Opinion about the Website

While BE Communities offers much more content than Usenet, I find the Forums are far less convenient for accessing and monitoring content of interest. A newsreader allows us to quickly browse the content of forums by picking a forum in the list and seeing the posts list in a seperate window for immediate review. Any flagged topics are highlighted and easy to isolate and review. Reading the threads under a topic are easier to review since replies to a particular comment can be placed under the comment in the comments tree. While I don't expect we will return to Usenet, at least it would be helpful if some of it's advantages could be implemented here.

A couple of suggestions I would like to see implemented are:

1) A forums browser with list of content like a News Reader. Currently we have to jump into a web page to view the posts to a forum and back out to access a different forum. This results in lots of waiting for pages to reload. Content is much less accessible.

2) The ability to tag topics of interest and be able to filter them and have them highlighted when browsing posts. I am aware of the ability to list topics I have posted to but the list does not include topics I want to follow even though I made no comments. Email subscription to a forum results in constant emails which become a distraction and a nuisance. Subscribing to individual threads is cumbersome since we have to access email to see if any topics have been updated.

3) Thread trees. Sometimes a thread develops sub-threads that are off topic or I may wish to reply to a particular comment in a thread. Currently we have to read every comment in a thread to find the context of interest and sometimes the the context of  a comment can be hard to discern when it is directed to an earlier comment in the thread.
  • Thanks for the feedback. We are looking into making the Web interface "mimic" some things that newsreaders provide (at least for the Forums), some are in current releases of the software that is being used for Be Communities and some can be implemented, but since there are differences in the way that NNTP clients and Web browsers work, there are some things that you can do with one that you cannot do with the other. That said, there are other technologies that the site supports (especially RSS) that provide similar capabilities as what a "newsreader" can, it is just in a different implementation. .

      

  • Thanks for replying Phil. 

    Having little experience with RSS feeds, can you elaborate how they can mimic the newsreader capabilities mentioned in my original post?

    Neil Wilson (aka Neilw)

    Power Civil v8i 08.11.07.245

    AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018

  • Sure... if you have not yet, you might want to look in the Getting Started wiki article, where there is a pretty good section on RSS.

      

  • I only have this to say "Anything Bentley has involvement in is not user friendly." I find the site has no easy helps to get a person wanting to understand microstation better any general help. Everything is designed to make a person take more classes.

     No wonder I like autodesk better, at least they do not block groups from teaching each other on how to use the software.

    yes I noticed how the communities are pulled into this site then nop information can then be found.

     

  • Everything? Really? Maybe you should actually take a look at the actual content of what is accessible from this site first. Will it ever replace dedicated and focused training -- nope, it is unlikely that anything will ever to do that. However, there is plenty of quality information here -- and plenty more coming. If you are having difficulty finding something, you might want to consider asking questions -- that's a good way to find out how much (and good) this community helps each other out.