's camp and anywhere else that send people over to GS. To be honest, I'm not why PBWiki is using GS... the Problem Page format seems to work fairly well.
There should be a Suggestion Page for specific, constructive suggestions, eg. tagging capability in Get Satisfaction or other ideas.
In the same way that PB Wiki can and should be structured into topics (using folders, tables of contents, etc. GS definitely needs a better system of organizing posts. Possible categories could be: Formatting text, Adding Media, Plugins, etc.
Take a look at features offered on different sites and consider incorporating some of the ones that work well. Eg. Ning discussions allow you to be notified if someone has added to a thread you are following. PBwiki and TappedIn allow you to reply directly to a comment, not just at the bottom. Many communities allow comments to be rated either with useful/not useful or my favorite, best answer.
I’m unsure about where to post
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Inappropriate?All good suggestions. But here's another ... perhaps I'm the most stupid person in the world, but I don't see "threads" in this new system. All the posts are listed by date ... not very helpful since it requires me (or any user) to input a keyword into the Search box to get relevant replies. Or am I missing something entirely. (And yes, I still hate this, wish the old Forums were in place, for all their faults.)
I’m still frustrated
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My mistake... you can respond to individual comments.
About the threads, I imagine that commenting on the top Question would constitute a thread, however those questions need to themselves be put within categories like on my ning classroom 2.0 community, for example. I posted a question about embed codes, but it should really be under "Adding Media to PBWiki" or something like that. Thanks for replying... I worried because the last post was so long ago!
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