Thor Muller's dashboard

Thanks! Those are the ones.

Also, you're very funny.

eConsult Team, this is because you have the customization feature. You can customize your header any way you like in your admin section, including use of your logo. Let me know if you need assistance: thor at getsatisfaction.com. – Thor Muller, on February 07, 2010 17:18

If you've turned off notifications or stopped following a topic and are still receiving emails, it is because you have inadvertently created more than one account. Please check the recipient email address on the unwanted email notification and login with that email to manage its notifications (or close the account). Apologies for any confusion. – Thor Muller, on February 06, 2010 18:33

Thanks for the food for thought. We'll definitely keep this in mind as we implement additional updates to community management tools. – Thor Muller, on February 05, 2010 21:55

Great point. We will fix this in an upcoming update to the Management View. – Thor Muller, on February 05, 2010 21:55

Pat,
this concern you've expressed is exactly why we've avoided it to date. However, there's a natural tension between the quality of the information (which becomes more difficult as a community scales) and lack of community management tools. We crossed this rubicon long ago when we allowed for moderator removal of topics. However, when we did that we created a changelog and dispute mechanism that recorded all changes. This provides community managers the ability to curate a high signal to noise ratio, while providing transparency to all users in the use of the management tools.

In the case of closing a topic, a user may still create a new topic, so they aren't being silenced necessarily. It is more a function of organizing content in effective ways, and adjusting to how people use the site. The use case here is not about stopping discussing on a suggested idea (that would be rare, I'd think), and more about avoiding the confusion of new issues with fully resolved old ones.

One offset to your concern on a 'close' feature, though, could be to a.) prompt users to create a new topic where the reply box is, and b.) create a link to the new topic on the old topic. These could be listed as "related topics." This way there's still continuity between the concepts.

Finally, I'll just say that there are many places where people can say whatever they want, with no structure or accountability at all. We see Get Satisfaction's place as helping to create more useful and outcome-oriented community interaction, with our continued commitment to a balanced approach for both customers and organizations.

I was just about to comment about this when your comment got posted, Waleed. This is still planned, and here are my thoughts on the ideas discussed above:

1. "Archive" should be used liberally by moderators for topics that are not helpful to other users for one reason or another (e.g. they've been resolved). This tool removes topics from our search results, Google search, featured topic lists, and other activity feeds (note: currently archived topics fade off activity streams, they don't disappear immediately). This addresses the issue of signal-to-noise ratio when used well.

2. "Resolved topics": we plan on providing more explicit ways for authors of topics to express that the issue was resolved for them, and for answers to be highlighted more easily. While we may suggest that users start a new topic in these cases, resolution will not automatically close topics to new posts

3. "Close" topic: we agree that there are use cases where closing an issue to new topics makes sense. For instance, we've seen ourselves that people will too often append an out-of-date problem thread with a report of a new problem, and this is clearly not helpful. There are good reasons why a community may opt to never use such a tool, but we prefer to trust the judgement of the community managers to make this call themselves.

4. "Close topic to certain users, or official reps only": we don't have plans for this currently. It's an interesting use case, but so far is not one that we're focused on.

Items 2 and 3 are really important to us, and are part of initiatives we have planned over the coming few quarters. In the meantime, the archive tool should be a good stop-gap measure.

As always, thanks for the very thoughtful input.

The widget configurator provides this option, but essentially it adds the following parameter to the widget code:

feedback_widget_options.style = "problem";

thor at getsatisfaction.com – Thor Muller, on February 04, 2010 21:28

That is how it works. Is your implementation on a staging site? I just tried your live site and didn't see anything GS related in the code. If I can take a look at an example I can probably identify the issue very quickly.

It sounds like you've properly setup your external login URL, but have you added the Fastpass SCRIPT method to your login success page?

Also, you aren't calling the widget from an SSL page are you?

Any chance you could share the test Implementation with us? Your setup is the trickiest to debug. I'll probably be able to see the issue within a dew minutes.

Apologies for the trouble. We're preparing to release documentation that clears this up.

For SSL you need to set your own cookie since we don't have an ssl certificate for your domain. You can just set the cookie with the name of "fastpass", with the signed URL (using the URL fastpass method), on the domain ".mashport" so that other subdomains on your domain can read the cookie. That last part us very important.

There are examples of this for your language on the current fastpass documentation page at http://getsatisfaction.com/developers...

You have to use escape characters for the colon slash slash and the dots: http://www.getsatisfaction.com

colon (:) = :
slash (/) = /
dot (.) = /

This is rather annoying, and I hope to provide a better solution in the future, but that's the path for now.

Can you point me to an example? – Thor Muller, on February 02, 2010 20:15

You guys rock! Thanks for the quick turnaround time.

Apologies, I meant to update this topic. Our deploy was delayed slightly, but I hope to get this out today.

It's too hard to find, we know. You can get there by adding "/overheard" after your community URL (e.g. http://getsatisfaction.com/apple/over.... You can also open a drop-down menu by clicking the arrow next to the word "Community" in the subheader (right under your company name).