Hey Admin - How About Some More Categories

[Andy Schmidt]

Hi there,

I spent the last few weeks trying to find answers to issues I encountered and realized that my problems were not at all unique - but that it took a whole night of going through old (unrelated) posts to see reports/solutions posted by others - or to realize that my issue may have been reported before and a solution is still outstanding.

The problem is that the majority of board messages (3,000 of them) are crammed into ONE category.

May I suggest that you consider creating a few "categories" so that it will be easier to find relevant information from prior conversations, e.g.:

- PSTN lines (incl FXO gateways)
- ATAs / FXS gateways
- VOIP accounts
- Digital Receptionist and VoiceMail
- 3CX Phone System General

 

[RobLloyd]

There should be an FAQ or stickys that someone with admin level can change and keep updated. Yes there are a lot of repeats - firewall, OS issues, adapters, phones etc.

I would volunteer as that admin if 3CX doesn't have the resources. :mrgreen:

 

[Andy Schmidt]

Hi,

Yes, I think stickies can help somewhat. But I still think we need more categories. Look at the current category list:

- 3CX Product and Company Announcements and Hotfices (93 posts)
- 3CX Phone System General (18,500 posts)
- 3CX Softphone / VOIP Client (591 posts)
- Forum for Specialist, Export, VP members (672 posts)
- Feature Requests (1,133 posts)

It's plain obvious to me that the 18,500 posts in the "catch-all" category "3CX Phone System General" are nothing but a huge black hole where uncategorized information disappears forever. If those 18,000 posts were split over more categories (like the ones I suggested), everyone would be 5 times faster and more likely successful to benefit from previously posted information in the same category.

Also, the support staff would be 5 times LESS likely to have to respond to the same question over and over - if the previous q/a was categorized properly.

 

[RobLloyd]

It would help if people used the search function too

Hi,

Yes, I think stickies can help somewhat. But I still think we need more categories. Look at the current category list:
Also, the support staff would be 5 times LESS likely to have to respond to the same question over and over - if the previous q/a was categorized properly.

 

[N_G]

Hi,

I don't think adding categories will make the forums more useful - we recently actually removed a category because there are many questions that dont fall into a particular category and many categories make it more difficult to review and maintain. The search function allows you to find pretty much any post.

We place frequently asked questions in the "FAQ" section of our website.

We would welcome any suggestions that users might have for FAQs - and if you have the answer ready as well then even better

You mention in your post that it would be easier for support staff to find. Just to be clear - this is not the place where we provide official support. This is done through our support system - available to those with a support contract. I mention this because sometimes there is confusion in regards to the level of support we provide.

 

[Andy Schmidt]

It would help if people used the search function too

Well the search on this forum is mostly worthless. Whenever I tried to search on certain terms, no matter HOW MANY I combine, I get a message that my search is too common. Example:

"external internal line provider pstn voip" with the option that 'all' must be present

Tells me that it's too generic!

Come on, how many message are there that have ALL these words. It's clearly broken.

 

[demonofsteel]

I agree with you Andy, most of the time, when I search for something, 3 situations can apply for me...

1. Search is too comon.
2. Too many results and non relative results.
3. No results at all.

Well, the 3rd isue can be normal is nobody posted about what I asked, but the 2 others are painful. It's hard finding what I want, but I must admit that in some cases, it's normal that the search tells you this... There's way too many posts out there with comon words like "line", "voip", "sip", "pstn", "internal", "external", "3cx", "server", "client" and the list goes on...

This week I wanted to get a list of VoIP providers, but what do you think the search "voip providers" resulted in? 1. Search is too comon, and I never managed to get a single result for this search, so I went through the forums looking for what I wanted, took a lot of time... This is where more categories would have been better.

Yes I agree for the fact that people could use the search function, yes I agree that the search function is not the best, but I must admit that it's a bit normal due to the amount of similar topics that are already posted here.

 

[Andy Schmidt]

I must admit that in some cases, it's normal that the search tells you this... There's way too many posts out there with comon words like "line", "voip", "sip", "pstn", "internal", "external", "3cx", "server", "client"

I think you may have overlooked that my search (in the advanced options) specified that I wanted to find ONLY messages were ALL words appeared.

Now, while I realize that too many message have the word "voip" or the word "line", or the word "internal", etc. - I bet you there are FEW messages that contained ALL my words. So , once I choose the 'AND' condition, it should not longer worry whether individual words are "too common"!

 

[N_G]

Do you expect us to recode the search function in PHPbb forums or something? It works fine for me. We also have another search function, provided for by Google, you can find it at the top of this page
http://www.3cx.com/support/

I should think this should cater for your search needs.

 

[Andy Schmidt]

Hi Nick:

I do run several Webboard systems. No, I don't recode any functions for those either.

Here's what I suggest:

a) You could include the Google search link on your vBulletin pages (I actually was looking for it and couldn't remember where I had seen it).

b) When one of my users reports an issue, I open a case with whatever vendor of the web board system.
In this case, I would report the specific issue to vBulletin for THEM to recode the function. I'm sure your board is not the only active one where important terminologies will obvioulsy repeat frequently and where users would need to be able to search for COMBINATIONS of these words. While the individual words are too common, their specific combination might only yield 50 records, which consequently should be displayed.
I doesn't make sense for a WebBoard for a VOID PBX to not allow searching for VOIO and PBX terminology.

Best Regards,
Andy

 

[coelhopsi]

Another problem I have with the current search is that I cannot do a search for exact phrases. A search for "more categories" would show all the posts that contain "more" and also "categories", but not only those posts that contain this exact sentence. Probably the Google search would be able to address this concern, so as Andy suggested:

a) You could include the Google search link on your vBulletin pages (I actually was looking for it and couldn't remember where I had seen it).

 

[N_G]

Agreed, i'll try to find a place where to put such a string, but i try to keep the phpbb as standard as possible....

 

[Andy Schmidt]

keep the phpbb as standard as possible....

Uh, okay, that explains it then. phpbb is notorious (for years) for having a terrible search engine. If I recall correctly, it looks in what percentage of messages a word appears and then makes it a stop word (as "too common"). Consequently, if a visitor tries to combine several of these words into a combination that does NOT have a high occurrence rate, then phpbb will be of no use, because none of these words are even in the index.

Yes, unless someone added a "good" search to phpbb, it may be necessary for you to offer alternate search options (such as Google) for the board to be at all useful as a "back-reference".