Overheard from the MVPS: More specific Feedback on Forums and Other channels

This is the last of the notes i took at the Summit that I was able to actually write down. 

On Forums…

“After posting an answer to a question there should be a link that goes directly back to a the filtered “unanswered” page you started from instead of just back to the forum. “

I think this is just a simple workflow tweak that could be provided in new forum UI.

“How do you know which answer is the best answer if there are multiple answers in a thread”

This goes back to a large debate over answer quality. Not all answers are equal. Lately I’ve liked what yahoo answers does here to show the rating directly with each reply about how good the answer was and then bubbling up the top answer next to the question. Check them out and let me know what you think.

“Be transparent about all moderation”

Yup, that’s on deck. We want the community to be able to police itself and call out users that may be abusing moderation rights.

On Other Channels…

“lots of teams used to do technical chats, but it doesn’t feel like they do anymore?”

This was something that team’s used to self organize and it appears that the investment here really has dropped in the last year. What do you think is a good schedule for product teams to do chats? What sort of topics would you like to see covered? No promises, but I can add some pressure to get more chats on the schedule.

And the related “The web chat control is really flaky”.

“We like webcasts best since they are the most well produced and includes slides, downloadable sample code, etc.

“pages on MSDN shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load when we hit F1 because you’re waitng for a tree view to load that we don’t need”

I talked to folks in MSDN about this and it was recently fixed. Library topics will render first and the tree control will render afterwards. J