Getting the most out of this forum

Vanilla Forums

Here are some tips and tricks for using this forum:

* **Use the reactions**. These let you share how you feel about other’s comments. The most liked content shows up on the [Best Of](/bestof) page.
* **Mention others.** Put an @ symbol before the username to mention someone. They’ll get notified when you do.
* **Update your notification preferences.** You’ll receive a notification if someone mentions you or posts to a discussion that you’ve bookmarked. You can set notifications from the Edit Profile page.
* **Send messages.** You can private message members by going to your inbox, or visiting their profile page (click their username anywhere).
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* **Check out the forum from your mobile phone.** Just go to the forum URL in your browser - no need to download an app.
* **Want to embed a YouTube video, a Pinterest Pin or a Tweet?** Just paste in the link. Vanilla will handle the embedding for you!
* Check out what’s going on with other community members on the [Activity](/activity) page.

Have fun!

Vanilla Forums

These are the notes on the hour or so I spent setting up this site:

• Forum building screen is broken (I guess we're waiting for the switch over to new inf?)
• Had a duplicate System account
• Deleting duplicate System threw my counters off by one
• Theme selection is really bad; even 2 more options would be great beyond Basic, Bittersweet, and Bootstrap.
• Bootstrap theme still breaks when you add a logo
• No guidance to get to 'Banner' & Registration pages for basic setup
• Initial plugins aren't a great selection & are outdated; any why isn't Editor on?
• No guidance to set up roles before categories (makes permissions so much easier)
• Many plugins could use better descriptions
• Enabling a plugin should take you to its Setup page if it has one
• Using the Auto-Role plugin made me want to reassign the default roles, which isn't in the UI
• Categories get added to the top of the list; it would make a lot more sense to add to the bottom (i.e. you are adding them in the order you wanted them in)
• Initial Reactions enabled are still dumb; I thought we'd fixed that.
• Curator & PersonalInfo permissions required a utility/update to appear.
• Default inputformatter should be Markdown
• Addons page feels old & outdated.

radist

• The Import tool, does it actually do anything? if not remove the link
• Either update or get rid of help/tutorials and Getting Started, those videos are so, so old.
• Recent News could probably replace one of those sections if we filtered it for feature updates and Friday tips
• email confirmation as the default setting? Its often off on client sites when we get spam complaints.
• The ability to select one language on start up would eliminate a lot of support requests, multilingual can still be us, but I don't see why someone should have to wait just to get their initial native language, especially since it effects the dashboard.

Vanilla Forums

Which brings us to:

• Markdown removes line breaks which is a bad experience

(use * 1 asterisks per line for lists)

radist

• The same selection tool we have on the forums we use for threads, but in the spam and moderation queues. If can click around pages and have my "Take Action" pop up on the forum, why not there? It would make larger queues a lot more manageable

Sections that could be renamed for clarity:

• Messages- I realize that "announcements" is what we call stickies, but "messages" doesn't call to mind the notifications that appear on top of the board.
• Advanced- Seems like a bunch of miscellaneous settings that would be better elsewhere? Discussion & Comment Editing, Sorting, and Archiving? Editing seems like it belongs with roles/permissions (and people often look for it there), and sorting with categories.
• Social- If addons automatically take you to the settings page, this wont be as big of a deal, but people are still triggering open ID when they are looking for google plus and not actually configuring their addons.

Alex Powell

Should also make note for people to review outgoing email.

As for the import button, that's in a CSS fix
https://github.com/vanilla/internal/pull/100

I am surprised the Google (old one) and Openid are still default.

I know one of the ideas Luc mentioned is flavors, and hopefully one of them will be internal community, which turns on Private mode on automatically.

@Laura, I agree with the outdated videos, but I think that whole section needs to be redone, as the links go to video. Personally, I would love it just go to one of our video channels.

I guess it's good idea to try setting up a new community every once in a while for inspiration ;p

Vanilla Forums

Private Community was automatically enabled on this site when I started it. I don't really like that as a default.

Alex Powell

@Lincoln‌ really that's new. And why not private first ? It gives you time to get things together.

Vanilla Forums

@Adrian It does, but it's unexpected behavior. I'd favor it if there was a way of communicating (like a wizard) that it was on, and when it's time to turn it off.

Alex Powell

I agree, I wish we had a welcome Bot doing an overlay/wizard. I have seen some pretty cool on-boarding for cloud products recently.

Vanilla Forums

Link some up!

Unknown

customers should be able to turn on Pockets

Alex Powell

This article is a pretty good start: http://sixrevisions.com/user-experience-ux/onboarding-techniques-examples/

Vanilla Forums

@Patrick said:
customers should be able to turn on Pockets

Agreed.

Vanilla Forums

@Laura I basically agree with everything you've suggested thus far.

We have a bit of an ordering problem with Messages/Announcements naming. We need to change Announcements to "Pin" first, to clear that namespace and let it cool off for a release before we reuse it for Messages.

Victorine Courtois

Just chiming in here to agree that the old Google addon really needs to be removed entirely. It's on by default and far too many people end up trying to use that instead of the new one. This leads to support requests (or requests to me or the account execs) that could be entirely avoided, particularly as it's been at least a couple of months since the new one came out.

Vanilla Forums

I think the issue is that I removed it from that list, but the list is only on new infrastructure, and sites are still spawning on old infrastructure. I don't know the status of @Tim switching that over, but maybe it would be worthwhile figuring out how to get the old inf list updated in the meantime?