Is the forum structure *that* unintuitive?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi all,

I can't help but notice that again and again people new to the forums asking for help post in the FreeNAS (legacy) section instead of the appropriate SCALE or CORE one.

Anyone got an idea why that might be the case? I certainly don't.

If we can help new members to find the right subforum, we should by all means do so, but at the moment I fail to understand the cause of that problem.

Any suggestions?

 

[asap2go]

I wrote a resource and I am quite (but not 100%) sure that I chose "Jails and Plugins" under TrueNAS Core.
But it ended up in the FreeNAS forum.

The structure itself is quite intuitive I think.

 

[winnielinnie]

A "tagging" system would have helped greatly, but I'm not sure it's possible with this forum software.

You have "Jails and Bhyve" under the "Legacy" forum, yet no such counterpart under the "TrueNAS Core" forum. And then there's "Applications and Jails" as its own parent forum, but it implies both SCALE and Core. But then there's "Apps" under the "TrueNAS SCALE" forum.

That doesn't even take into account how there are things like "Performance" and "Hardware" under different parent forums.

It's a bit all over the place, isn't it?

Using "tags" would eliminate this confusion. Here's how:

You'd have a handful of sections (for example, though not comprehensive for this post):

• Installation
• Hardware
• Performance
• Operation
• Upgrading
• Applications
• Miscellaneous

Then you slap on the relevant tags.

So a user might need help deciding on what hardware to purchase, and they post in the "Hardware" forum, slapping on the tags "SCALE" and "Bluefin" and maybe even "New User".

Or maybe a user is having performance issues with network shares, so they post in the "Performance" forum, slapping on the tags "Core" and "SMB".

Something like that...

 

[asap2go]

A "tagging" system would have helped greatly, but I'm not sure it's possible with this forum software.

You have "Jails and Bhyve" under the "Legacy" forum, yet no such counterpart under the "TrueNAS Core" forum. And then there's "Applications and Jails" as its own parent forum, but it implies both SCALE and Core. But then there's "Apps" under the "TrueNAS SCALE" forum.

That doesn't even take into account how there are things like "Performance" and "Hardware" under different parent forums.

It's a bit all over the place, isn't it?

Using "tags" would eliminate this confusion. Here's how:

You'd have a handful of sections (for example, though not comprehensive for this post):

• Installation
• Hardware
• Performance
• Operation
• Upgrading
• Applications
• Miscellaneous

Then you slap on the relevant tags.

So a user might need help deciding on what hardware to purchase, and they post in the "Hardware" forum, slapping on the tags "SCALE" and "Bluefin" and maybe even "New User".

Or maybe a user is having performance issues with network shares, so they post in the "Performance" forum, slapping on the tags "Core" and "SMB".

Something like that...

That explains a lot and invalidates my previous comment.

 

[danb35]

A "tagging" system would have helped greatly, but I'm not sure it's possible with this forum software.

I understand XenForo does support tags, but I'm certainly no expert with that software. But I've mentioned similar concerns:

Separate forums for each major version?

The more additional subforums are created, the less sense it's making to me. Back in the old days (i.e., before rebranding everything to "TrueNAS"), there was a pretty well-defined set of subforums for FreeNAS, with divisions that pretty well made sense. Although there were tweaks to it, the...

www.truenas.com

...and things have only gotten worse since then.

I wrote a resource and I am quite (but not 100%) sure that I chose "Jails and Plugins" under TrueNAS Core.

I think, though I'm not sure, that each of the (very few--four, I think?) categories of resource is tied to a particular subforum for its discussion thread.

Edit: somehow a whole bunch of information that didn't belong to me got added to this post. Deleted.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hi all,

I can't help but notice that again and again people new to the forums asking for help post in the FreeNAS (legacy) section instead of the appropriate SCALE or CORE one.

Anyone got an idea why that might be the case? I certainly don't.

If we can help new members to find the right subforum, we should by all means do so, but at the moment I fail to understand the cause of that problem.

Any suggestions?

It's been mercilessly tormenting me for way too long. Whenever we need to move a thread or whatever, we get a massive drop down that is in a very bizarre order where the "LEGACY" section shows up first with a million entries. And crap indents. AND IT'S THREE AND A HALF PAGES LONG ON A 1440 MONITOR! Please someone fix this disaster already, I keep asking but I must be going crazy because nobody else seems sufficiently pissed at this! AGH!

 

[Ericloewe]

I'M NOT CRAZY!

 

[Arwen]

I wrote a resource and I am quite (but not 100%) sure that I chose "Jails and Plugins" under TrueNAS Core.
But it ended up in the FreeNAS forum.

The structure itself is quite intuitive I think.

Yes, the defaults for Resources seems to be mostly to the legacy FreeNAS forums.

But, you can request to have it fixed!

Simply "Report" your Resource and request it's discussion thread be moved to an appropriate forum. Hopefully you know where it should go and can say so. I've done this a few times and it works okay. A Moderator sees the Report and does the needful.

 

[danb35]

So, Patrick, it seems the answer to your question is, "yes, yes, it is."

 

[Ericloewe]

By the way, regarding resources: the categories revamp depends on the forum restructuring so that discussion threads can be created in a logical place. It's also an admin operation, so the mods couldn't do it independently and incrementally over a week or two.

 

[Davvo]

I feel immense pain about this, and am not a mod. I have mixed feeling about archiving the general help section and yet seeing the Freenas section still open.
Definitely needs a housekeeper, but I do not think the structure as it appears is the issue.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm very much in favor of closing the old sections with a big red notice or something. That may include locking all the threads, with whatever is still relevant being moved out of there by the mod team during the process and/or later on request. Coalescing everything into two or three new sections that can get the hell out of the way when listing them for mod actions would still be necessary, though.

 

[Davvo]

I assume the main reason the Freenas section is still open is the resources having their discussion threads there.

Having a big red warning when opening a new thread there could help redirecting users to the correct sections.

 

[wsoteros]

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. We really appreciate it. Whatever it takes to make the experience better for all, I am on board.

I assume the main reason the Freenas section is still open is the resources having their discussion threads there.

We can always switch where these land :).

Whenever we need to move a thread or whatever, we get a massive drop down that is in a very bizarre order where the "LEGACY" section shows up first with a million entries. And crap indents. AND IT'S THREE AND A HALF PAGES LONG ON A 1440 MONITOR!

We developed this to encourage you to have a vertical monitor /s. This is something that bothers me too, I'll see what we can do.

 

[winnielinnie]

We developed this to encourage you to have a vertical monitor

I found a leaked video of @Ericloewe confronting @wsoteros

 

[Davvo]

I found a leaked video of @Ericloewe confronting @wsoteros

View attachment 72439

Who is who?

 

[Ericloewe]

Vertical eyes guy is the monster who invented vertical video. He must be banished back to his overly-vertical planet.

 

[Tigersharke]

I won't make any promises but assuming things do not radically change here in some short period from now, I may again have copious amounts of time to try to do what can be done about this. The organization or visibility or ordering of areas in that dropdown etc., or other things. Even mod/admin pages or tools/links/dropdowns etc., can be affected by themes here, which if all else fails I believe such a dropdown listing could be forced into a little different format, such as a wider rather than longer dropdown box.

Yes there are tags, and labels. One or the other or both could be used for organizing or highlighting things. I have mentioned these in the past. XenForo does permit searches based on labels or tags or both. I am not looking into it to check which right now, but I recall at least one of the two was searchable.

PS.
If I begin work on the CSS stuff (ie, themes) it may take me some time to re-discover how I did things for my own (Ganz großes Kino theme to begin with, and to adapt things to other themes as needed.