Finding things and communicating

This isn’t a fully formed suggestion, more of a jamroom.net user experience report.

The new jamroom.net site is great, but I am having a few minor problems finding things and communicating.

This morning I couldn’t find a forum post. Michael asked me about writing documentation a couple of days back, but I couldn’t find it searching in the forum (the search is very simple, searching for Michael mentioning documentation would have brought up a very long list or results, though I would have gone through the lot finding it) - instead I gave up and tried to contact him via the site.

The only option I found (outside of the support center or creating a forum thread on his profile) was to try posting into the timeline @michael, I have no idea if anyone reads these timelines, I rarely do. I might be overlooking something. He might be ignoring me, I have no idea how these things work.

And then just now I came to jamroom.net to find some info about a module mentioned by a client, so went to the network marketplace, but there was no option for searching the module. So I tried the site search instead, but that brought up zero results. ("geolocation" was my search term)

Hmmm, can’t think of what to suggest, so just posting my user exp instead. They are minor things and I’m entirely loving the new look and wonderful functionality. The simplicity of everything is awesome but I like to find things and communicate easily.

Disclaimer: I’m crap at finding things and have sometimes have trouble communicating when I’m not at the computer as well, so it may be a wider issue than jamroom.net’s usability.


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)
updated by @ultrajam: 12/20/13 08:13:05PM

Thanks for the feedback Steve - it is appreciated.

1) I've got an open ticket to improve the forum search - right now you have to go into each category to search, and I'll be adding a "search all" forum posts to the main index shortly, which should help.

2) Right now we have private notes disabled, but that can probably be changed. I've been hesitant to enable Private notes, since when we had private notes on JR4 many, many users would opt to send us a private note instead of posting to the forum, or opening a support ticket. Maybe this would be something good to have for developers/subscribers?

3) If you searched for "geo" you would have found it (since the module is "geo location" - 2 words). The global site search should work pretty well - I updated that a week or two ago and it searches quite a number of areas. There's no "fuzzy" searching at this time - honestly I'm not even sure how it would be implemented

Let me know if that helps at all.

Thanks!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

It would, but right now almost every thread mentions documentation. I did like searching by user in phpbb, I used it very often, especially if a long list of results came up on the first search.

I don't much like them myself. And definitely, definitely better to make people to post their questions and answers in the forum. The idea of a timeline just seems so missable though. Michael will never reply and I won't be able to sleep tonight.

Yeah, I can sleep with that. If I wasn't developing I'd be subscribing.


livesearch would have helped with that. Or maybe tagging the items with multiple keywords/search terms. I knew I could go and find it from my dev site's marketplace, but internet is slow tonight so I looked for the quick fix from the mothership - search the storefront listing for a module to do the job.


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

Tagging is a good solution, since that is wired into the search (live search would require development).

I'll start tagging


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Blog first, tag second


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

I rolled in a global forum search real quick on the main index - it seemed almost too easy, so I'm certain I am overlooking something, but check it out and let me know if that works.

Thanks!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Difficult to ell without seeing which cat each search result is in. It needs a search results header, and it showed this thread as unread (I do still see some entirely read categories and posts marked as unread elsewhere though).


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

Does the category matter? I'm assuming that when doing a search you're looking for a specific post, so the topic title is going to be more important, and maybe a "snippet" of the text around where the search string match is located?


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

If I can find it upon searching without a second thought, then nothing else matters, including the category. I have already found it. The search is forgotten.


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)
updated by @ultrajam: 11/15/13 01:40:56PM

you can search for "geolocation" here:
https://www.jamroom.net/download/modules

(reading the rest of the thread now)

.

You would send me my first mention on the exact day when i was (accidentally) testing out the

system.

I clicked the link yesterday and got un-subscribed from all notifications.

Im being notified again now and am curious as to whether i get an email notification when I get mentioned.

try again.

suggestion: perhaps a 'reply' button on the update.

@ultrajam mentioned me, I got I got an email that said go here: https://www.jamroom.net/ultrajam

I would have liked a 'reply' button on that message.

The caching seems to be off - it takes ages for a mention by Michael to appear in my timeline, although I get the email notification right away.

Also, I just entered around 750 chars as a message, and that seemed to work - the 140 char limit isnt being applied (which is a good thing).


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

Yeah - You can post action text of more than 140 characters, and I agree with Steve - don't fix it, or maybe make it optional somehow?


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

I think adding the option to contact people should be at least an option. Having ways to communicate easily is important. Not every piece of conversation needs to be public forum post. I can see where having it on could become a problem with tech support so just have a disclaimer not to post tech support questions in email to staff or they will not be responded to. You could always just allow individual accounts to disable email.
updated by @developer-networks: 11/19/13 08:56:32AM

"contact the profile" support is in the latest Private Notes module:

https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/tracker/127/create-a-contact-the-artist-for-logged-in-users

Thanks!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net