Site bug report and possible improvement

In addition to my previous response (any thoughts on those? What underlying forum software are you using?), there appears to be no way to monitor / subscribe to forums (so as to get notification of new posts, etc., in normal or digest form).

Is there any way to do this (you can on the SourceForge-based ones)? Very important functionality for regular users/developers IMO.

Stuart

Profile Complete says only 77%, why? I filled out everything..

Mark L
stud indicator by poker calculator

I'm confused by the forums functionality:

1. You can add posts at any point in the thread (by replying to a particular post), thus messing up the chronological order and making the flow of the discussion very difficult to discern and apparently non-sensical.

(In other sites, such as Slashdot, you can reply to other people's posts specifically, but they then appear as nested posts expandable from the one they reply to.)

Plus (as this post shows), using the overall thread Post button at the bottom puts everything in reverse chronological order (newest at the top). This is the opposite of the norm (but see point 2).

2. There are the vote up/down arrows (looks like all registered users can vote up and down existing posts). This suggests the forum is trying to be a question and "best answer" style forum, like (the excellent) Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com), but nothing else about it is consistent with this. (In this context, it might make sense to have the newest at the top, so that users can vote on them and thus move them to their "correct-place-on-merit", but I don't think this is the norm.)

Some decision potentially needs to be made on what the forum is trying to be, and what then to allow/restrict. Maybe I'm missing some new forum paradigm or something(?), but I've not seen anything like this before.

3. You can also have a subject per post (like this one!), which defaults to the first few words of the post. To me, this just serves to confuse the threads (at least have no subject if the user doesn't explicitly enter one, since it typically ends up being some banal selection of words like "I think that", which just draws attention away from the content). Again, am I missing some new forum paradigm or something?

Great job! Thanks Jessica.
 
Below are my comments. Should you need more explanation, please let be free to contact me.
 
Cheers
 
Marie.
 
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• One might expect to get same behaviour from each menu item: for instance, clicking on "RESEARCH" takes the user to a list of items. I expected that, because when the mouse was on the top of the button I got the menu. The web site behaves differently when clicking on SOFTWARE: it leads to a page that contains information on the actual software, not on DOCUMENTATION or EXAMPLES as announced in the menu.... 
• When the window displayed by the browser (firefox) is not wide enough, the button "About Yawl" in the top menu is splitted in 2 parts. If I make it even less wide I get the sliding bar at the bottom, then it is OK.

• Menu item SOFTWARE

1. Home » Software Documentation: document names are not clickable
2. if you think that many documents will be made accessible here, would be better to organise the page with anchors and links "back to top"

• Home » Examples

1. - id. above

• Menu item "RESEARCH"

1. - As the buttons CONFIGURATION and DECLARATIVE WORKFLOW are links to other web site, shouldn't they open another window?

• Menu item RESOURCES

1. Home » Resources
2. Page is empty that would make the reader sad.. :-)

• Home » Tutorials

1. Page is empty... display all tutorials selected by the query expressed in the dialog box at the right? a name to this box should help...

• Menu item PUBLICATIONS

1. Home » Publications: As the list is long, could we propose various ways to obtain the publications: all, for a year, for an author, for a topic, etc.
2. Home » Citations: It is not clear whether the list of publications is actually a list of papers where YAWL is cited. Embed google scholar instead of giving a list?

• Menu item SUPPORT

1. - open WIKI in another window?
2. - FAQ: list of questions, each of which being a link to the answer

• Button "Contributors"it leads to a pdf document: it's not obvious what it is all about..