Suggestions - Improving this Forum!

Help me!
1

Hi Forest,
So excited about this forum - I love Forest and love the community. This is going to be awesome.
I can see some potential improvements to start off on the right foot.

First, let’s be able to mark answers as “Correct” and resolve questions - it would be so much easier to know who needs help or what question might already provide an answer.

Second, we should create other categories to ensure the basic separation between the kind of posts people would create. I would suggest at least the following:

Help Me --> Add Tags!
Help can be in many areas and this is a bit too generic.
No need to be too granular of course but at least separate technical help with tags to better triage what it is about.
Keep existing Help Me super-topic and provide tags for the different areas of support:
Installation & Setup
Layout & UI
Forest API
Data Access
Performance
Security
Integrations
Upgrades & Migration

  • You probably better have a better list than mine - but that’s the direction.
  • Even if posts are created without them - You can assign those tags to posts as they come in to help your team know what they are about and for the community to easily find things.

Account & Billing - Questions and problems about the accounts, plans, billing and things that are related to that.

Announcements - Could be the place for you to place announcements about product updates, downtimes, general news etc. Which usually do not require followup from the community but could allow it. (Only you create new topics under this category).
! Can use the same tags from “Help Me!” here.

Teach & Learn - Optional, a place mainly for you to share common tips or workarounds. Members can show cool things they learned or suggest other ways to do something. It’s also an important place for general suggestions from the community about Forest.
! Can use the same tags from “Help Me!” here.
! My post would probably go here :slight_smile:

Design Discussions - This one is optional - but this is not about technical problem support but more about design considerations or implementation discussions. This is also a good place to discuss different approaches the community might have about using Forest. You can also open posts here to discuss possible features for the next versions and how would members think they should behave.
! Can use the same tags from “Help Me!” here.

Thanks!

9 Likes
2

First of all, thank you, thank you, welcome here and… thank you! :tada:

This feedback is amazing and helps building this tool packing it with all the features that are needed for growing our community healthy and strong. Let me answer you on the various points:

“Solving” issues

This is a great suggestion but… it should already be possible! This is an example of a question which was solved: MongoDB : Delete/Update a collection on forest admin interface
If you don’t see it, it is a problem on our end that needs to be solved.

Tags

I gave this feature some thought, and after some pondering I decided to skip this for the launch. The reasoning behind this choice is that it may be overwhelming information for new users, and, in the end, it does not really change the support process. Any questions under any tag would have to be treated exactly the same way, with fanatic support. As this community grows in size, however, I feel that it’s a natural evolution we should tend to, and yours is a really good list. Maybe we can add a couple of other tags too, for example one could signal whether a new feature is on the roadmap. Which brings us to your other suggestion…

…Categories

they are definitely going to appear, and I think you came up with a great list! But again, we opted to launch with just one category at the start for the sake of simplicity and to ensure a smooth transition. However, the community seems to be getting already quite some traction, so I was thinking to start to create them already in the next week or so. I would like to see at least the following:

  • Account and Billing
  • Announcements (yes!)
  • Feature requests (with votes)
  • Teach and Learn

and of course, given your post, I guess we have to add:

  • Community Feedback (for discussion related to this website)
    :wink:

All these categories will need some initial content for being launched, and I will only turn them on once there are a few topics to start with. So… if you have tips and tricks you have come up with, I’d love if you could share them, and I’ll be glad to re-categorize them and work with you before we announce it.

In any case, thanks again for being with us from day 1 and for being so supportive. It’s wonderful to have developers like you on board! :sunny:

5 Likes
3

Soooo
one suggestion, lock solved topics to avoid resurrection. See what I mean?
Resurrection = poor readability
Account and Billing is a first for me…why not…but strange considering the biz model simplicity of forest.
Annoucements & FR are no brainers.
Setup is a painful stage, it needs independent attention (from you).
For now all the rest should go in general to avoid overthinking it
Cheers

1 Like