Please Read: NI Discussion Forums Maintenance

[Laura F.]

Hello Everyone,

In my discussions with Lithium (our forum vendor) regarding performance, they have suggested some maintenance on the forums that could help with our community's performance. 

The maintenance is to "trim" subscriptions and floats (floated threads and boards) for all users in the community.  This means that if you added a message subscription or floated a thread more than 3 months ago, we would remove the subscription and/or float for you.  In long-standing communities like ours, users can build up many subscriptions and floats that can affect the performance of the entire community. 

In order to keep the floats and subscriptions that are important to you, you just need to unfloat and re-float the thread, or remove and add the message to your subscriptions again because they will then be newer than 3 months.

I must stress that there is no guarantee that this will have a noticeable benefit for performance, but Lithium has recommended that we try this because it has helped other communities in the past. 

I would like to perform this maintenance as soon as possible, but I recognize that it is the holiday season and we must give people adequate notice to take any action they find necessary.  Therefore, we will do this maintenance the week of January 7th, specifically either Tuesday January 8th or Thursday January 10th.  I will post the specific day after the new year.

Please post any questions or concerns you have to this thread on the Feedback board.

Regards,

Laura

Web Support & Operations

National Instruments

Message Edited by Laura F. on 12-21-2007 11:00 AM

[Matthew_Williams]

Hi Laura.  Thanks for the notice of the changes.  I'd like to make some comments:

1) The real value to me of subscriptions is that they provide a way for me to monitor interesting threads
without requiring me to remember them or read every message posted to all threads.  I get messages on only new
threads or subscriptions, so this saves me a lot of time.  Having a subscription silently deleted after 3
months would significantly reduce their utility to me.

2) As an alternative, could you move 'stale' subscriptions to my bookmarks, maybe in a
sub-heading of 'stale subscriptions' or something similar?  This way I don't permanently lose
track of something.

3) Instead of 3 months after subscription, could you make it 3 months (12 would be better) after
the last post?

4) When a subscription is to be deleted or moved, could you send an email 7 days prior with a link
to keep the change from happening?  From a practical perspective, there is no way a user can
be expected to 'refresh' all of their subscriptions without prompting.

The forum is a tremendous resource, and I think silently deleting bread crumbs that users
have set to help them find things they have identified as important is a very bad idea.  I
have had no forum performance complaints, but maybe I don't use it the same way as
others.

Thanks for all the hard work keeping things on track.

Matt

[TCPlomp]

I offer an alternative:
RSS
For the heavy subscription users this is might be drastic shift in workflow, but as LabVIEW users we are used to that.

In my RSS reader (newsfox for Firefox) I have a group called 'discussions' where I have feeds from discussions I'm interested in.
Every thread has it's own RSS feed so you easily follow them.
Besided Discussions I also have trackers feeded through RSS.

Ton

PS This was only stickied to the LabVIEW forum, DIADem users don't use stickies?
PPS Most RSS readers check every thread regurarly, might this be the cause of the slow down now RSS is gaining momentum?

[Laura F.]

Hi Everyone,

Let's continue this conversation in the thread on the feedback board so that everyone can see it.

Thanks!
Laura