More Information on the MSDN Forums Beta
Update: Check out the new forums welcome post.
Word is starting to get around about the MSDN Forums Beta. I guess I should jump in as well. I helped drive the project from the Developer Division side of things, but we wouldn't have anything to talk about if it weren't for the MSCOM Community team that has been working like mad to get this site ready to support Whidbey Beta 2 customers. If you've been a long time reader of my blog you might have been able to guess we were working on something like this. I've had fun playing with the beta and re-reading some of these discussions...
- Updated Threaded Discussion Opinion Result Tally... Still Do Nothing?
- Threaded Discussion Opinion Result Tally... Do Nothing?
- Choices Choices Choices for Whidbey Beta 1 Discussions
- The more I think about it... NNTP Doesn't Cut It
- MVP Summit Views and Issues with Threaded Discussions
- Brainstorming Results of Online Discussion Solutions
- Good Feedback on my Brainstorming
- Newsgroups, Web Forums, and ???
- Chris Sells on Posts and replies
I'm sure there were others, but these are the ones I had archived last summer. Now here is pretty much the mail we sent around internally today...
Today, answering questions online got a lot better: MSDN Forums Beta is now available at https://forums.microsoft.com/msdn !
MSDN Forums Beta allows customers to search a growing archive of technical questions and answers. If an answer can’t be found in search, a customer can ask a new question, be notified when there are replies, and mark the appropriate reply as an answer. Over time we’ll use this Q&A pairing to improve search, build a “hall of fame” of top contributors, and construct a community-maintained FAQ. We’re creating forums for Whidbey Beta2 technologies to start with, and will add more developer technologies soon. There are already people requesting DirectX forums!
How do I efficiently find questions needing answers... and answer them?
A big complaint today is that answering questions online—or even finding what questions are unanswered—is a hassle. MSDN Forums was designed to make things easy for answerers and site users in general. Some examples:
- Unanswered status tracking: The forums publicly expose whether questions are answered or not, which makes it easy for experts to find questions needing answers and askers to determine if they have received a good answer.
- Notifications: you can track threads and get email when someone responds to your post. You don’t have to keep checking back on a thread to see if you need to respond again.
- Unanswered Question Filter: Go to a forum and at the bottom of the page change the “View by Attribute” filter to “All Questions” and click Apply.
- RSS: Subscribe to your favorite forum’s RSS feed. From the default feed change the mode=0 to mode=1 to view only unanswered questions.
- View All Unanswered Questions: one page for all unanswered questions in all forums.
Forums are easier than Newsgroups for answering questions, but we (Microsoft) still have a responsibility to “jump-start” the forums with answers while the community is small.Beta2 adopterswilldepend on product team members to subscribe to forums and answer questions, especially for the first month or two after release. This stage of our community engagement is critical as we transition our product knowledge to a growing community of Visual Studio 2005 users.
Other cool forum features include:
- Moderation: Seen by our customers as stewards of successful technical communities; forum moderators (who could include, but are not limited to MVP’s and Microsofties) have the ability to edit posts, lock threads before they become flame wars, delete off-topic conversations, and eliminate duplicate entries into the FAQ system.
- Visual Studio Beta2 Integration:
- IDE help search also searches online forums—simply click the “Questions” tab
- There’s also a streamlined “ask a question” wizard available in one click from the VS help menu & toolbar
- Filtered search, so only results relevant to languages and technologies you specify will show up
- Advanced Search
- FAQ Views: To find the most-viewed questions pick a forum, go to the bottom of the page, and sort by Total Views in Descending order. You can also scope by date!
- And more…
That's all for now. I'll have more to say in the next few weeks about this. If you have feedback for the MSDN forums site please post it to the site feedback forums.
Comments
Anonymous
April 07, 2005
A new resources for all your .NET programming needs: MSDN Forums. Several Microsoft employees and MVPs are available to answer your development questions. (via Jim Glass) Josh Ledgard, a program manager working on the project, offers more information about the...Anonymous
April 07, 2005
When do we see this for IT Pros over on TechNet?Anonymous
April 07, 2005
Since MSDN Blogs are using Community Server, it seems odd that the new forums are using the old ASP.NET Forums 2.0 aka CS::Forums.
Are you planning on switching?Anonymous
April 08, 2005
The MSCOM Community Team has launched a spiffy new way for the developer community to find answers to...Anonymous
April 08, 2005
RE: IT Pros... We're working on this. I can't say anything for certain, but we are aware of the overlap and will be working on a plan to address the need.
RE CS::Forums: Lots of reasons. Timing had something to something to do with it. Feature requirements was another. There was actually a lot more dev work than you would have imagined with this project to ensure proper integration with other services at Microsoft like VS search integration, profile alignment with the Feedback center and MSDN home pages. And a couple other things that you won't notice right away. This system had a vastly different set of requirements than the blog engine.
I also answered this question on the forums. I like to think that MS has a good relationship with the Telligent folks and that we'll be partnering together more in the future.Anonymous
April 08, 2005
The comment has been removedAnonymous
April 08, 2005
Thanks for the comments betsy!Anonymous
April 10, 2005
Blog link of the week 14Anonymous
April 10, 2005
You take one day off and all sorts of stuff happens... Josh Ledgard has information on the new MSDN Forums...Anonymous
April 11, 2005
MSDN has a new web-based threaded discussion system in Beta called Microsoft Forums.  Josh Ledgard...Anonymous
April 19, 2005
Speaking of the forum, be sure to check out the Visual Studio Team Foundation forum.  Folks like...Anonymous
July 20, 2008
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June 16, 2009
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