Hi. Some questions on forum functionality

[vames]

Hi all
I am considering using nabble as a private, members only with sub forums, forum and a public anyone can post forum.

This is for a very active association that has it's own web site and I would like to embed this in the web site which I know can be done.

I have had a play with a temporary forum and I kinda like what I see.
I have also had a dig around to find answers to a lot of the questions I have but I am still left with a few and would be gratefull for any pointers

1) forum access functionliaity
How do you assign roles to members for access.
i.e. in the members only forum (which will probably be a category) I want an all members forum and I want a moderators only forum. bothe will have sub forums.

2) mailing.
I want to be able to easily eMail all moderators and I want to easily be able to eMail all members for important announcements but I can find no options to be able to do this.
I also do NOT want this forum to be a mailing list. It's for online access only. Is this possible?

3) moderation.
Is moderation intuitive? What's your opinion please?

Thanks for reading

James

[vames]

Sorry. 1 last question.
Is there any functionality to see who is currently in the forum and when members last visited?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Hi vames,

Welcome to Nabble. Below you can find my answers to your questions.

vames wrote

1) forum access functionliaity
How do you assign roles to members for access.
i.e. in the members only forum (which will probably be a category) I want an all members forum and I want a moderators only forum. bothe will have sub forums.

Forums (and sub-forums) have a "Options > Users > Who can view & post?" menu option. There you can change the forum to be public or private and also provide a list of authorized users (for the private forum case). Please take a look at that screen and you will see how it works. Note that if you forget to add a user to the authorized list and he/she wants to visit or post a message in the private forum, he will be blocked, but will have a form to submit a request to you. You will receive the request by email with instructions on how to add him/her to the authorized list. You can try that and see.

vames wrote

2) mailing.
I want to be able to easily eMail all moderators and I want to easily be able to eMail all members for important announcements but I can find no options to be able to do this.

We are still developing this feature. It should be done in the near future.

vames wrote

I also do NOT want this forum to be a mailing list. It's for online access only. Is this possible?

Sorry, this is not possible. May I ask you why you want this? The integrated mailing list feature is very useful because you can receive and reply to posts quickly by email. This is the same as going to the website and posting the message from there.

vames wrote

3) moderation.
Is moderation intuitive? What's your opinion please?

Yes, moderation is intuitive, but Nabble has a different approach than other forums. Forum admins can remove posts from any user, but never delete them. "Remove" means taking the post out of the forum and "Delete" means real deletion.

vames wrote

Sorry. 1 last question.
Is there any functionality to see who is currently in the forum and when members last visited?

Please see: http://n2.nabble.com/Who-is-online--tp1559169p1559169.html
Currently we don't show when members last visited.

Regards,
Hugo Teixeira
Nabble.com

[vames]

Thank you so much for your responses.
We want to use eMail for important announcements to the whole group (association) and eMails should only be sent after approval from a moderator.
The association is a membership of profesional eCommerce traders of particularly high and publicly verifiable standard.
The membership consists of a large number of disabled members that are unable to visit often and others that visit on a regular basis.
It is important to understand "who is missing" which we currently do in another forum by checking the last time a member visited.
We have a requirement that IMPORTANT announcements are not missed and if there is a matter of urgency to a discussion then this would be the ONLY time an eMail to all members would be sent.
It is critical NOT to bother members with eMail unless absolutely necessary because of disabilities and also because there have been occasions in the past where eMail messaging has been abused.

So is this possibly an option?
The forum I set up was just a play place. On the basis of what I found our chairman has set up a forum that will probably be our new home but the last visit and the eMail issues are absolutely critical.
Is this on the agenda at all?

Thanks again for your help

James

[Will <Nabble>]

vames wrote

... but the last visit and the eMail issues are absolutely critical.

Thanks for your explanation.

We don't have the email feature right now, but we do plan to add it pretty soon.

Regarding the last visit feature, we don't have it either. But we could add it if it make sense.

If I understand you correctly, you would use the last visit feature to find out who haven't visited your forums, and then email them for important announcement? Is that the use case?  

[vames]

Hi,
Yes that is correct! Sort of!
Let me explain further.
We use the last time visited feature for 3 purposes
1) Particularly vulnerable members tend to "go missing" occasionally and it is a really good way to highlight the fact that a member might be in need of some support which is something we as a group do extremely well.
2) We are considering a requirement for members to visit on a regular basis and this would be difficult to do without having this feature. The nature of the group is changing and we are intending to open up a public face to our forum for interested in the group, what we do and why we do it and we will need support from our members in this area. But this is only a propostion at the moment.
3) As per your understanding. The group is democratically run and there are times when we NEED members to respond to polls or express their opinion about issues that arise from time to time. The ability to eMail members of our private forum is essential.

We have apprximately 150 posts a day currently and inboxes are going to get swamped and important announcements are going to be missed and members will get totally hacked off

Hope that makes things clearer.

Thank you by the way for such courteous responses and for taking such trouble to understand our requirements.

[vames]

Perhaps it would help you to understand our membership.
We have currently approximately 51 members and this is growing weekly.
As a result of the changes and the forum move we anticipate that there are likely to be approximately 30 members active on the forum.
There are a lot of discussions and we have a mix of members that include prolific posters and some occasional posters and some that just browse.
We have on average 90 new topics a week which attract an average of 12 posts per topic
That is one heck of a lot of unnecessary band width usage if those messages have to be sent by eMail as well as in the group and I do not want hundreds of messages flooding my in box and neither do our members.

We need an eMail moderators function.
We also need an eMail all members function.
This last function should NOT send messages until they have been approved by a moderator.
So we need a moderator alert facility to draw the attention of moderators to the fact that a message needs approval.

Hope this makes sense.

The facility to eMail members and moderators should also be able to be restricted to the members only forums UNLESS we decide that we want to open this up to the public site.

Once the public forum is up and running there is a potential for a huge number of messages.
Our membership consists of some of the largest independent eCommerce sellers in the UK and include eBay sellers with 100,000+ feedback and top 10% sellers.

I don't initially see a huge increase in traffic as far as the forum is concerned and indeed I anticipate a drop in traffic until things settle down.

We are not funded in anyway and currently charge no membership.

We believe in supporting op-en source communities and really like the ethos of what you are doing with nabble.

The nabble2 forum options perfectly fit with being able to embed the forum in our web site and this will help promote our association and also nabble.

Again I hope this helps you to understand a bit more of our requirements.

[Will <Nabble>]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It looks like there is some confusion which made things more complicated than it should be.

So, basically you want a private forum (member-only), which may become a public one later, right?

For this initial private forum, you need an email feature to email all members - this is fine. We can add this feature easily.

You are worried about getting lots of emails. I think it's a misunderstanding. There are no emails as it is a web forum. Most users will just go to the forum to read and post. There are no emails. But some users may like to read the forum via email, Nabble has an option to subscribe to a forum and receive all posts by email. But that is optional.

You also want a feature to look at a member's last visit. Sorry, we don't have it, and we are not sure if it's a good general feature. People can visit but if they don't post, they are not helping, right? With Nabble, you can click each user's profile and easily see when's the last time he posted. Would last post be better criteria for your forum?

Let me know if I miss something here...

[vames]

Hi,
So, basically you want a private forum (member-only), which may become a public one later, right?
No, but it is not important.

Fireman Grumpy has set up the forum structure that we needed and has access now sorted out as per earlier discussion thread regarding permissions on parent and sub folders.

For this initial private forum, you need an email feature to email all members - this is fine. We can add this feature easily.
I'll ask the group about this before providing a definitive answer but in principle that would be utterly superb.

You are worried about getting lots of emails. I think it's a misunderstanding. There are no emails as it is a web forum. Most users will just go to the forum to read and post. There are no emails. But some users may like to read the forum via email, Nabble has an option to subscribe to a forum and receive all posts by email. But that is optional.

Thank you for clearing that up. Total misunderstanding :-)

[vames]

O.K. members last visit and eMail members can wait.
eMailing members can be done using other functionality that we have identified today and we have more urgent matters that need addressing.

We are pretty sold on nabble but we have 2 issues which are really bothering us.

For a members only forum
When adding a member for authorisation, you click on a button saying 'add member'.

Simple enough, however, it has no 'search' facility to enable you to identify the member you want.
You have type in the member name and it will look for the name and add them.

Problem is, as I found with Dave, I managed to add a 'turner' instead of 'turner-uk'
also a 'Jan' instead of 'Jan- Absolute'

It's VERY easy to do and could cause security issues.

Is there anyway of tightening this up a bit please?

Also there are various pages that are missing back links amd breadcrumbs that make site navigation awkward.

When clicking the grey flag next to my user name at the top of the message boards I am presented with a page that shows flagged messages.
It is very difficult to work out how to switch this off to return to my previous view. Clicking on the now red flag does not turn it back to grey and send me back to my previous view and there are no other obvious links to use that allow me to get back to my previous view of the messages. I ended up using my browsers back button a dozen times.

Similar issues have been noticed by fireman grumpy in the admin section. Navigation is missing breadcrumbs for some of the pages.

I have not identified which yet but will get back to you on this.

[Will <Nabble>]

Thanks for the feedback. Please see my response below:

vames wrote

For a members only forum
When adding a member for authorisation, you click on a button saying 'add member'.

Simple enough, however, it has no 'search' facility to enable you to identify the member you want.
You have type in the member name and it will look for the name and add them.

You can add the user screen name or the email address. Does email address work for you?

vames wrote

Also there are various pages that are missing back links amd breadcrumbs that make site navigation awkward.

This sounds like a bug. If you see it again, please tell us more details on how it happens, also make screenshot if that's possible. We always appreciate any bug report.

vames wrote

When clicking the grey flag next to my user name at the top of the message boards I am presented with a page that shows flagged messages.
It is very difficult to work out how to switch this off to return to my previous view. Clicking on the now red flag does not turn it back to grey and send me back to my previous view and there are no other obvious links to use that allow me to get back to my previous view of the messages. I ended up using my browsers back button a dozen times.

First, the "grey flag next to my user name at the top of the message boards" should be red - it links to your flagged item page. Can you make a screenshot of the "grey flag"?

As for return to the previous page from the flagged item page, I just use the back button. The reason we don't use a return link is that the flagged item page is not logically related to the current page. So, we just rely on the back button to take you back.

vames wrote

Similar issues have been noticed by fireman grumpy in the admin section. Navigation is missing breadcrumbs for some of the pages.

I have not identified which yet but will get back to you on this.

If you saw those bugs again, please let us know. We take bugs very seriously. We fix bugs quickly.

Many thanks for using Nabble.

[vames]

 

This screen shot is the page I am viewing before I press the flag (Sorry. I got that wrong it is red rather than grey)

Press the flag and I end up here with no way back. or indeed no way to go anywhere at all

[Graham Perrin]

Alongside (or beneath) any thing that you may flag:

• a grey flag.

At all times, alongside your name:

• your personal red flag.

Focus on the grey flag in your first screen shot. In that example you were viewing a forum (not a topic therein); the grey flag is beneath the name/description of the forum.

1. click the grey flag of the forum

To view, or review, a list of things that you have flagged:

2. click the red flag alongside your name.