Help us help you: improving the forum

[Rob]

As we look to improve the experience of folks using The Events Calendar/PRO and it’s add-ons, one aspect we’re working on is the forum here. We’ve gotten word from a number of users that there are things that could be done to make this forum more easy to use from a customer perspective; this thread is meant to help track those.

So: what can we do to make this forum more usable for you? Keep in mind that we’re aware of two biggies right off the bat:

1) Email notifications don’t work 100% of the time. We know this, and have a fix waiting to be deployed (hopefully sometime next week).
2) There is no easy way to embed code directly into a thread. While we haven’t narrowed in on a solution yet, we are looking at our options here and will have something deployed as soon as we’ve made a decision. We realize this is a pain point for you guys, and indeed it is a headache for us when we’re trying to share code too. In the interim it’d be best to use a service like pastie.org.

Other ideas are welcome in the comments below. Let us know…to help us, help you.

[Torstein]

Also, it would be nice to allow editing posts, at least for 15 minutes or so (maybe even longer would be better here, since it can sometimes be complicated code or similar that needs adjustments)

[Matt]

Maybe it’s just me, but could you put your search at the top of the page instead of at the bottom?

[ostii]

I totally agree with Matt and the search at the bottom of the page. I did not even know it was there, until he mentioned it. Thanks Matt.

[Alex]

Agreed on the search to top. I could not find it so I emailed my question, not wanting to sift thru threads.

[Andy Fragen]

There is a tremendous amount of gist code for customization and problem solving that has been supplied here. It would be great if some separate page with links to those gists were available. Naturally really good title descriptions of the gists would be needed. 😉

[Karin Ettenson]

You should use this forum!

Home

Pretty awesome all around, amazing plugin too!

[Bev Hendricks]

I’ve been trying to find something in the support forum related to this, but I can’t.
I love being able to see the events by venue, but my organizers and their constituents would rather see events listed by organizer. This is because many of our organizers use multiple venues. I can’t figure out how to do this. Ultimately, I want to create a menu of our Organizers, that when they click on this it shows a list of all of the events that they have posted (under “Events” not “Posts”).

[wort]

Please fixenhance the search results!
Search results seem throttled — https://theeventscalendar.com/?s=category&x=0&y=0 only brings back a single page; I know there are other threads (Google searching the forum digs them up, but with strange results).

It would be extremely useful to differentiate between visited and unvisited links here. When you’re digging through the forums hunting down an issue, it’s easy to hit the same post, not immediately seeing that you’ve already been down that path.

Search results should also show the post date and number of replies. If you want to get fancy, you could date of most recent reply.

Thanks for asking! –Miriam

[Leah]

Hi Bev,

I’m sorry your post has been overlooked- we weren’t checking this thread for support requests. If you’re still having trouble, can you please post your question(s) in a new thread so we can take a look and discuss outside of this topic? Thanks!

~Leah

[Leah]

Thanks for all the great forum improvement suggestions! I’ve added them to our feature requests so hopefully some will be showing up in our future website updates. Improving the search functionality is definitely one of our priorities.

[Marty]

Improvements to search would be welcome, such as choosing to search Documentation vs. Forum. The layout of the results page could do a better job of directing emphasis (right now I find the big titles distracting).

I also agree that a better system for seeing solutions other users have posted would be a big help. The forum is a bit of a needle in a haystack and encourages posting a new topic rather than extending an existing one.

[Leah]

Good ideas Marty! Thanks, I’ll definitely add those to our list.

[Andy Fragen]

OK, so here’s an easy improvement. If I’m not logged in and I want to comment on a thread, I select the button to login and instead of being directed back to the page I was on after logging in, I’m directed to the tri.be home page.

Now, I don’t mind seeing Shane, Peter and Reid but it’s not where I wanted to go. 😉

[Andy Fragen]

FWIW, the ‘Howdy Partner’ box does the redirect correctly but the ‘Sign in to comment’ link has no associated redirect.

[Author]

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