Announcing the NI Idea Exchange!

[Laura F.]

Hi altenbach,

I was testing the edit functionality and you should be able to edit your idea after posting it.  You have to click on the idea title so you are looking at the view where you can post comments.  Above the title you will see "Idea Options".  This will drop down with an option to Edit Idea.  Can you check for that the next time you create an idea?

We should be getting a little icon next to the "Idea Options" link soon so that it is more visible.

Thanks,

Laura

[tst]

The problem I was getting at was this: I want to be able to follow all posts and it's hard. Here's a situation: September, 2009. I've been busy or away all week. Now it's the weekend and I have the time to go over things. I look at the board and see "Posts: 345, New: 23". How do I find these 23 new posts?

If this was built like the forums display, it would be easy - go into the board and the posts are in the first threads, already highlighted and with a direct link, in a simple table. But it doesn't have the forums display.

You say it's like a blog post. Well, there's only one way I follow blogs and comments on blogs: RSS. If a blog doesn't have an RSS feed for all the comments in all the posts, I simply won't see the comments. The JKI blogs have this, so I see their comments. Darren's blog does not, so I don't see all the comments.

I think this is a critical issue for the usefulness of this. I would say that we need either an RSS feed for everything or a board view (which can link into the blog view), or both. The board view might need to include the extra stuff (like the status) as columns.

A side issue of this is the default display. I said the default (for everyone) should be the newest stuff, because otherwise only the stuff which got a lot of kudos would be on the top and no one would see the other stuff. It's really kind of pointless.

P.S. "order of floated threads". Not threads. Boards.
But throwing in the admin-floated threads as well is also good.

[Laura F.]

For clarification tst: you would like to see an RSS feed of all idea comments in the exchange?  For comparision, if you subscribe to a particular idea's RSS feed you will get the comments.

Hot Ideas are time bound, so they are not always the ones with the most votes.  I think having the default be "New Ideas" is good for users that come often to the Exchange but for the more casual user it won't be obvious what popular ideas they should think about.  Therefore, I think it would be nice configurable option for users to have.

I will update my suggestion to be floated threads 🙂

Thanks,

Laura

[tst]

I want to be able to see all posts (and all comments) posted to the exchange. The ideal interface would be the GUI we currently have for the forums. It sorts by activity time, does threading, links to the newest post in a thread (comment, in this case) and waits until I read something before marking it as read.

The second best option is an RSS feed for all the posts and another for all the comments in all the posts (or having them combined). That means you only need to subscribe once (which answers your question), but isn't as nice as the first option, mainly because it doesn't do threading.

Another variant of this would be email subscription, and if the different "threads" were sent using unique topics, threading email clients like Gmail would automatically sort them correctly.

I feel I didn't clarify how much of a problem this is, so I'll try to do it now.

Even now, with only 15 conversations, if I want to find the new posts, I have to sort by time, and if the new stuff is comments, I have to hope that there were no more than four new comments (which appears to be the current limit of the Latest Comments section which, BTW, appears not to be sorted by time). That's just very inconvient.

Another issue: I haven't started a topic yet, so I don't know if this is so, but it would be useful if the tags (labels) were selected from a limited set.

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Laura F. wrote:

I will update my suggestion to be floated threads 🙂

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Once again, not threads. Boards.

[Laura F.]

Sorry tst, I did change my request to boards but mistyped above.

The labels are from a defined list and tags are free-form. Every idea requires at least one label but there are no restrictions on tags.

I understand your concern about seeing the comments and will pass it along.

Thanks,

Laura

[tst]

The image from the post overlaps the comments and video area.

[smercurio_fc]

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smercurio_fc wrote:

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tst wrote:

In general, I think the idea is great, if only for allowing people to be able to track suggestions they and others have already submitted, thus working around that part of the black hole nature of the PS database.

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Good point, which brings me to two other questions: Does this mean that we should no longer tell users to use the Product Suggestion Center? Does it mean that if we've made suggestions to the PSC then we should repost them in this new board?

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Follow-up: Darren has posted a nugget talking about the NI Idea Exchange and the Product Suggestion Center. While it explains the basic difference I still don't know whether to point users to the NI Idea Exchange, or the Product Suggestion Center, or both if they have a suggestion to make.

[Ben]

The idea is to move toward the Idea Exchange too accomplish two things.

1) The "black hole" impresion of the existing suggestion center. They will stay in view and can't slip over the event horizon.

2) To better flesh out ideas by allowing brainstorming by the users.

Ben

[Tom_Hawkins]

I would like to contribute to this but although I am registered and logged in on the NI site, when I click to add a comment in the Idea Exchange I see a box stating 'You must be a registered user to add a comment on this article. If you've already registered, please log in. If you haven't registered yet, please register and log in.' If I try and enter a new idea I get a pop-up window requesting a username and password, and my login and password for this site are not accepted.

[tst]

I'm giving up on trying to follow the comments. If the Latest Comments section had at least been up-to-date and sorted it would be reasonable, but it doesn't seem to be. I'll just subscribe to the RSS feed for the exchange and miss the comments. I'm hoping I'll remember to mark my own threads so I get an email alert if someone comments.

As I said, I feel that the only real solution for this would be to have a standard board view.

P.S. The right sidebar is quite annoying. Often, when I scroll the mouse wheel before the page fully loads, it scrolls instead of the main part of the page. When the page finishes loading it sorts itself out, but that may take a few seconds.