| Quote from: chesterfield |
It seems like posting is down, the integration with the portal is gone for good and the feel of having the comunity within a single portal page is now truly lost. This may as well be a discussion board like any other, and not part of the ISP pages at all.
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I just wanted to say that we haven't been ignoring this thread Chesterfield. In fact you sparked quite a robust internal debate and we certainly do see where you are coming from on this one.
I know I have explained our reasons for keeping the community site seperate from the Member Centre previously so I will try not to go over old ground too much here. Just to recap though:
- The community site brings together users from all of our brands, not just Plus.net customers. In the longer term we plan for the community site to become an even wider resource for the UK Broadband community as well as our own customers. That philosophy isn't nearly as practical if the site is embedded into our member centre.
- The community site runs on different hardware to our portal and is deliberatly seperated on the network. This is for two key reasons; security and redundancy. With the previous integration you will know we had various problems we wanted to solve in these areas. Now, nothing that happens on our portal (eg overnight maintenance or performance issues) can impact the community site. Even in the event that the third party software we use for the forums was compromised (Which is less likely now anyway because the seperation means we can keep the software bang up to date) we can be certain that there is no route back to any of our core customer data.
- We wanted to keep the community site codebase completely seperate from our main portal because that means we can use different development resources (eg outsourced or contracted developers and even customers where appropriate). Testing is also much easier now as we don't have to worry about what impact any change might have on other systems, as we do with any change to our portal functionality.
Anyway, you knew all that already and I know we have discussed it at length before. What you might not have seen yet however is the roadmap for the community site, which is
here. This shows the technical improvements and features we plan to introduce to the community site over the next year or so. There will soon be another document published which will explain the strategy behind those items and will also give the community as a whole the opportunity to feedback and steer where this ends up going.
As I say though, we do understand your point and we certainly don't disagree that we would like it to be easier to get back to other relevant pages from within the community site. On the basis of that feedback we have agreed to add another item to the roadmap. This will be a tool which lets you add your own quick links to every page of the community site. As such, if you want a link back to a specific part the member centre you will be able to add it to your own community site profile and always have that easy access. I hope that will provide what you are looking for, but if not let us know here (Or my commenting on the roadmap) and we can take another look. Tam is looking now to see where that best fits in in terms of the schedule and priority of our other items - hopefully it won't be a massive job, but it will need to wait for the new skins and front page to be rolled out.
On a final note, with an average of 124 new posts a day (And rising fast as this includes the period when the site was in beta testing) this forum is certainly busier than the old portal forums were. What's more striking though is how many more people are reading the boards (Which I suppose is to be expected now that anyone can see them and they are archived by Google). At some point I will try and share more stats, but please do take my word for it that number of postings and especially number of readers are up now on what they were for the old portal forums.
Kind Regards,
Ian
