What do you think of the new Q&A format here?

[Red Iron Crown]

On 11/30/2015, 1:50:12, Snark said:

I like posting answers here.  I like being helpful to people.  There are a lot of other helpful people out there, too.  I'm interested in recent things, and "when was the question originally posted" is completely useless for that because there are long, on-going discussions and the original thread may have been posted quite some time in the past.  What are people talking about now is much more useful than "when was this originally asked?" which is almost irrelevant.

Try sorting the main Gameplay Questions page by "Last Reply", that's equivalent to the old forum sort method.

I'm another poster who spends a fair bit of time trying to help people in here (and occasionally asking for help), the new layout in this subforum in particular is one of the biggest adjustments so far. I've been upvoting what I think are good answers (and I hope others are doing so too) as I want to see if that system turns out to be helpful.

[adsii1970]

3 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Try sorting the main Gameplay Questions page by "Last Reply", that's equivalent to the old forum sort method.

I'm another poster who spends a fair bit of time trying to help people in here (and occasionally asking for help), the new layout in this subforum in particular is one of the biggest adjustments so far. I've been upvoting what I think are good answers (and I hope others are doing so too) as I want to see if that system turns out to be helpful.

Thanks for the advice... this will help me do the same.

[Mister Dilsby]

This format COULD work as an immediate resource for OPs with questions and as a continuing resource for ALL users if:

--knowledgeable users voted on answers to the question, promoting the best ones to the top

--OPs or a mod tagged questions to make searching easier (e.g. "SSTO", "Parachutes", "Landing", "Intercepts", "[INSERT NAME OF PLANET]")

--People with questions used the above tools to find answers before asking duplicate questions

--OPs consider maintaining their thread as the price of getting a question answered, and follow through on things like votes, likes and tags

It will NOT work for much at all if:

--OPs simply blast a question to the Forum and do nothing to maintain their threads

--knowledgeable users don't answer or vote on answers

[Snark]

7 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Try sorting the main Gameplay Questions page by "Last Reply", that's equivalent to the old forum sort method.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really help me all that much-- I still can't see who or when the last reply was posted.  (For example, very relevantly, was the last poster me?)

It's a royal pain.  I really wish there were some kind of user settings that control how the forum overview is displayed.

[Red Iron Crown]

9 minutes ago, Snark said:

Unfortunately, that doesn't really help me all that much-- I still can't see who or when the last reply was posted.  (For example, very relevantly, was the last poster me?)

It's a royal pain.  I really wish there were some kind of user settings that control how the forum overview is displayed.

A custom Activity Stream might be the answer, try it with these settings:

[Kerbart]

On 11/30/2015, 2:49:48, Jouni said:

I guess this is now a "KSP Stack Exchange". The format can work, as it has worked with many other complex subjects. I'm not sure whether the forum software is adequate for the task, however.

But in Stack Exchange the replies are nested; that's a pretty essential caveat.

[Zwer.ch]

Just curious, is there any thread that has a "best answer" yet ? All I see is threads with "awaiting best answer" ...

[Harry Rhodan]

There's not even an option to go directly to the second or last page of a thread because of that rating stuff? Ugh.

[Streetwind]

Not sure of what even constitutes a "best answer". If a thread receives exactly one vote on exactly one post, and never anything else, is that enough to fulfill the definition, in the sense of that thread no longer being displayed as "without a best answer"? If yes, that would imply that "without a best answer" is synonymous with "has no answers at all", and it's just confusing people by not calling it by what it really is. If no, then we're still confused because we don't know what constitutes a "best answer".

I'm also not sure what the software counts as votes. For example, this thread here is shown in the thread listing as having "3 votes" at the time of this writing. But if you went and actually summed up all the votes cast for different posts, you would count 18, not 3. So what is it then? The number of individual answers that have received votes? Nope, that's 11, not 3. The number of votes that the top rated answer has received? Nope, that would be 5, not 3. Is it perhaps the number of individual people who have cast one or more votes? Nope, because again, the top rated answer has 5 votes, which requires a minimum of 5 individual voting people. Does that mean that the forum somehow weighs or judges the value of votes cast by specific users, deciding that some are not actually valid votes? That would be rather counterproductive.

So basically, neither the concept of "best answer" nor the concept of "votes" displayed in the thread list makes any sort of sense.

Edited December 3, 2015 by Streetwind

[Harry Rhodan]

12 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

I'm also not sure what the software counts as votes. For example, this thread here is shown in the thread listing as having "3 votes" at the time of this writing. But if you went and actually summed up all the votes cast for different posts, you would count 18, not 3.

It is probably updating at weird intervals. Yesterday there were only three votes and it was listed with those three. So I'd say it's not totally broken.

[steve_v]

Eh, I'm not particularly enamoured of the whole "answer rating" idea, here or elsewhere. IMO a question is either [SOLVED] or it isn't, and it's pretty easy to put that in the subject of the OP like most other forums do.

The only thing an answer voting system does is encourage competitive answering, a concept I personally find rather distasteful... and it's only going to work at all if we only get questions with well defined answers. Is really that something we want here?

I wouldn't care, except that this Q&A style actually gets in the way of me seeing what's going on (much as Snark describes oh ffs what is going on here there's a bloody space there you steaming pile.

No. Stop. This horrible editor is screwing with me again ^ everything typed after the username I pasted in above is getting turned into a link to Snarks profile, WTF?

Nevermind. Resume.

Nope, I've forgotten what I was going to say. I guess I like the Q&A format slightly more than the editor... but yeah, I'm not a big fan of that.

[Streetwind]

A good way to link to someone's profile is by tagging them, i.e. writing @steve_v. The editor caps the tag and won't extend the link over stuff you write after it... and better still, you don't have to pull up their profile first to copy/paste the link. (Also, it notifies the person that they've been tagged.)

[Jarin]

At least I can sort the posts in chronological order now, and not just the threads. We're getting there...

[steve_v]

7 hours ago, Streetwind said:

A good way to link to someone's profile is by tagging them, i.e. writing.

I know about this, however I did not pull up the profile, rather grabbed the username from the left panel of the post I was referring to -  i.e. plain text from my clipboard. I was not wanting or anticipating a link of any kind, much less one that takes over the whole line.
This second guessing what I'm trying to do is really aggravating, if I want it to be a link I'll put it in sodding url tags.

Edited December 3, 2015 by steve_v

[Streetwind]

Well, it simply copies the formatting along, and a link is a type of formatting. However, anytime you paste something with formatting into the editor, it should show you a notification of this fact - along with a button to remove all that formatting with a single click. Works just fine for copying the username as well.

Edited December 3, 2015 by Streetwind

[Trann]

The Q&A format reminds me of stackexchange and it can end up being pretty valuable but I'd also suggest your question wouldn't qualify for this subforum: it's too subjective  

[Snark]

23 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

A custom Activity Stream might be the answer, try it with these settings:

That looks super cool... how do I make one?  Where do I get to that UI?

I've been looking all over (on the forums main page, in the header of individual forums, on my profile page, everywhere I can think of)-- I don't see any "create activity stream" item.

[Red Iron Crown]

@Snark I wrote a little tutorial on using them to replace the old subscriptions page, just use the settings I showed above. Tutorial: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/126874-miss-the-old-subscriptions-page-try-a-custom-activity-stream/

[cantab]

Lots of good points from people.

I agree that the Technet model is better - a copy of the top voted answer, then the thread in chronological order. I also agree that the thread (question?) list could be more like elsewhere on the forum, there's a lot of info gets missed. To summarise there's potential in the Q&A format but currently, like most of the forum, it has shortcomings.

[Stone Blue]

On 11/30/2015, 8:41:46, steuben said:

it needs a last posted line like the other fora.. forums... forex.

given the changes over time from new aero, part rebalancing, etc. an answer from .23 won't work in 1.0.5, and may point people in the wrong direction.

 

Well, that is where the date of the post helps... With Squad's usual timeline between releases, you can figure if you're looking for something relevant to the current release, anything older tan, say 6 mos, is probably way too old...If you are looking for something relevant to a previous version of the game, you should already be familiar with, or know how to quickly find a time period that is relevant, and search thru THOSE dated posts...

On 11/30/2015, 11:44:32, dborgo said:

First time looking at the new forum, just started reading this post, and didn't even notice post times were out of order. No wonder I've been so confused. Forums like this, where there is much ongoing discussion, need to default to "sort by date." Let those who want a quick search for the best answers click to "sort by rating." It just makes more sense.

I agree... things are disjoionted, and I have been confused since the changeover... But THIS is talking about just one, separate forum... NOT ALL of the forums and the whole site, right?
Or did I miss the whole point in the OP?... lol
Ergghhh....I'm...SOOO...Corn-fuzzzed....

[Stone Blue]

On 11/30/2015, 12:20:12, Snark said:

I absolutely loathe the new format, at least for the overview page that lists all the threads.  It doesn't show when the last post was, or by whom, or how many views the thread has.

I like posting answers here.  I like being helpful to people.  There are a lot of other helpful people out there, too.  I'm interested in recent things, and "when was the question originally posted" is completely useless for that because there are long, on-going discussions and the original thread may have been posted quite some time in the past.  What are people talking about now is much more useful than "when was this originally asked?" which is almost irrelevant.

It's also really bad because it's inconsistent with the other forums, which makes it very hard to train my eyeballs to be able to skim through and pick out the interesting bits.  I can't skim.  General UI principle:  Any time you have a very data-intensive UI that presents lots and lots of information to the viewer, it's really important to keep the organization and presentation of that data as consistent and uniform as possible so that people don't have to do jarring mental context switches when they move around.

I find the overview page here to be horrible, useless, and inconsistent, which makes it much less likely that I'm going to find and respond to issues, which in turn means I'm contributing less value.  Yuck.

 

I agree totally... Please check out and upvote my post here... lol : http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/126588-what-do-you-think-about-the-new-forum/&do=findComment&comment=2309347

[FancyMouse]

Two things that would keep me away from visiting this subforum as often as before:

1. Stupid sort by rating. I don't mind adding it, but can I have the option to make sort-by-date default for myself?

2. In the main page I need to scrollllll to find this subforum. For lazy people like me, whether showing up in the browser without scrolling pretty much determines how often I'll visit the page/link.

[Geschosskopf]

The more I have used this forum, the more I'm getting irritated by this forum's refusal to remember that I prefer to view posts in chronological order, NOT in order of rating.  I really wish this "feature" would be knocked in the head and buried in an unmarked grave at midnight.

[jackal40]

I am also noticing in this thread it NOT remembering read posts. I've come back three days in a row, seen the start, clicked it and come to the end of the thread.

Really annoying.

[Pecan]

I've been a moderator and helper on several forums for lots of different software and this format only works if the original question contains ALL the information needed to diagnose the problem and the 'favourite' answer contains ALL the information needed to cure it.  In most cases that makes the Q/A too specific for anyone else having a similar problem so they start another thread just because the general-guidelines discussion that might be contained in the thread are so hard to follow.

As soon as there are requests for more information or a screenshot, as soon as there are multiple answers dealing with different aspects of the issue, as soon as there is more than one approach the rating system is worse than useless.  In this case that shouldn't be too much of a problem because the 'sort by date' option is easily available but people will have to get used to a few new habits if this format is to have any chance of being more useful that plain date-order:

1. For thread-starters: DON'T reply to requests for  more information with a new post, it'll get lost in the noise.  Instead EDIT your original question
2. For responders: ALWAYS quote the post(s) you're replying to, if it's not the OP, as rating will make nonsense of any implied sequence
3. Everyone: as soon as it's more than a straight question -> answer, start a new thread in discussions (destroys most of the value of the format, but that's the price you pay for what's left).

Edited December 10, 2015 by Pecan