The signal-to-noise ratio of this group ???dB

[TroyK]

Am I the only one that feels the signal-to-noise ratio of this group is low?

Like below 0dB.

It seems to be slowly turning into a second LabVIEW forum for coding questions. The main difference being all members get emailed when anyone asks or responds to a question.

Is that how the community groups were supposed to work? Have I misunderstood their purpose?

[vishots.com]

The problem is that the usability of ni.com is horrendous. People just want to post a problem. They scratch and claw and somehow find a submit button. Then click it. Community/forums/whatever means nothing.

[James@Work]

Michael, your are correct!! 

I have been frustrated lately (several months) with the increase of new users posting to the Community pages.  However, this morning after a quick test I realized they are not to blame.  If you're a new user looking for help it would be almost impossible to end up at the forums by following links from the main ni.com page.

There doesn't appear to be any path to the forums by following any series of selections from "Support & Services" category.  However, a link to the Forums can be found as the very LAST option for a newbie to try out under the "Community" category.  With this design, they are destroying the intent and usefulness of the Community pages and isolating the forums from those who most need to find them. 

Why put the link to the location that should be the first choice for assistance at the end of the line? 

And, why isn't a link to the Forums also available (prominent) under the Support category?

Was this design a horrible mistake or a plan?

[LiliMcDonald]

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry to hear about these frustrations with the NI Community.

The purpose of the community groups are to share best practices and code, whereas the forums are meant for the type of support questions you seem to be getting here. We try to define the purposes for each area here: http://www.ni.com/community/ but I know not everyone ends up on this page and we still see users posting questions where they see fit.

Discussions like this are great to have though because it helps the community team and our web team understand what are the issues and how can we address them. I've been in contact with our web team already, and we can take some short term steps now, while we work towards a long term solution for these experience issues.

Thank you,

Lili McDonald

Community Manager

National Instruments

[TroyK]

What exacerbates the problem is that the "stop email notifications" function doesn't work.

There are a number of discussions currently going on that I have no interest in but I still get an email for every response.

It would be helpful to fix that function but please do not stop there. James is absolutely right, it should be blaringly obvious to a newbie that the forums are the place to go to ask programming support questions. This should be the first and most prominent option.

There should also be some sort of moderation in the community groups and regularly schedulled spring cleaning.

There's a lot of useless example code and documents that seem to be homework tasks or something.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

One more thing.

People can access this particular community via http://www.ni.com/largeapps/ when they download the Software Engineering Manual and exercises. If someone gets to this community through there, they might have zero introduction to what the communities are vs the forums.

[Bob_Schor]

There appear to be moderators for the Forum.  Does it make sense (and is it possible) to have a Moderator for the Community with the ability to "transfer" a Post that belongs on the LabVIEW Forums to ... (wait for it ...) the LabVIEW Forums?

If you did this, you would probably want to send an "automatic" e-mail (to anyone who checked "e-mail me when anyone replies to this thread") that says something like "This thread has been moved to the LabVIEW Forums" with an appropriate link.

I'm (naively) assuming that this is technically possible and feasible.  It would seem also to be a "good idea" ...

Bob Schor

[LiliMcDonald]

Troy - regarding the email notifications, the platform has your options split into two types -- notification preferences overall, and notifications for discussions, documents, groups, etc. that you have already subscribed to.

To find these, go to your community profile, then under the Actions widget on the right, click on Manage email notifications. You will see all the topics you've participated in, groups you've joined, etc. You can set the Filter to groups to find this particular group, click the checkbox, then remove selected notifications.

Fabiola - thanks for pointing that page out. Perhaps it makes sense for the doc/group owner to add a link or button to the forums, clearly directing users there to ask technical questions. I'll follow up on this.

Bob - Unfortunately, it's not possible to move posts from the community groups over to the forums since we're using two different platforms.

[TroyK]

LiliMcDonald wrote: ...You can set the Filter to groups to find this particular group, click the checkbox, then remove selected notifications.

Thanks for that, I'll give it a go. Shouldn't the "Stop email notifications " button do that?

[LiliMcDonald]

TroyK wrote:

LiliMcDonald wrote: ...You can set the Filter to groups to find this particular group, click the checkbox, then remove selected notifications.

Thanks for that, I'll give it a go. Shouldn't the "Stop email notifications " button do that?

If you mean the notification settings found here under Preferences, those are more for "going forward" and do not remove the individual discussions, groups, etc that you subscribed to in the past.