what happened to the pbwiki forums?

I'm looking at the old PB Forum home ( http://forums.pbwiki.com/index.php ) where 12 major topics let me zoom in on the areas of greatest interest. I'm not seeing how this new forum venue improves on that... I come into the new forum and see the last 15 topics with zero organization.

Also, we now have two separate forums to search, as the collective knowledge of the past years didn't get imported into the new venue.

So help me. Why is this a good idea?

The problems with classic forums are well known, particularly in the context of mainstream customer service. The best answers get buried in long conversations, they breed endless duplicate topics, they're hard to search, they tend to be either under-populated or clubby. They generally aren't friendly or inviting to casual use. We're using Satisfaction to harness open conversation without falling into these traps. One example of how we're doing this so far is the "talk box" at the top of the page--by merging the process of actually asking a question and searching. The result is very few duplicate topics, and more focused engagement around the issues. The pages are designed to be more like blog posts, with each topic creating a focused conversation piece that makes sense even when entered from a Google search. The conversation threads themselves are more personal.

From the standpoint of customer service traditional forums are too general purpose to be *that* useful. We're building tools that support the distinct activities that dominate conversations between our customers and the PBwiki team -- questions, problems and ideas. There are outcomes and interactions in these activities that forums just are not suited to support.

Get Satisfaction does support the ability to "zoom into areas of greatest interest," but instead of a rigid category system it lets users associate one or more tags. You can explore the topics with a particular tag via the tag list on the left column of the main page, or anywhere you see a tag. (We realize that the tag list is not obvious enough, but PBWiki can customize its own interface to be more similar to the old forum list if they like.)

Having said that, on the old PBWiki forums 80% of the posts are in the three most popular categories: "Newbies/Help Me!", "Bug Reports" and "Feature requests." Get Satisfaction is structured around these basic categories, though we call them Questions, Problems, and Ideas.


What's interesting about each of these topic types is that each has a desired outcome--questions seek answers, problems need solutions (or resolutions of some kind), and ideas need to be ranked and implemented...or not. Get Satisfaction provides tools to help along those outcomes, and in the process can work for a much larger audience than a generalized forum.

Users can vote up the best answers, and company reps can mark their replies as official answers. Both cases will show them at the top of the page for easy discovery by casual users. The "I have this problem, too!" buttons on each topic makes it easy for people to show their interest in an outcome and helps the company prioritize its efforts. Upcoming tools for people to rank ideas, and for the company to report the status of resolutions will make the system even more effective.

You'll notice also that there are a few questions we have already put up - as PBwiki employees. We're trying to "populate" the Satisfaction forum with questions we get a lot- that way, when people ask these questions in the future, there will be answers already there!

It's going to take a while to refine this process, there are over 2 years of questions, answers and tips in the forums! We're all trying really hard to make this work, though, we want to get you the best and easiest ways to fix your problems and share your ideas. Remember, change is good. It's hard, but in the end, it's necessary to survival.

So if you see something you know was answered a million years ago in the forums, chime in with the solution. It will make this a better forum for getting answers, and you'll be helping not only the person who asked the question here, but all the other people who ask it later.

I like the idea of the forums, but am not too happy with the name of the site. I know this is beyond your control, but now I'm getting daily mails from "Get satisfaction", which is somewhat ambiguous.

Rose: Sorry if it's not apparent, but our intent is to keep you updated when someone answers or replies to a question or reply you had. You can always change this and "stop following" a topic. Or, you can turn off all e-mail notifications from your user dashboard. But, our hope is that the e-mail connection will be a way to get notified as soon as someone answers.

I think Rose's point is that the emails are "From" Get Satisfaction and she doesn't immediately associate that with PBWiki.

Rose, we're working on improving the text on the notification emails to be less ambiguous. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi,

Sorry, what I meant was that the company name reminded me a bit too much of all those companies that are sending me spam promising all kinds of things, including "satisfaction". I am not sure how my boss would react if he saw that I was getting mail from "Get satisfaction". Sure, I can explain, but I'd rather avoid the confusion at all. Again, I don't think you can ask the company to change its name, but you did ask us how we felt about the community ;-)
In itself the subject lines were clear, so that was working just fine, and I liked the notifications.

I see no improvement over traditional forums. Search used properly works well in traditional forums. I seriously dislike this format so far. Big on cute and weak on usability.

One of the nice things about Get Satisfaction is that we're actively improving it and integrating the ideas and suggestions we're getting. So look for your concerns to be addressed in short order. Thanks!

I will say you are gracious. I do love PBWiki so I'm sure the forum will be great. I did find the answer to my question so all is not lost :) Best Wishes!