GetSatisfaction departure - request for Community ideas

LegacyUser

joe martel said: Our FamilySearch GetSatisfaction forum has been a tremendous resource to me to get a perspective of how a community can identify issues and grow to help each other. I will miss this venue more that you know. 

But this will cease in the next couple months. It will take time to build a new community forum, and will be difficult to meet parity of GetSat soon. In the meantime we will have to rely on Communities. 

https://community.familysearch.org/s/?language=en_US

It is a fairly complex platform to make big changes. 

I would like to know what you would do to Communities to be our interim venue for GetSat-like feedback. I suggest you get familiar with what Communities can do, and I'd like to hear your ideas.  I think we might be limited to things like group setup: "Have two groups..." Also realize your entry from the product may likely be the same Feedback screen.

There have been a couple posts about this forum platform being terminated:

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/getsatisfaction-outage

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/hope-whatever-familysearch-comes-up-with-to-replace-getsat-is-better-than-the-familysearch-community-support-question-groups

 

LegacyUser

joe martel said:

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: What will happen to our posts on here when this service is discontinued? Is there a way to save them?

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: At the top of Communities, you have Home, My Feed, Groups, and Questions. You could create another group that goes up there named Suggestions, which would be a group similar to sharing ideas on GetSat.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: It has been a while since I've used the FamilySearch communities, but they are (or at least were) horribly awkward to get to and find the correct "community" in which to enter information.

There needs to be an easily understood hierarchy starting with "Feedback" at the top of the hierarchy. Presently, the Feedback )on the landing page for Community) only deals with

suggestions and discuss problems related to features, functionality, or design of community.familysearch.org

The message where that appears refers to Get Satisfaction for all other areas of FamilySearch.

So...

At the top of the hierarchy is "Feedback" which should be given the same level of appearance as the Support Questions and Groups. So there needs to be three categories, one of which should be Feedback.

Right now, I find the Community to be far from "easy to find solutions as ask questions."

For instance, I cannot find any of my contributions and or questions that I've submitted to any community group. That has to be a priority otherwise, there is no way to easily go back to what I've posted before.

Next, we need a clear structure in terms of titles. Right now, there is no structure except for a larger/bold font that is inline with the concern and a few responses. We only see the latest responses, and have to click on More Answers (at the top of the list) to see the earlier responses.

There is no reply/comment structure like there is in Get Satisfaction. It would be ideal if the structure with responses was similar to Facebook, wherein a reply is provided and then comments can be easily added under that response, as well as comment applied to a comment, and so on. New responses (replies) should start a new thread within that particular question/issue/concern.

Those are just some starting points, but right now, I would likely stop participating simply because the Community structure is so horrid and I have no way to see what I've previous posted...

LegacyUser

m said: When I looked at Communities I decided it wasn't worth joining.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Joe,

From your link in the original post, it appears GetSat was acquired by Sprinklr in 2015 and continues doing the same, or similar, thing. If so, WHY change??? They apparently dropped FS due to non-response by FS (per Jim Greene) then reconstructed the forum a short time later.

GetSat FS seems to be favored by current users, WHY change? $$$$?? Why not just make some changes herein, if desired. IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T 'FIX' IT. I understand you don't make the decision, but it would be interesting to understand what is driving this suggested major change.

1 month ago
Interestingly, this change of ownership appears to have happened in 2015:

https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/abou...

"Apr 8, 2015 - “Get Satisfaction's vision is to enable a world where customers achieve ultimate value with their brands. We upgrade outdated one-to-one support"...

"Sprinklr is the most complete enterprise social media management technology in the world, purpose-built for large companies to drive business outcomes and manage customer experiences across all touch points. Called "the most powerful technology in the market", Sprinklr's fully integrated social experience management software powers more than four billion social connections across 77 countries. Headquartered in New York City with more than 750 employees globally, Sprinklr is revolutionizing customer engagement for almost 800 of Fortune’s top enterprise brands, including IHG, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, and Virgin America, and partners like Accenture, Havas, and Razorfish. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or tweet us at @sprinklr."

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: I have already given my notice of not moving over to the community site.
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

LegacyUser

joe martel said: I did a cursory look at their product. The SprIinkler platform offering is not GetSat parity. It's actually in a different space than GetSat. Often acquisitions involve abandoning one platform (the one being acquired) in favor of the buyer's platform. If you find another platform that matches GetSat I'd love to see it. 

LegacyUser

Juli said: There are many aspects of Communities that I find ...irksome, starting with its refusal to effing STAY SIGNED IN. And then there are those infernal "more" links. (It's not quite as bad as GoodReads, but that's damning with faint praise.)

I like the suggestion above to add another top-level folder of Feedback, with the Feedback link at the bottom of pages linking to it, but this would still not be a full replacement for GetSat.

The most important aspect that Communities is apparently completely missing is one that Tom mentioned: the ability to see your own contributions. If I click my name, I can see the questions I've asked -- and nothing else. I can find no way to look at my responses, short of scrolling through My Feed and clicking every "expand" and "more" link I see. Ironically, it looks like I *can* look at both questions and responses from other users -- I clicked Jeff Wiseman's name and saw questions from other people listed, with his responses buried under several layers of "expand" -- but for me, it only lists my questions.

What Communities really needs is simplification. Keep responses at one or two tiers, and never (ever) hide any of it. Decide whether top-level posts should have a separate title field ("Question") or not ("Post"), and only offer that one method of posting. (Does anyone ever actually use the third option ("Poll")?)

My other suggestion is one that GetSat doesn't have, either: a way to group the groups. (Primarily what I want is a completely-separate LDS area that I never need to go near.) In Communities, groups of groups could help make sense of the current juxtaposition of mega-general groups (such as "Austro-Hungarian Empire") with micro-specialized ones (like "Cass/Case Family Group").

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Please! if we gotta use communities, please get RID of the FACEBOOK style of image handling. On social media like Facebook, a person might take a selfie and then post it across dozens of discussions. However for tools feedback many, many one-offs of images are used in discussions. For reference and future access purposes, any images accompanying a reply in the forum MUST remain non-volatile to the posting just the same as the text itself is. The messages need to be monolithic. Just like using emails. If you send a person a note with an image, it all stays in their mailbox as a single message as long as they ever want to review it.

But in the current communities, I have to upload an image into some kind of personal holding area and then any posts that I make have to LINK to that area. IF you ever remove one of the images in your "Pictures Pool", it will permanently disappear from every single message that you ever posted. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they set the messages area up like this as well.

Right now you have to become a pictures librarian in order to ensure that previous documentation that you've posted doesn't have the most descriptive parts of it (i.e., the pictures) disappear.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: It is extremely unlikely they could be migrated. And google cache doesn't help because it doesn't cache the threads, just the dashboard.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Joe Martel,

There is open-source software out there that could possibly serve the FamilySearch user community in a manner similar to GetSat. However, it would entail some work to integrate it as a function of FamilySearch.

A number of years ago, I played around with several of these open-source programs and many of them had the ability to do some things that GetSat wasn't set up to do (it may have had the ability, but I never played around with its functionality).

One of the features that would be nice would be the ability to make a discussion sticky, so that it appeared at the top of the list. A least a year or more ago, one of the FS reps posted a "how to" discussion. Jim Greene's comments about the temple icons could be another.

This same software had the ability to separate discussion threads into sections, which would satisfy the need for separating Church discussions (with respect to temples, etc.) from more general discussions. The same could be done with indexing issues, place issues, and so on.

Back in some of the earliest days of FamilySearch as a site (or it may have been on nFS, it has been a decade or so ago, the Church was using this kind of software. It took moderator time, but was relatively easy to use.

For the current forum software systems, see the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: Joe Martel said above "If you find another platform that matches GetSat I'd love to see it".

A cross reference to a post I made which Joe may not have seen, on July 16, 2020 12:27 in the topic
"Hope whatever FamilySearch comes up with to replace GetSat is better than the FamilySearch Community - Support Questions – Groups"

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

I referred to the platform Invision which is used by the Great War Forum to which I belong . The Great War Forum incorporates features which I believe include the vast majority of features requested by users of this Get Satisfaction Forum in a replacement platform, and GWF administrators have been able to add extra required features at times.

In addition the Great War Forum is a non profit organisation rum by volunteers, so the platform is presumably considered value for money.

As a user the Great War Forum appears to operate in a satisfactory manner, and as a user I feel the Invision platform could be a good replacement for the Get Satisfaction Forum.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Good suggestion.

Can you provide a link to the Great War Forum or a screen shot? That should be helpful.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: https://www.greatwarforum.org

Also mentioned in my post linked above for July 16, 2020 12:27.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Joe, I guess you are saying that Sprinklr will not be supporting GetSat in the near future.

You might want to take a look at groups.io

They might even be able to transfer the GetSat posts to there platform. I was somewhat involved in transferring a group from the now defunct Yahoo Groups and they were quite organized (a lot of Yahoo groups transferred in a short time period.

It supports chat, wiki, integrations, etc.

https://groups.io/static/features Take a look

(for some unknown reason, I couldn't respond to the comments above)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Thanks, Maureen. That site is powered by the Invision Community, a service similar to GetSat. (https://invisioncommunity.com/)

Definitely worth looking into.

LegacyUser

Paul said: I got a bit "carried away", while visiting the "other place" just now, and found myself making a few responses - or should that be "answers" or "replies"? Although we must remember there are two ways or responding on this forum, too: the basic difference being you can't get a "gold star" if you choose the "wrong" way!

As mentioned above, clicking on ones display name here brings up all the threads you have participated in, whereas at https://community.familysearch.org/ you only get to see the posts instigated by yourself.

While GetSat covers a whole range of topics, and degrees of experience regarding its participants, FamilySearch Community does seem to attract more inexperienced users. However, it does have some good features: like separate groups (not that I particularly like some of the current headings, a couple of which are close to being duplications). Again, as suggested, perhaps any new forum could have a group for "LDS matters", though how far it should be broken down into sub-divisions is debatable. For example, one for "Family Tree" sure - but then do you divide this into further groups for its main functions, like Merging, Sources. Memories, etc. That might be going too far and make the forum unwieldy.

If "FamilySearch Community" had been the only forum that ever existed for FamilySearch / Family Tree users, would anyone have thought-up the current GetSat format? Now we are all so used to it, giving it up (especially for something like Communities) is going to be a difficult adjustment, even though it has its own imperfections.

Hopefully, users will find other forums on the web whose format can be adapted to suit any consensus amongst us and serve as a suitable replacement for GetSat, for years to come!

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: The disadvantage of the GWF - and possibly all other forum per se software??? - is that there is only one level of response within a thread. Where there is a need to discuss responses, as here, you can't do it, other than by quoting.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: What you are dealing with is flat vs threaded messages. See the Wikipedia article that I posted above for the definition as well as a table giving details for various software packages, some of which are open-edit packages.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Thanks Tom - clearly there are several threaded packages, they just don't happen to be ones that I've used.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: Just to say that if anyone is looking at the Great War Forum/Invision that a upgrade/ new version has been released by Invision after my post of August 17, 2020 23.06 and there are currently a few teething problems.

With regards to the image attachments on GWF, a GWF member said: "IIRC the GWF images are stored separately on Amazon Web Services. Again, IIRC this is a bespoke solution specific to the GWF".

Also Internet Explorer is no longer supported with the Invision upgrade.

LegacyUser

JT said: Please allow "Ctrl Click" to open any link in a new Chrome tab. Right now with Community Forums any "Ctrl Click" stays in the current tab.

LegacyUser

JT said: Community only lists up to 8 groups that I belong to, near the top left of most of their main pages.It's too hard to find all my groups (even on the Groups tab). I saw them all at one point, but now I can't find my whole list of groups.

LegacyUser

Kathryn Grant said: What a tremendous loss... so many important discussions have taken place here over the years.

LegacyUser

m said: Here is a comparison of internet forum software:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I find the community site (not this GetSat one) extremely hard to use and navigate. If this GetSat forum moves to the groups as currently set up, I probably will not participate -- the groups are just too hard to use, lack too many features, and I cannot see a list of my contributions.

LegacyUser

m said: I probably will not participate if this GetSat forum moves to Communities as well.

There's plenty of good forum software (see other post). Communities does not meet expectations of users/is not up to current standards in the year 2020.