Announcing the NI Idea Exchange!

[Laura F.]

Hi Everyone,

Lithium has promised significant improvements in the next version for the Idea Exchange.  I have not seen the next version yet. All of your suggestions have been sent along.

I hope to find out more about what our upgrade schedule could look like soon.  I will keep you posted.

Sorry I don't have more specifics - hopefully my next post will be more informative.

Thanks,

Laura

[RavensFan]

Here is an example of a lost comment.

I had 1 new comment I had yet to read.  I knew it was posted since this morning which was the last time I had gotten my new items down to 0.  I finally found this comment once I got to page 10! of the Hot Ideas sorting.

It was posted on 7/28 2:59 pm by GPIB Guru.  On the side listing is one newer comment by Altenbach at 3:21 pm.  Several more from 7/28 that occurred before GPIB Guru's.  Then into 7/26.

Where is GPIB Guru's?  It should show up 2nd on the list right after Altenbach.  But it doesn't show up at all.  And it takes a lot of searching before finding that new comment on page 10 of Hot Ideas.  It is on page 11 of Top Ideas and page 4 of New Ideas.

[tst]

Personally, I don't think we need "improvements" - Lithium already has a GUI for this kind of interaction which works perfectly well and has more features than the exchange GUI. Useful features, actually. Ones we need. All they had to do was use it.

Ravens, I simply gave up on the forums GUI and went for a combination of RSS and email notifications (which I described earlier). After setting up a filter in Gmail it works reasonably well.

[JackDunaway]

Like tst, I have subscribed and use gmail as my "new comment" notifier. Agreed with tst... why spend even MORE development time on a way inferior message board rather than implementing a mature scheme with the correct features? The Idea Exchange message board interface falls far short of NI's support quality.

[Laura F.]

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mechelecengr wrote:
Another usability note: often, when you reply to a thread, there is no option to insert links, bold, or italicize. I continually have to go back and edit my posts to format them correctly. Furter, perdiodically it strips my posts of carriage returns. I must edit them to properly add back in the returns.

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What browser are you using?  Does it happen every time you edit? Every time you post? It sounds like it is probably random.  I'd like to reproduce and report the issue so thanks for the additional information.

Regards,

Laura

[JackDunaway]

Laura,

Using IE 8.0.6001.1878.3

This link allows no editing options (bold, linking, italicize...) as shown in the screenshot below. I accessed it just minutes ago.

[RavensFan]

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tst wrote:

Ravens, I simply gave up on the forums GUI and went for a combination of RSS and email notifications (which I described earlier). After setting up a filter in Gmail it works reasonably well.

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Thanks Tst.  I had forgotten about e-mail notifications which I had turned off by default in my profile, and never thought about the option being present on the Ideas board.  It seems to be working pretty well after a day so far.  There haven't been too many messages to flood my inbox.

I tried messing around with RSS feeds on my IE8 at home.  I'm not really sure if it is working because I don't really understand it.  Is there some delay between when an idea is posted and when the RSS window shows it is there?  My e-mail shows 1 new message was created less than 10 minutes ago, but the button that takes me to the RSS windows shows the latest message has being 28 minutes ago.  It is not the newest one, but the one before that.

[tst]

I'm guessing the issue you're running into is that RSS only gives you the ideas, not the comments.

What I've actually done is set up three "readers" -

1. I have the RSS feed in Google Reader, which shows every new idea.
2. I have a filter in Gmail which deletes the new ideas automatically, since they already appeared in the RSS feed and the email subscription doesn't send the actual content of the post.
3. I have another filter which recognizes comments (they have "Re:" in the title) and automatically moves them to a separate folder, so that they don't clutter the inbox. Because Gmail threads by title, that means the all the emails for a specific idea appear together.

[RavensFan]

I'm using the RSS I got to by the little orange icon that is the right of the tabs on IE8.

I think there may be a setting in there that by default looks for updates only once per day (and would be changeable).  I think it got all new ideas and comments, (I'll have to look again tonight to see if it was just ideas or also comments were included, to be sure).  But the update (which was about 24 hours from when I set it up the night before may have just run and captured all the latest messages just a couple minutes before I went into it.  The newest message that had grown to a half hour old never showed up before I stopped for the night.  It may be because it will have to wait to the next 24 hour period to be up before it captures it.  I'll find out more tonight when I play around with it.

So far, I'm not impressed with RSS, or at least the way IE handles it.  The subscription to the thread and having it send the messages to my inbox is more reliable.  Using the right hand side of the Ideas Exchange screen is completely unreliable because not all new comments show up there.

[Laura F.]

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mechelecengr wrote:

Laura,

Using IE 8.0.6001.1878.3

This link allows no editing options (bold, linking, italicize...) as shown in the screenshot below. I accessed it just minutes ago.

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 Hi Everyone -

Is anyone else using IE8 and experiencing the same issue?

Thanks,

Laura