AZGroups.com

The forum categories don't make sense to me...

"AZGroups Meetings" - if this is just for meeting-related stuff, should there be a distinction between ".NET internals" and "ASP.NET"?  Are there separate meetings for the 2?  Should "Announcements" and "Chat" be under "ASP.NET User Group Forums"?  Where is the "WinForms" forum?

I have worked with a TON of non-profits, large and small, and, in my experience, have found that the success of forums actually depends on unifying separate forum rather than seperating them.  Oddly enough, the more you separate clear, concise topics, the less activity you get in general.

My suggestion:
*Start with as few forums as possible.  We know what our audience is, so how about (using Namespaces would be a cool customization)...

• "AZGroups"
• "AZGroups.NET [Announcements / Meetings / Events Forum]"
• "AZGroups.Website.News"
• "Discussion Groups"
• "System.Web Forum"
• "System.Windows Forum"
• "System.Data Forum"
• "AZGroups.Chat Forum"
• "AZGroups.Classifieds"
• "AZGroups.Website [Bugs / Suggestions]"

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--Eric Swanson
http://www.ericis.com/

I agree with Eric's points... I have also noticed people here at work scream "we need forums!"; then create a nice array of forum topics (after I install CS) with what they feel is suffcient granularity only to have NO ONE use them becuase they don't want to spend all their time drilling down to just to collaborate and communicate on ideas... While I don't neccessarily see that problem here, I would like to see the techincal area "ASP.NET User Group Forums" moved to the top of the page as it is what I most care about on on a daily basis...

Also... how will we get mail feeds from this system... Like we did with Yahoo Groups? I like having my e-mail aggregate the info and using a gmail accunt as the interface to interact with the group... I suppose NNTP is an alternative I should look at too.

Scott, Lorin, Chris, et. al.... excellent job supporting this transistion. You deserve a raise! ;-)

 

 

Ok so I can minimize the Panels as I see fit... and it DOES "remember" this preference over successive visits to the site (unless I chuck the cookie I'm sure). Darn... I just let the steam out of my own suggestion.

Thanks again guys! 

P.S. This is a nice Sub-Modal, Ajax-Style "quick reply" in this version of CS.  

We don't know who our audience is. The major upgrade of AZGroups.com will hopefully be used to entice other user groups to use the site, not just the ASP.net group.

And ... not just .NET user groups. I'd like to see Flash topics, SQL, Java topics, Project, General PC, Linux, and whoever else wants to join the online community.

My Current plan, is to install a set of 3 forums for each group,

1. Announcements
2. Chat
3. Technical

If the site were just for my ASP.NET group, then your suggestions would be fine, but I have a larger community vision for this site.

the other reason i'm giving each user group their own "forum" under meetings, is because each forum has it's own RSS feed, so you'll be able to subscribe to just the meeting schedule for the user gorup that you're intersted in.

I dig the vision... and personalization helps a lot. It would be cool if you could hide forum groups altogether. The site seems pretty snappy.. nice look out of the box.

yes, I agree with Eric that "Start with as few forums as possible".

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