How can Roon improve site layout and posting hygiene?

Roon Labs LLC Roon Community Site
#1

First off, I get that this is a large, very active forum with multi-national posters so site organisation is always going to be challenging and perhaps a little hap hazzard.

I think another factor this that Roon runs all of its support function in parallel to the general discussion forums. Sometimes one topic bleeds into another.

The main issues are:

  1. Topics generated with no categorisation at all. This is easily fixed by mandating a category before allowing the post. This feature is in the board admin settings.

  2. Support topics that are posted in the #roon heading. This is to the detriment of the poster because they don’t get the attention of @support in a timely way. It’s also more difficult to track the outcome to a conclusion. There is further ambiguity because often support for specific platform issues get posted in the Roon Software sub-category headings (e.g. #roon:appleios ) that aren’t mirrored in the Support section.

  3. Non-support topics posted in #support which are often general discussion moans or #roon:feature-requests rather than actual support requests.

Are there too many sub-categories? Are people less familiar with the board software and how to use it? Do people need more prompts from the board software before posting to put topics in the right category?

I propose one immediate answer is that @moderators should be much more aggressively “re-homing” posts into the right category. It would also give their busy fingers less time to actually delete and modify posts :wink: (this is a joke for the avoidance of doubt :kissing_heart: ).

Category reorganisation and prioritisation could also be optimised a bit too. Currently, #support sits underneath #live-radio in the category ordering. Given the levels of activity, should it sit higher so that a new visitor to the front page sees Support without potentially having to scroll down through the list of categories.

Would welcome your thoughts. Is this even an issue for other people?

3 Likes
#2

This is a good suggestion, and worth doing (IMHO).

The rest, yup, it’s a busy forum and first-time posters are first-time posters, so a little guidance is always likely to be required.

All-in-all, I’m surprised it works as well as it does. Dunno how busy the moderators are. I don’t envy their task at all.

2 Likes
#3

I agree that changing the order could help matters. The descriptions (tooltips) could be tidied up too.

#support says: Got a question about Roon? #roon also says … asking questions.

And, if you’re browsing #roon you can’t post in #support. That said, misposting does get picked up and changed or the moderators informed.

2 Likes
#4

Mods “rehome” posts all the time and are usually pretty vigilant about posts that don’t belong in Support. TL3 users also have power to recategorise.

At the moment the Forum is suffering from technical issues that can prevent shifting posts from one thread into another. This is a function of increased usage as the Forum grows.

2 Likes
#5

Agreed! I just re-ordered a few categories and updated descriptions to make things more clear.

They are absolute saints. :pray:

5 Likes
#6

Another idea randomly rattling around my head is that perhaps Roon should publicly append support’s internal issue tracking numbers to the title of support threads they are actively working on.

There are many recent examples of users unsure whether their problem is being looked at and it would probably reduce the number of duplicate and meta thread overhead for Roon if people could see their problem was being investigated.

1 Like
#7

Now he knows ! Welcome to the team Geoff.

2 Likes
#8

This is an interesting issue. Mods look at the new uncategorised posts and categorise them where appropriate, but there are a number of threads that don’t fit anywhere and remain Uncategorised. I used to think we should make more sub-categories and sort everything into one, but these days I’m more open to Uncategorised serving as Miscellaneous.