Sunday, March 08, 2009

OTN forums : 28 weeks later

Following the previous post I wrote last September (28 days later), today 28 weeks later, in reference to an other horror movie, is a logical way to go right now.
So, 28 weeks later, are there any improvements in OTN Forums ?
No, not really. Even worse. As a "birthday" present, today a new issue appears (again) with the email address...

Less and less valuable people are particpating, people does not learn how to give points or "close" thread by marking thread as answered when it is not, forums slowness and often up-down effects, and of course, still these bloody markups we cannot avoid anymore, and still no getting back the red bullets to mark threads as (un)read.

It seems the upgrade of last summer was a downgrade, nothing more. And despite all the complaints of OTN members, nothing has been done to really improve the OTN forums.

Finally, why continue to use it ?

6 comments:

Christian Berg said...

Amen to that! I hope Justin reads this and we can finally get some real moderators for each forum.

Cheers,
C.

Laurent Schneider said...

Even if someone marks the post as solved, it does not mean the thread is closed. This is different by moderation where :

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1458730&#1458730

The bug is not fixed (even 2 1/2 years later...), but the moderator considered at that time the thread to be close, and lock the thread.

You cannot rely on users to give an accurate rating, but is using only the post count a more accurate rating? Maybe we could have given only aces the right to mark answer as solved or helpful and to give points for best answers...

Nicolas Gasparotto said...

Laurent, of course you are right regarding closing thread. That's why I double-quotes the word close, I didn't say and actually don't think closing a thread is a good choice neither. It is not support wise, and if you want to add some comments to a closed thread, it won't be possible.
I didn't say neither that a counter of posts was better, but points are given so arbitrary !
Rather, I would suggest to remove every single "Top users" list from the forums, it is not a competition.
Lastly, and not at least, "close" thread and "points" are not the only problems on the forums side.
From now, I stop totally my participation there, and to avoid any temptations, my wife changed the password which I don't know.
:-)

Laurent Schneider said...

=)) this is too much funny!!!

I could not do the same since a support guru hijacked my Siebel account last year and since then I have limited functionality (changing password is one of the function that does not work for me)...

Well, the "Top Users" list changed a lot, I still can see Justin, but otherwise it is almost acefree !

Nicolas Gasparotto said...

>I still can see Justin,
Yeah, Justin C. is really amazing !

>but otherwise it is almost acefree !
Just wondering why ? ;-)

Sidhu said...

Agreed ! Nobody seems to be taking care of the complaints. Old forums were way better in terms of looks & performance too. Just adding some fancy things, they screwed it up. I don't understand why Oracle doesn't switch to some piece of software used by OraFAQ. Its so light and simple and rocks performance wise also.