We’re about a month into the forum now (since our early testing) and I think it’s going great, wanted to shout out all the excellent build logs popping up definitely check them out if you haven’t, thanks to all those spending the time writing stuff up and sharing it!
Wanted to ask if there’s anything else you particularly want from it? From what I can tell most people are posting design & build logs, sharing finished builds and then event reports off that which is great. People haven’t used it for advice / questions yet much! (yet) - whereas this is probably the main use of our facebook group, maybe that’s just down to the format of the different sites.
Is anything unintuitive, would you use it for anything else? - what do you miss from forums / what do you come here for? Is there any features you’ve seen on the discourse platform elsewhere we should add?
Big love for the forum so far, happy to have somewhere to log progress and generally be a nuisance without being zucc’d
Honestly I would be super surprised to see a forum in The Current Year be the first stop for newbie questions as it just adds steps in the world of instant gratification. I would hope in time we see some migration as this grows more questions and queries can be answered by links to relevant topics and discussion. I think it is way more useful to have information in a forum setting as it lends itself more to research and archive trawling. We will see in time. I’m not going to stop answering FB comments when I can help but I might answer more in depth if I see the same thing here.
I am going to use it to document my mess and fawn over other peoples builds for the most part. I wouldn’t be adverse to a little marketplace section and maybe a CAD resource area where we could spit out commonly used or helpful models (spam thingiverse links and so on) and maybe offer a bit of support for techniques within commonly used programs.
It’ll be shaped by need I imagine so perhaps it can just be left to ride for a while and we can see were we all end up.
Seconding Harry’s suggestion of a CAD section. I can’t be the only person who models all of the components I’m using, and sharing models around would save us all a bit of work.
I’ve noticed a few things concerning the backend of the forum, when composing a post, the spell check is for American English, is there a way for users to change this as it feels a bit odd.
Also apostrophes in alt text on images don’t display properly, they get converted into ASCII encoding (something like & # 3 9 ; without the spaces)
Slight forum tweak - a few people myself included found the profile picture of the most recent reply being shown for the topic listing image confusing so I’ve changed that to be the profile picture of the topic creator
