The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Discuss anything related to audio or music production.
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by login » Fri Dec 13, 2019 8:24 pm

The answer site was closed?

IMHO that site should have been monitored by Ableton Support, have a single guy dedicated to answering it, that's is the only way it was going to work, also that could serve for ableton to improve manual or make a troubleshooting guide.

jestermgee
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by jestermgee » Fri Dec 13, 2019 9:15 pm

Personally, I like the way the NI forum works. It is far more efficient than the company itself.

The main points that I feel help it actually do a good job at helping users fast and keeping users checking back:

- You can post images (even just copy/paste without having to upload) and embed video links to make it easier to offer screen grab assistance. I know how to post images for this board but still find it a chore to save an image to desktop, upload it to imagr, get the link and place it in, I rarely ever could be bothered.
- It's clean and fast to navigate with a lot of useful tools to find information.
- It has a good rating system to rate user posts as useful, unhelpful, spammy, informative etc which can really assist at marking users that are helpful or just trolls. This also makes it fast to find threads that have a good chance of having the info you need if there are a lot of thumbs up for instance.
- You can easily ping moderators (and actually see who they are) if it's warranted for threads

In addition to that it would be VERY handy to have the forum tied to a users version of Live as part of their "specs" profile for instance./ This should be automatic from their user account so you can quickly see what version they have or if they are using a trial, lite or "no version at all".

Answers was never going to work if it was not monitored. The reason forums still work is because of a lot of users that are probably like me who just have an ongoing interest to keep up to date with what is happening and use the Forum not only to share the info they have gained over decades, but to also pick up on what the current issues and suggestions are. I tend to drop in and out a few times a day for some lite reading and I know there are always these users around that can help some of the very new users out from time to time. The "Answers" approach just does not allow for fast skimming of posts that are relevant and this point was made way back when the User section was closed that it would never work.

TLDR: The forum as it is just isn't inviting for new players at all because it's old tech in a new world. It needs to be clean, engaging and easy to use so users feel like coming back even when their question was answered.

Angstrom
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by Angstrom » Sat Dec 14, 2019 2:28 pm

Forums are obviously flawed for a corporate community engagement tool.
"Answers" / Quora solutions are also flawed.

I think an improved solution (wishlist) would reflect what Ableton, and Ableton customers might actually benefit from.
That means: Ableton want to sell packs, engage with street teams, push potential users toward their CertifiedTrainers, events and purchases (from my observations)
Meanwhile: The Community members want to promote, engage, ask for advice, give advice, look like a cool dude,etc.

A sketchy wishlist of features for such a community support and engagement tool would include things like user profiles, ableton Blog integration to "focus on member/ Certified trainer" , threaded discussions, tagged topics, solid search. Community events. Wiki functionality for common questions, edited by MVP (mods). Integration.

Forums aren't great for this, but if Ableton want to capitalise on their massive community and street-team presence they should integrate the community more, not hope that Reddit or Facebook will magically do a good job. Community will make them money, if managed right.

If I put it in real terms. (Or make it all about me)
Right now I wont ever go to one of their Ableton events. Why? I don't really feel like part of the target demographic. I don't feel like part of the Ableton Community.
Surely, that's wrong?
Naturally 80% of the problem there is me, but if I were Ableton I'd see users like me and see an opportunity to be capitalised on.

The community is not actively engaged with, or maintained.

chapelier fou
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by chapelier fou » Sat Dec 14, 2019 4:44 pm

I personally like the clarity of the lines forum (https://llllllll.co).
It automatically searches for similar topics when you create one, which can be very useful to reduce the amount topics around the same question. And I believe this is quite common in "help" topics.
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Angstrom
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by Angstrom » Sat Dec 14, 2019 4:57 pm

chapelier fou wrote:
Sat Dec 14, 2019 4:44 pm
I personally like the clarity of the lines forum (https://llllllll.co).
It automatically searches for similar topics when you create one, which can be very useful to reduce the amount topics around the same question. And I believe this is quite common in "help" topics.
I think that's this :
https://github.com/discourse/discourse

siliconarc
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by siliconarc » Sat Dec 14, 2019 6:30 pm

www.elektronauts.se uses it too - it's great

rish
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by rish » Wed Apr 07, 2021 2:50 pm

Sorry to revive this thread but yes, all of those run on Discourse! Even more communities that moved to Discourse recently are Steinberg (https://forums.steinberg.net), Neural DSP (https://unity.neuraldsp.com) and Waves (https://forum.waves.com) :mrgreen:

Disclaimer: I work at Discourse but I'm an Ableton fan first (Got Live 10 a couple years ago, 11 and a Push this year). If anyone here or from the mod team has questions about a possible migration, please reach out! At discourse.org, we offer hosting options and handle quick and easy migrations from external platforms just like this one.

stringtapper
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by stringtapper » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:29 pm

Whatever Émilie at Mutable Instruments is using for her forum is what I consider to be a modern forum format (unlike this place).

https://forum.mutable-instruments.net
Unsound Designer

stringtapper
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Re: The Forum needs a new subforum: "Help & Troubleshooting"

Post by stringtapper » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:29 pm

stringtapper wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:29 pm
Whatever Émilie at Mutable Instruments is using for her forum is what I consider to be a modern forum format (unlike this place).

https://forum.mutable-instruments.net
Edit: looks like it's Discourse.
Unsound Designer

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