I hope people don't mind all these posts. I am trying to do my job as a user/documenter while thinking about all of this from my own unique business focus. If no one ever reads this it wouldn't matter in the least; I am just stretching my brain out as I figure out my own issues.
I know that the concept of what all of you developers must provide as a first step to the user base differs from my definition of a finalized, cohesive forums, and that all the bells and whistles I want/need are not necessarily things that you need to put in there, or even maybe think about very much.
Now that I have a good php guy I can see how easy it is to make solutions. But many users don't have such luck, or they may be paying through the nose for development, so its important to give people a solution they can implement fairly quickly and painlessly. I will definitely push for wider adoption by providing a relatively simple solution to get going with. Let them learn the power they have later :-)
But, I do admit I have a huge conceptual gap between, give me more options and, just do it yourself. I might think something ought to be core, but perhaps it could be added as a custom job or as a plugin or something. For example, the user level system in Discuss, which honestly doesn't work very well, provides the option for levels to be defined according to posts, but not another option. Not complaining about it, just saying it is provided as an option, but then there aren't really other values. So allowing user freedom is actually pretty tough! Where is the line drawn?
Here, I want to talk about the various values that the system can/will log, and how important they are. In my work, I touched on this but its too uncertain and I can work around it. But it got me thinking about what I would want, in a perfect world.
Of course the system will log various activity, and it will be important to provide full documentation about all that stuff. But what is logged is interesting, what values are easy to grab and/or useful to forum managers? Could I know which users log in daily and which are only once every 2-3 days? I would give the former a nice prize for being "core" users, wouldn't I? In China we have a messaging service called QQ, and it lets you go up in level, and if you log on every day, as opposed to every 3 days, you will find your level increases quickly, otherwise, your level will languish.
Even thinking about "core" users, I mean hey I want to first identify them, the reward them probably, then understand them. So I need the data to do that, I am sure there is a bunch of this regularly picked up by the system anyway, plus in the depths of the system more can be picked up. Pls pick it all up and give it to me haha!
The same is true for casual users, I would like to identify them and then I could try to lure them in. Right now I am going to try and modify the manifest so that I can put some sort of teaser on the sidebar of the new post (meaning thread) view, so I can say to the few who post, hi! thanks for getting here, what do you like so far and don't like? Or join me in a special discussion, or...something. That's a nice example of what Discuss can do, but more data will make it easier to do that in more ways, this example is a bit crude, obviously. It might be their first post...I haven't really targeted who I want very specifically in my example.
If a user just came back after a significant absence, I need to know it. I just went back on FB for the first time in like 2-3 months, and got an email from them seconds later, some idiocy like how to get back into facebook. But the point is, they knew.
I am going to build a simple system which will provide a developing icon as people post more, to encourage posting, and also a post-based level system, and thats fine for my needs now, but I would love to be able to base these values on other data. Who writes stuff that gets lots of replies or views? I would like to give that person something special. Who replies in good ways, sharing info? I want to connect with them too.
So, that's all I can really say. At first for my little scheme above, I wanted like user loggedintime in seconds, but then when that was difficult my staff felt that number of posts was just fine, no problem. So that got me thinking about all the different data which could be captured, not as an immediate issue, but just theoretically.
I hope people don't mind all these posts. I am trying to do my job as a user/documenter while thinking about all of this from my own unique business focus. If no one ever reads this it wouldn't matter in the least; I am just stretching my brain out as I figure out my own issues.
I know that the concept of what all of you developers must provide as a first step to the user base differs from my definition of a finalized, cohesive forums, and that all the bells and whistles I want/need are not necessarily things that you need to put in there, or even maybe think about very much.
Now that I have a good php guy I can see how easy it is to make solutions. But many users don't have such luck, or they may be paying through the nose for development, so its important to give people a solution they can implement fairly quickly and painlessly. I will definitely push for wider adoption by providing a relatively simple solution to get going with. Let them learn the power they have later :-)
But, I do admit I have a huge conceptual gap between, give me more options and, just do it yourself. I might think something ought to be core, but perhaps it could be added as a custom job or as a plugin or something. For example, the user level system in Discuss, which honestly doesn't work very well, provides the option for levels to be defined according to posts, but not another option. Not complaining about it, just saying it is provided as an option, but then there aren't really other values. So allowing user freedom is actually pretty tough! Where is the line drawn?
Here, I want to talk about the various values that the system can/will log, and how important they are. In my work, I touched on this but its too uncertain and I can work around it. But it got me thinking about what I would want, in a perfect world.
Of course the system will log various activity, and it will be important to provide full documentation about all that stuff. But what is logged is interesting, what values are easy to grab and/or useful to forum managers? Could I know which users log in daily and which are only once every 2-3 days? I would give the former a nice prize for being "core" users, wouldn't I? In China we have a messaging service called QQ, and it lets you go up in level, and if you log on every day, as opposed to every 3 days, you will find your level increases quickly, otherwise, your level will languish.
Even thinking about "core" users, I mean hey I want to first identify them, the reward them probably, then understand them. So I need the data to do that, I am sure there is a bunch of this regularly picked up by the system anyway, plus in the depths of the system more can be picked up. Pls pick it all up and give it to me haha!
The same is true for casual users, I would like to identify them and then I could try to lure them in. Right now I am going to try and modify the manifest so that I can put some sort of teaser on the sidebar of the new post (meaning thread) view, so I can say to the few who post, hi! thanks for getting here, what do you like so far and don't like? Or join me in a special discussion, or...something. That's a nice example of what Discuss can do, but more data will make it easier to do that in more ways, this example is a bit crude, obviously. It might be their first post...I haven't really targeted who I want very specifically in my example.
If a user just came back after a significant absence, I need to know it. I just went back on FB for the first time in like 2-3 months, and got an email from them seconds later, some idiocy like how to get back into facebook. But the point is, they knew.
I am going to build a simple system which will provide a developing icon as people post more, to encourage posting, and also a post-based level system, and thats fine for my needs now, but I would love to be able to base these values on other data. Who writes stuff that gets lots of replies or views? I would like to give that person something special. Who replies in good ways, sharing info? I want to connect with them too.
So, that's all I can really say. At first for my little scheme above, I wanted like user loggedintime in seconds, but then when that was difficult my staff felt that number of posts was just fine, no problem. So that got me thinking about all the different data which could be captured, not as an immediate issue, but just theoretically.