Idea - categorical mailing list?

Miklos_Hollender

During posting to this topic http://mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t ... 81fa4cdb19 I got this idea.

I think the most basic problem of the Navision world is getting information out of MS. Unless you spend a lot of time reading mibuso, PartnerSource and the KB for finding problems that *might* bite you in the future, you don't get notified of a problem until you actually hit it - and then you have to go and fix or if you cannot then go and find the solution at the above-mentioned sources. It quite a hit on user satisfaction, I think.

The idea is - let's turn it around. Let's define categories like Financials, Manufacturing, Development, Installation, SQL etc.

Let's build a feature in the forum that each user can "tag" a topic with one or more of the above-mentioned categories IF they feel it's an important problem people probably would want to know about. So basically f.e. a financial problem and it's solution via development would have, say, 50 "financial" tag and 35 development tag as a total, from users on the forum.

Then, send an automatic e-mail to a mailing list for each category, showing the top X topics of the week regarding that category. So if you are say a mostly financial consultant and you are deep withing a project you still get notified of the most important financial-related problems others found an hopefully their solution as well.

I can volunteer to do some PHP programming about it but probably it would be better if more of us could volunteer to that to share the load.

DenSter

People will not tag things or tag them incorrectly, causing me to want to check all new postings anyway. Besides, what good will it do? If you want to search for a good SQL topic, now you need to search all the emails when you can just as well search right on the forum.

This is a complete waste of time IMHO.

Miklos_Hollender

Because the whole idea is that you would be notified that a problem exists BEFORE it would actually arise at a project thus you can solve BEFORE it would annoy the users.

Luc_VanDyck

You would end up with too many tags, and too many mails.
And it's not because a topic is tagged, that it's important for you to read it.

Sorry, but I voted NO.

nunomaia

Too many e-mails to orgranize. I want to watch only for specific threads.

kriki

Luc Van Dyck wrote:

You would end up with too many tags, and too many mails.
And it's not because a topic is tagged, that it's important for you to read it.

Sorry, but I voted NO.

And too many moderating to fix those tags.

I also vote NO.

ssingla

I have found forum search quite effective though some time it takes a lot of time to pinpoint the exact thread I am looking at but managing a mail account will be much more difficult. Further wrong tagging will annoy the user of this facility.
Sorry but I voted No.

zeninoleg

I am just VERY curious where is at least one YES vote? Miklos, you have voted against your idea? Good Job!
To my mind, people will not tag these topics and it will be more mess. If you want a category then make it as a dropdown list which is mandatory. But I think that it would not fly.
Moreover if you want to have a local copy of this forum then, i think, you can buy a DVD from Luc. Am I right, Luc?

Luc_VanDyck

zeninoleg wrote:

Moreover if you want to have a local copy of this forum then, i think, you can buy a DVD from Luc. Am I right, Luc?

The forum is not on the DVD, sorry.

Waldo

If the feature would exist, I think I would use it, so I vote yes... (sorry to disagree :oops: ).

Searching the forum sometimes gives back many results. Tagging with very general categories could help to reduce the search.
You could make it non-mandatory though ... .

Miklos_Hollender

Gee, are we all living on some different planet? It's not about making search easier.

I'm so disappointed... NOBODY understood what I'm after. Let's try to explain it once again (last time):

1. Searching on the forum is great if you have ALREADY encountered a problem you have to solve.

2. However, it's a bit too late. It would be a much more ideal case to know BEFORE a given functionality is sold/planned/implemented that it's crap and you should roll your own instead. (My most recent example is Business Notifications - we are very lucky that we took the time to try to build a demo system with installing everything from scratch because this we learned before selling it that it's crap so that we know now it must not be sold. I shudder to think of the thought what might have had happened if we just trust MS and sell it.) If you get notified of the most common landmines people stumbled upon then you can decide at a project planning / proposal phase that functionality X is crap and plan Y development days instead to roll your own.

It's NOT for solving problems, but for getting notified of often occuring problems so that you can plan everything that way that you WON'T ENCOUNTER (so many) problems because you can take measures to avoid the BEFOREHAND (usually by rolling your own solution instead of functionality that is known to be crap because there are lots of complaints for that in the forum). NOT for during and post-implementation, BEFORE implementation. Clear enough know?

I just don't understand why is it so hard to understand. You guys never ever were in a situation that deep within a project you encountered some big trouble and wished "damn MS should have told us that it's not mature yet or not thought seriously or it's not for this case so that we shouldn't even tried"? Well, this would be a community-driven solution instead of that missing "beware, possible landmines" newsletter MS should periodically send to all of us if they would really care about us...

zeninoleg

Ok Miklos, here are couple questions:
1) Why not create a new section of the forum for such things where you can put your "Financial" tag in the header
2) Don't you think that you will get same topics each week due to popularity of those and will miss all new ones (taht is in case of your solution)

Anyway, I believe taht it might be a good idea in the perfect world but
1) Will require more moderating
2) Will turn every topic in this forum in the voting poll
3) People would not bother voting for the topics
4) you will get same topics each week
5) People will be marking it without knowing if that is really worth attention or not
6) Quite hard to implement (Luc, do you have such capability on this forum?)

DenSter

You know Miklos, maybe people know exactly what you mean, but they just don't agree with you that it is a good idea. I know exactly what you mean, knew it the first time you brought it up. No offense intended, but I just think it is a complete waste of my time. I don't want hundreds of emails from mibuso, telling me about a new topic that was categorized incorrectly, just on the off chance that there might be one that is beneficial to me.