boen_robot wrote:
I'm personally somewhat disappointed.
When I said above that you should use tags, I didn't mean "have tags in addition to "forums" (which are merely renamed to "spaces" it seems...)", I meant use tags as the ONLY means to filter out a SINGLE place for all sorts of questions, regardless of vendor, certification and the like... And now, I should add, force users to have at least one tag in their question to encourage their use.
Now... I can see that there's a single "Help & Support" space, but the fact that there's even the option to post a discussion elsewhere means that inevitably, people will. I almost found myself asking a question in the "How to" section (for a test... not that I had a "real" question), but then I remembered this forum, and how the "How to" section is about user tutorials, not about "How to" questions. New users won't know better though.
A "How to" post should be a special type of blog post (that should also not be in "spaces", but be binded to a user or user group), that a user is allowed to "promote" a normal blog post to, i.e. make it both part of their blog, AND the "How to" section of the site... Perhaps via a special tag, if not otherwise doable by the system.
A lot of the other spaces don't really make much sense either... I mean, not in terms of discussions. They only make sense as pages of the documentation, or for specialized types of posts (e.g. ideas only make sense in the GNS3 ideas space).
I don't know if this Jive thing allows things to be any other way, but at this point, it's a mess...
I have to agree with you here, after taking a good look at it. Questions are buried far, far too deep.
The advantage of the current forum layout is (from my perspective) it allows me to easily see everything.... And on an almost daily basis I read the entirety of the the new posts... to be able to assist where possible whether that be guiding a fellow user or testing a feature to see if a bug exists... you get the idea!
As you mention, from an end-user perspective (rather than contributor/developer) it's not all that clear where to ask for help... unless of course you want to pay for it!