Improve community groups site
I’ve gotten a lot of good information from the German research group that is part of the FamilySearch Community, but the platform is often frustrating and could use some improvement to make it more user-friendly.
For instance:
- It’s hard to locate the “Groups” section from the main FamilySearch home page. I’ve never actually found a link to it, but had to remember that it starts “community.familysearch…” or bookmark it. It’s such a great and helpful community tool, it would be nice if you drew more attention to it or made it more accessible.
- It would be nice to have a way to search on discussions I have posted or participated in. I don’t see any way to do this. I’ve learned to copy/paste discussions into my own document, to save anything I wanted to look at later. I know that I may not be able to find it again on the site.
- When I click on my user profile icon, under “My Discussions” it says I have 63 items, but when I click on that, it goes to a blank page.
- I recently had a correspondence with another user researching the same last name. I would get email notices for some of her messages, but not others. Or they seemed to be on different threads?
Thanks for all the work the moderators do to help us German researchers. They’re a talented group. I’m just hoping you consider ways to make it more accessible.
Elda
Comments
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Huh, now this entry shows up when I click on the My Discussions link, but 63 other items do not show up.
Which makes me ask, how long do these items stay available on the site?
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I have the URL of my comments bookmarked, making it easy to find anything I've said. You can find that URL on your Profile page.
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The "My Discussions" page only shows threads that you've started in the main Community categories.
(I think the Groups section is one too many "levels" for the software, or something.)
You can see a complete list of threads you've started by going to your community profile page and clicking "Discussions" there. (Note the lack of the possessive pronoun.)
You can get to your community profile page a couple of ways: by clicking your profile icon (the gray circle thingy) at the top right, and then clicking your name on the drop-down; or by finding a comment you've made, clicking your name, and choosing "View Profile".
Note that while your profile's discussions list is complete (once you've clicked "More" often enough), it may not show as many threads as the counter says: for some inexplicable reason, flagging a thread also increments the discussion count. Flags are otherwise completely invisible to us mere mortal users, so this is a very, very strange behavior of this particular forum.
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Thanks, Áine Ní Donnghaile and Julia Szent-Györgyi, for the tips!
When I am on the community.familysearch.org page and click on the gray person in a circle icon at top right, these are the choices I get. And the "My Discussions" thing only shows me this particular discussion we're in. But once I click the entry circle, I see my name with a larger gray circle and a page with my name on it and a new list of choices (second image below) that does say "Discussions" and "Comments" - and those get me what I want to see.
And I'll try that option of bookmarking.
I posted this on the "Suggest an Idea" page in the hope that FamilySearch will improve upon this navigation to the groups in Communities and make it easier to find your own discussions or search for keywords.
Thanks,
Elda
image #1
image #2
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On your Image #1, you need to click your name, directly below the gray thing, to go to your community profile page (where the list in your image #2 can be found).
I agree that these highly-nonsensical weirdnesses of the Community could use fixing. (Message boards are older than the internet. Surely people have figured out how to set them up sensibly by now....)
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