Improving Groups

Hello PP team,

I was wondering if you might look at adding a simple 5 star rating mechanism to each forum post / article.

About 5% of all community posts are worth reading in full, but the daunting task of wading through the other 95% of general noise commentary looking for these nuggets means I don't visit the forums much anymore.

The frustrating part is that I know many other readers have already performed this laborious filtering task ahead of me and could have left a set of ratings behind them as they trolled.

These ratings would leverage the community in aggregate, allowing the cream to naturally rise to the top as well as simultaneously providing a real time pulse for the community when it comes to various ideas.

Regards,

FreeX40

Man, I hope I'm not the only one feeling this way, but if so, so be it.  I am lost on the new site(s).  Even though I visit and spend at least an hour a day on PP and RL, I haven't got a grasp on navigating the sites.  It seems I just guess at where I want to be and start clicking things.  It seems to take me many tries to find a previously viewed conversation.  Very frustrating.  I pretty much had mastery of the old site, but this new site has me flummoxed.  Is there a navigation chart or primer for the site?  Thanks for starting this conversation Adam, I've been holding this in for a long time.  Aloha, Steve.

I've given this a bit more thought, I think the problem may be us old farts who view things hierarchical like the old forums.  You had a forum, then you had topic within a forum, and posts about that topic.  The equivalent in the new system is Group, Discussion, Comments.  However, the new system does a "Facebook" style display where you have a single page that blends content from below together.  For example the "My Account, profile" or the "Group, mygroup, select group" pages.  I personally find that display method very very confusing.  I know that the system allows both methods/styles of displaying information and intermingles them.  I think that is where most of your confusion originates.

Perhaps a poll or look at the logs to see how people view content.  Do many people use the "My Account, profile" page?  Or do they do like I do and simply click on the "new" links on the front page or use the "MyAccount, history" tab?  I think if you look at my recent comments, they are centered around enhancing the "hierarchical" paradigm so that it more closely resembles the old forum system.

Adam + Chris-

What rhrare and thatchmo said.! I am not comfortable on the new site (re, navigation and layout do not seem intuitive to me, even after this amount of time).  I think the concept of a separate "Prosper" and "Prepare' page are fine.  But overall, I do not feel comfortable or grounded on the site anymore.  Maybe rhrare has it figured out, per his comments above.  

Also, some pages -particularly the home page for both the "Prepare" and "Prosper" sections, just have way too much stuff on them (my opinion).  I find the crowd of topics in rows and columns confusing, each with something different going on.  Too much.  I know there had been concern, when doing the redesign for the site, about using the real estate on the pafe more effectively (making more/better use of the space).  But I think what has happened is that more is on the page, but at the cost of being less effective (less clear, less intuitive). Maybe it is an old fart thing (with me being the OF)!

I tried to go to other sites that I still feel comfortable in, to figure out "what was different" on theirs vs PP.com.  One thing I see at sites like ZH is that the page has ONE main focus.  You might have links to other good stuff in a narrower column on the left, and something else in a narrower column on the right.  But the overall feel is very intuitive: you see an article summary in front of you, and scroll down to see other article summaries below it.  Very simple, very straightforward,and very intuitive.  I feel "grounded".

I love the content on the site, and was also very hesitant to say anything, and come off as sounding critical.  But I was happy to find a place (the Test Kitchen) where some of the posters I know had already started giving constructive feedback, and where I felt more comfortable (and welcomed) to do so.

Best as always,

pinecarr

Children enjoy chaos and excitement and go out of their way to create them.  As we get older, with pressing responsibilities and limited time, we value order that lets us quickly find and evaluate information.  We have to make judgments and decisions, and need to “cut to the chase”.  Years of experience have taught us this, often at painful costs.  We should always be open to new ideas.  But there is no need to apologize for having obtained maturity and a bit of wisdom.  And no need to encourage things that make our tasks harder.

Travlin

Hello Adam and Chris,

Yeah, what they said. (Safewrite, OliveoilGuy, rhare, thatchmo, etc.) Guess that puts me squarely in the camp of  'old people', but the issue of time required to find and read relevant comments/discussions while suffering through cognitive dissonance around my perceived confusion makes this site not feel user-friendly anymore (and I freely admit I do not "do" social media sites, so this may play into how I navigate).

There is value to community, though, and the "community" of this site has been as valuable to me, if not more so, than the information I rely on everyday here. (Play a few bars of the old Mastercard commercial..."Information, costly but worth it--Community, priceless!")

Having said that, I continue to rely on this site and you all, and each and every member here to contribute to what I process, which leads me to either make some sense of this crazy world or dance in the bliss of shared insanity in reaction to it!

cheers all,

juli

I would prefer to simply have the comments in the order they were entered with the ones that I have not read marked as new and a way to jump to the first new comment in a thread.

I also do not like the concept of contributing content to the group discussions and then having the content locked down and available only to paying customers.  It is one thing to pay for content written by Chris and guest bloggers, but it is another to pay for reading your own content and content shared by other normal forum members.

The Enrolled Members forum is OK since it gives paying customers a place to post without risking noise from the general public, but the point is that putting content in there or not is a decision made by the poster.  I suppose we could also decide to put everything on the threads in the General Discussion section but that seems extreme to have to opt out of the groups section completely.

I don't want to have to read the popular posts twice as I go down the page.. once at the top, and again in the natural time order.  It's fine to have the popular posts at the bottom of the home page to allow them to bubble up that way.. and like others have said, I can see the popularity ratings as I go down the page and hence get a sense of how the community is receiving them...  

I guess I am in the old folks category.

How I navigated the old site:

Check for new content.
Check for new posts several times a day (maybe).
Check the DD.
Check out a couple of forums.
Sometimes searched for posts with usually little luck.  Searches were usually a bust.

Left feeling time was well spent.

..

How I navigate the new site:

Check for new content.
Look for new posts (when clicked do not seem to always go to the indicated post).
Usually forget to check DD since all articles are not shown and main page is so busy.

Usually do not check groups.  Seems to be another layer away.
Get frustrated and go elsewhere.

..

Additional comments:

Groups seem to get in the way.  I do not seem to navigate to/through them easily.
Popular comments in forums/groups/whatever are really a pain.  
Popular comments on main page is a waste of space.  Would rather have the DD titles by 100X.
Probably defeats the idea of groups, but would like to have the option of increasing the number of new comments displayed (from the main page).  I find that I end up looking at the headers and looking for members names that I know that post worthwhile reads.

Really need to have a guide to suggest how the site is designed to be navigated.  Not - you can do this, you can do that, you can do this other, but here is a suggested path through the site.
Love the increased content, but navigating member's input has become a chore.  

I find that I am not as inclined to post as I was before, not sure why.  Perhaps it seems less interactive.

- Jim

I have removed this ite from my bookmarks and stop by once every month or 2. Used to be several times daily. Along with all the technical changes, the tone of the site has changed. 

Some times moving from piecemeal to production kills the product and the brand. Certain products just can't bear the load of becoming commercialized.

Good luck to all at CM, I hope you find the rudder control to right the ship. With all the feedback I have read this evening, if it is not apparent that there is a directional problem here, I'd say the sleuthing skills have become a bit numb.

I have posted this elsewhere, but am rather excited to have found "Unread Posts in My Groups", so I'll repeat it here.  Try

http://www.peakprosperity.com/groups/myunread

Really changed my viewpoint on navigation.  Wish the link were a button next to my inbox!

It did take some time to click-all-the-buttons and check all the menus and tabs until I got there though.  Not so intuitive.  Try it.

I wish there were something comparable for articles and voices.

- Jim

I have not spent much time trying to figure things out.. but my experience is this;

I am in PP and see a post I want to read along the bottom.. I click on it and get to the (obnoxious) screen  telling me that I will eventually be charged extra for this... then I click OK and sign in (again?).. then... then comes the frustrating part; I end up at some kind of JimH personal screen that has nothing to do with the post I originally wanted to see.. and I don't see anyway to get there.. so I go back out to Mozilla and reload the main PP page.. THEN, and only then am I allowed to click on the post and get to it.    

I like this change.  Still looking for the most efficient way to navigate the site, but this may help.

- Jim