Evernote Discussion Forum Updates - Request

[s2sailor 2,199]

@Shane D. while you are looking to improve the forum experience, please, please, please try to find a way for us to select view by date and make it stick or instead make view by date the default and then let those that want to view by votes have to take the extra step.  The view by votes disrupts the conversation when you are trying to read through a topic.  The forums already have a best answer mechanism to highlight the best response.  I don't see what viewing by votes provides us.

I would have just responded to your original post instead of creating a new one but it was closed for input.  Personally, I think it may have been useful to have kept that one open to allow for input.

[TK0047 422]

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

Personally, I think it may have been useful to have kept that one open to allow for input.

I agree with this recommendation. User would like to discuss the forum as well not just the app related items. 

[Shane D. 1,818]

@s2sailor @TK0047 

Thanks for reaching out, and for your feedback!

We generally do not open community announcements to public comment as that commentary tends to quickly get off topic, often devolving into subjects or complaints about something that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

(To be clear, that is not to say that user's opinions, feedback, and complaints aren't warranted, but the better we're able to organize and classify that commentary/feedback in the forums, the better we can transmit that information to our teams, and it then becomes more likely they'll be able to take action/implement changes.)

Instead, we prefer that those discussions be relocated to a better suited area, like what you've created here!

That being said, I'll do my best to answer your question.

You wrote:

Quote

please try to find a way for us to select view by date and make it stick or instead make view by date the default and then let those that want to view by votes have to take the extra step.  The view by votes disrupts the conversation when you are trying to read through a topic.  The forums already have a best answer mechanism to highlight the best response.  I don't see what viewing by votes provides us.

To clarify my understanding, you're talking bout how the commentary is sorted, when you go into a thread from the 'Product Feedback/Feature Requests' section, by individual upvotes, instead of by 'date' posted, correct? 

And at minimum, you would like the ability to at least set the default sort order for yourself, so that it can be done by 'date', instead of automatically starting off being sorted by 'vote', and then not remembering the settings you already had in place, correct?

Let me know as I want to make sure I'm understanding your questions/suggestions properly!

[s2sailor 2,199]

59 minutes ago, Shane D. said:

To clarify my understanding, you're talking bout how the commentary is sorted, when you go into a thread from the 'Product Feedback/Feature Requests' section, by individual upvotes, instead of by 'date' posted, correct? 

And at minimum, you would like the ability to at least set the default sort order for yourself, so that it can be done by 'date', instead of automatically starting off being sorted by 'vote', and then not remembering the settings you already had in place, correct?

@Shane D. Thank you for the response and yes your understanding is correct.

I honestly cannot tell what sorting by vote is trying to achieve, but at a minimum please either remove it as the default or allow us to set the default by date and remember the setting for each user.

[jefito 5,589]

4 minutes ago, s2sailor said:

I honestly cannot tell what sorting by vote is trying to achieve

Most likely it's more useful to Evernote employees, who want to gauge the most popular items. That's my guess, anyways...

[Shane D. 1,818]

@s2sailor

Good to know, and please allow me to elaborate a little bit on why the sorting is the way it is currently.

Quote

I honestly cannot tell what sorting by vote is trying to achieve, but at a minimum please either remove it as the default or allow us to set the default by date and remember the setting for each user.

 

To put it quite plainly, I completely agree with you, but due to technical limitations of our forum software, this isn't something I can change at this time. 

But, please allow me to elaborate.

Currently, our forum software provides two types of forum/thread format structures. 

First, there is the basic commentary forum/thread format that you see when you go to the 'General Discussion' or 'Possible Bug/Technical Issues' sections of our forums.

The other type of forum/commentary format that we have available to us is the 'voting' style setup that you see in our 'Product Feedback/Feature Request' sections of the forums.

This 'voting' style format is meant to be implemented as a question and answer (Q&A) solution, very similar to what you would see in Stack Overflow. 

It works like this:

1. User proposes a question
2. Users reply to the question
3. Other users vote on the best reply
4. The reply with the most amount of votes appears at the top

While this Q&A style format can be used to manage product feedback, it is better suited to do so when there is less of a backlog (Read: lots of very old posts/content), when the community is smaller in scale, and there are dedicated staff available to moderate.

When our 'feedback' forums were created many years ago, this format met our needs. As we've grown, this format has become less manageable. 

At this time, the Q&A style format is the only one that has a voting feature available, and there is no way to adjust these types of forums to sort by date instead of by default, or to "remember" your previously selected sort preference. 

Also, there isn't a way to simply tack on voting to the normal/basic commentary format. (Although, we are looking at possible plugin solutions that would enable us to do this)

Therefore, our middle ground solution in the interim is to use the Q&A format as a way to use voting to more easily condense and package user sentiment until we have a better option available.

For the time being, the 'voting' forums will have to remain sorted as they are.

Obviously, I recognize that having to manually sort everything is cumbersome and counterproductive.

That being said, I am looking at workaround solutions for the near term. For the longterm, I'm assessing other forum software vendors to make sure we possess the tools that our community requires. 

My sincere apologies for any trouble this has caused, but please know that it is something I am aware of and am working to address.

I hope this helped to answer your questions, but certainly feel free to reach out if you need further elaboration or have other questions!

[s2sailor 2,199]

@Shane D. Thank you for the full explanation and the willingness to see if this can be improved in the future.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

@Shane D., that was truly awesome. It does make sense, and it makes it clear why something was chosen and why it's less functional now than when it was chosen. The only product feedback forum I hang out in is Android, and I guess I don't notice the problem, because I don't think any of the replies there has ever gotten a vote!

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, Shane D. said:

At this time, the Q&A style format is the only one that has a voting feature available, and there is no way to adjust these types of forums to sort by date instead of by default, or to "remember" your previously selected sort preference. 

So how much does the forum software provider want to add the capability?

[jefito 5,589]

12 hours ago, CalS said:

So how much does the forum software provider want to add the capability?

Oh? Got your checkbook out?  

[CalS 5,280]

Every day.  ?

[s2sailor 2,199]

15 hours ago, Shane D. said:

That being said, I am looking at workaround solutions for the near term. For the longterm, I'm assessing other forum software vendors to make sure we possess the tools that our community requires. 

Just a thought, both views (by date and by vote) are already there.  The path of least resistance may be, as @CalS suggested, to just approach your current forum software supplier and see what it would take to get a version where the default view was changed to sort by date.  Others may feel different, but other than that I think the forum software is fine it just has that one (and a big one to me) friction point.