sdbarb's dashboard

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!

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

PBwiki recently switched to Satisfaction as well - it is kind of hard at first, because the forums had a lot of information in them! But the Satisfaction interface, the context-based search form, tags and "Useful" marks are a lot more streamlined, and *hopefully* will make for a better, more easily searchable support database. The thing it needs now, though, is more questions and answers, which you can help with, by asking and answering them here.

The faces are a little silly, yes, but some people find that being able to express their emotional context for the problem or question they have enhances the question itself. I'm sure you've had times when you just want an answer now, and other times when you want to explore the different ways of doing something and maybe learn some other stuff along the way. But you don't have to use them, it's not required.

As for that nifty little script - you might want to share that here so that the other users can still search the forums, even if they have to ask new questions here! I know I'd be interested in it!

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.

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.

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?

I've got a page I devoted to this question.
http://help4all.pbwiki.com/AddingTagS...

We'd love to know your thoughts on this interface for connecting with our team. Our hope is that it will provide a much better experience for folks than our forums did. Our whole staff regularly reads and responds here, and the Q&A is integrated with help pages on every PBwiki.

Hi!

PBwiki has moved the forums for our old site (forums.pbwiki.com) to this new site.

We want to make it as easy as possible to reach the team and connect with others. This site should make it much easier (and more fun!)

A few things to know:

1) You will need to chose a new user name and password.
2) Your conversations won't be lost! You will still be able to read posts on the old forums page for a while longer but we will be locking them from future posts.
3) We are working hard to make sure that your important posts won't be left behind. If you think we missed an important thread, let us know or even post the question on the new site.

If you have any questions, just ask me!

Kristine

however, when I search I get none of the answers I used to get. I found a script that I could copy for a tag search box and several other useful items that don't show up when I search here. And lose the faces; makes me feel like I am in grade school