The behavior of the users seems to be expected. This forum does not look, feel, or act like a forum. It looks and feels like a Q&A support page or a FAQ page with comments, and I would guess that users respond in kind.
I did not perceive in any way that this was a forum, until I saw this post in my digest email. The UI in general does not convey its size, structure, or persistence. It seems only logical that users would respond to that by assuming that it is not vast, not structured, or persistent, and by extension of the device being new to them would assume that the community is new in kind.
Semantics and structure greatly impact UX, and user behavior.
ok this makes me laugh, but I can see some truth. All this whitespace and gray text is too artsy and not useful. SEARCH should be spelled out, and it should be the biggest dang button there is. Even when you open search, still surprisingly hard to find the post you ALREADY know exists, and more-so the post that may not exist.
But it’s wrong to refer to new posting as “abuse”. When all you 've got is a hammer, everything looks like a new post.
Way off topic, but personally I wish all forums on the internet used discourse. I’ll admit, it took me awhile to figure it all out. And even now sometimes I can’t find what I know is here. But I love the look, feel and operation.
I like everything about it except search. Search is awful. I can have read a post five minutes earlier, remember a couple of keywords from the thread title, open search, put in just the keywords, and get a list of topics which are 12 months old.
I’m sure there’s someway to sort them from newest to oldest, but it’s not obvious, and it’s not voice friendly, so I’ve never found it.
5 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
50
After pressing the Search icon, select “options” (blue, in lower left portion of the Search box) and codes for filters, sort order, etc., are shown, as well as a local Google Site Search box.
My problem with this attitude is that there is SOOOOO much to search through, that it’s often just not helpful or filled with similar, older issues that are no longer relevant after several hub/app updates. How many different updates or back end system issues have there been where scheduled events stopped working? Answer; a lot. But if it happens 2 weeks from now, the hundreds of previous posts aren’t useful.
Another example, with a recent App update, I discovered the Apple Watch App no longer worked. I came here to see if anybody else was having problems. I searched. I read through dozens of posts, all of them before the update. I searched under different parameters, same thing, couldn’t find anything relevant. I searched a third time, came up with nothing. I finally posted and the first response I got was obnoxious saying I should use the search and included a link to a thread that actually had nothing to do with my question because the poster offering “help” didn’t actually bother to take my question seriously.
You say the fastest way to not make friends is posting new topics, but I say it’s by actively and intentionally being a jerk when someone else posts a new topic.
There’s no question it’s difficult to find things in the forums at times.
There’s a new community-created wiki, it’s only a few weeks old, but a number of the active members are participating and we’re hoping that this will help solve exactly the problem you described.
I’ve often said forums are for questions, wikis are for answers.
Take a look, contribute articles, and give us some time. I hope it will prove useful.
Doesn’t anyone find it a little inappropriate that SmartThings, worth over $200 million, owned by Samsung, worth about $200 billion, and when users have a problem they largely have to rely on other users?
This wiki seems like a tremendous undertaking. I hope people who use it show their gratitude appropriately.
4 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
56
Yes … and no.
As a Consumer Product, SmartThings is lack of consumer-friendly documentation and the various design weaknesses (and, of course, the instabilities), must drive up tech support costs tremendously.
As a Development Platform, SmartThings is just following the industry tradition of “user groups”, forums, and similar peer support mechanisms that have existed for decades.
We see “consumers” wander in here a lot and offer a lot of help … but usually remind them to seek help from Support@SmartThings.com.
Mostly, though, the Community consists of power-users, geeks, developers, hackers and professionals of varying skill-levels … and we happen to be much better at helping each other than SmartThings support. Other development platforms, let’s say Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server, etc, provide extensive highly technically support (an training, etc.), but at quite a high cost (per case, per hour, but most typically through large enterprise support and licence / maintenance agreements). Samsung / SmartThings is unlikely to be able to leverage the “SmartThings Development Platform” for similar revenue streams.
And currently, ST does have the resources to prioritize both. Perhaps Samsung needs to bring in a new division. Is this an organizational structure problem?
Or … maybe it isn’t a problem. We’ve all stuck around, and there’s tremendous volunteerism here that isn’t (on average) going away.
I find it more inappropriate that we already know how short staffed ST is with support; therefore, we turn to our peers, of which, some feel it’s neccessary to be the self appointed forum traffic police, by reminding others of the search feature, where it can be found, how it operates, etc.
I’m sorry to be so frank…but take your forum political / social correctness and shove it. Do you think the situation would even exist if support could handle the traffic?..c’mon! (To your point )
By the time many of us have spent troubleshooting our issues, reaching out to support, and waiting for an email, and dealing with our own real life issues…the last thing anyone’s patience needs is some self righteous forum cop telling us to use the search feature.
It shocks me how people assume that others didn’t search vs. wasn’t sure what to search, or did so and it didn’t fulfill their needs. If you’re going to help someone than do so without scolding them.
If this offends anyone than I suggest utilizing the search feature (lol) to look up how @JDRoberts assists anyone and everyone with more thoughtfulness than most of us could muster if we had to.
Did y’all like how I got in some hypocrisy there? Lol
I began on this forum (almost 2 years ago) as somewhat of a newbie. I had experience with programming, but not in a Java-based language. I also had experience with other forums that were populated with many, many people that were very vocal about this issue.
One of the reasons why I was able to make the progress I have made with ST programming was the openness that the other forum users had to my questions - whether they were “repeats” or not. I felt comfortable posing questions here.
IMHO, anyone who has invested any amount of time in ST’s platform should consider that more people who understand how to make the most of the ST system, the better the system will become.
So let’s not call a “repeat” question “abuse”. This forum isn’t only for the people who already understand how everything works – it’s for everyone.
One of the nice features of the discourse software which is used for these forms is that it is possible for the moderators to combine duplicate topics and move posts.
If you do see a topic started by someone new which is a duplicate of an existing topic, you can just point them to that existing topic, flag the new topic as a duplicate, and the moderators will be able to combine them when they get a chance. It sometimes takes a few days, but the forums do get cleaned up pretty well as long as members alert the moderators to the issues.
There are a lot of different ways that the community can be supportive of each other.
And again my own hope is that as the wiki grows over time, it will be much easier to find answers to very straightforward questions, with the forum free for brainstorming and discussion where there isn’t a particular factual answer.
icon, select “options” (blue, in lower left portion of the Search box) and codes for filters, sort order, etc., are shown, as well as a local Google Site Search box.
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