Sometime last night, the REALbasic user forums hit a fairly major milestone: over 50,000 posts! What's amazing is that it did this in just barely over a year's time. It sure didn't take long to pick up steam, did it? The forums are easily one of the most productive and helpful tools in the REALbasic user's toolkit -- so many smart people who are willing to donate their time to give you personalized help in solving your problems.
In a related note, I took a peek at my user statistics, and I found that I make up almost 10% of the forum's total traffic. That's rather scary, eh?
Edit (10:30 am): Since this is a milestone, I'd like to ask for some feedback from forums users. What is your favorite thing about the forums? And if you could change one thing about the forums, what would it be? If you're not a forums user, why aren't you?
Glad to hear that... I love having the forums as a resource. I know it was something that you really worked hard for.
Congrats!!
I know you all passed RealGurus a while back. It was a bitter sweet moment for me. And Aaron, 10% might seem bad, but everyone is extremely thankful.
Does that mean you post 14x a day to the forums? (10% x 50,000 / 365)
That sounds about right to me.
You truly are one of the hardest working people I've ever encountered ("virtually", or otherwise).
Thanks for everything you do for our community.
I think we passed realgurus in the first two or three months or something. I know in our first week we had more users than rg. I figured it was the beginning of the end when I finally got my wish to have our own forums. It's too bad we weren't able to join communities...
As for 10% seeming bad, I'm more shocked than appalled. That's a ton of traffic (around 5000 posts) just from one person (hence the shock). ;-)
@Russ -- thanks! And your math is close, but it's been more than 365 days. Here's my stats as of right now:
Total posts: 4974
[9.93% of total / 11.84 posts per day]
Well, Realguru kinda pushed people over to your forums. Nearly everyone went over there. You got the people, but lost the direct access to the posts. But the page is still there being maintained, for posterity, by moi. But, hey. Official forums are good, too.
Ah....HEM. I think that while the forums are quaint and might be useful to SOME people, there are resources out there, on the interweb, that others might find much more helpful (Without all the posting and stuff).
They jsut have to look, you know, a bit.
Feedback, sorry, I missed that edit. Ummmm.... ahhhhh.... maybe find out why only this forum has a hard time recognizing me clicking a link. I sometimes have to click a few times. But that's about it.
@Bill -- what ever could you be talking about? ;-)
@jdiwnab -- that's strange... we don't do anything special, just use phpbb out of the box. Is it any link, or one particular type of link?
Its any link of the RB forums. I can click on it and it will try and load, then it will say it timed out, so I try again, and many times it will work. I think it might be something with the server or something as refreshing a page sometimes won't work right, either. Maybe it happens when too many people are accessing the same thing at the same time.
I have a suggestion for a new section ;-) A code-only section where if someone finds a particular piece of code interesting and wants to share, they post the code with a description only.. Sort of like a Snipet section where all posts would be stickies (or automatically closed to avoid confusion).
Then, when someone says "How do I..." you can provide a link to that snippet.
You could also make the default "section" the snippet section when searching and avoid large SQL query results.
The RB forum is my morning "newspaper" and I would love to see this section!
Suggestions:
1. A "HOW TO" or "TIPS" section, by Platform or by any other category (just open your online LR to get some ideas). I don't know if the current forum version allows to create sub-forums (forums inside forums). If not there are some phpBB MODs that allow that. This would certanly help many users and also the forum mods - so many questions asking always the same.
2. Correct than damn bug with single quotes that becames " on RB code ;)
3. Add an option to copy the rb code (posted inside code tags) directly to the clipboard in a proper format or print it on code with end of lines using "\n" as you are using the HTML pre tag - currently, if I try to copy the code I don't get it formatted - it's always in one line. I have to copy it first to word and then copy from word to a simple text editor or RB.
4. This is something more radicall... but have you or RS considered changing the forum software for the vBuletin? Yes, it costs some money ($160) and yes, it's much far better than phpBB.
Maybe more to come...
Forgot this one:
- Allow the topic description to be more than 60 characters! 60 chars is too short.
Correction for 2 (above): the single quotes become "& a p o s ;" (without the spaces).
Have never looked at the forums, the reasons? I need a net connection and it's slower for me to read a forum than email.
• forums are ok but they are not as eaily searchable as my email is
• have to be conencted for them to work (which makes them useless when I'm on the plane) I can search my email archives any time anywhere
• they are just plain slower to load and navigate even on broadband
• timeouts in anything
I use them but they are not as easy and nice to use
I've never used any online forums that were as conventient or fast as I'd like from anyone (Oracle, Sybae, MSN, Apple, etc)
The only problem I've seen with mail lists is that some who post messages are tagged as spam an you don't get their contribution to whatever discussion is going on at the time. Fortunately, the forums aren't like that.
As far as what I'd like to see on the forums, although I haven't been in the beta program for a while now, I think it would be great to have a section just for beta testing, similar to the mail list, except that no one will be marked spam and you guys could just hide that section to users who aren't part of the 'beta users' group.
Also, it's annoying when there's like 40 e-mails about something in the mail-list in the span of 5 minutes and you're trying to pay attention to other things. Sure there's the digest version, but that's too infrequent for me. Forums aren't as intrusive and really aren't *that* hard to use...
Also, it would be nice if forum users are banned permanently when they don't use the [ code ][ /code ] tag!!! :x
@Corbin - I never said they were hard
They are just less conventient in many ways becuase it's a web interface.
They are less responsive as it requires many more round trips across the net, they are not nearly as searchable as my email is, and when I'm offline they are not accessible at all.
The other thing I find is there is less "random" assistance although the noise level can b higher.
What I mean is there may be threads that go along for a while that people may not contribute to, but suddenly an emai grabs their attention and they start adding to the thread.
There's less of that in the forums becuase you have to hunt down things of interest.
You have to go find things that you ight be able to contribute to. And, becuase they are web based this is slower to do so there is less "community building" going on.
For my money I just don't find them as nice to use.
It's too bad you can't aggregate all of the forum posts that interest you and save them in a an easy-to-read offline format. There probably is such a thing, like some sort of RSS ofline reader or something, but it's probably more work than it's worth...
I rarely use forums. I work 13 hour shifts and although there's pleny of time to read e-mails, I can't get internet there, just e-mails. I'm relegated to the NUG digests. Is there a possibility of digests on the forums? That would be great!
I much prefer the NUG over the forum for a lot of the reasons Norm discussed..
The main reason I use the forum is for when i need Windows specific help. I will often paste the same windows related question on the NUG and on the forum but only the forum gets a response... which of course has a lot to do with Aaron being on the forum and not on the NUG.
Mac questions get a better response on the NUG.