Improved Zotero forums plz

jazow

I love how Zotero has this forum; however, sometimes I find it a bit difficult to use (e.g., there are no categories, you can't vote on items, I don't think images are supported).

I would love a new forum that is easier to use and supports more features.

I use remnote to take linked notes of my research and create flashcards for things I want to remember, and their forum is quite user-friendly IMO. They have sections for features, bugs, tips and tricks, etc. They use an open-source platform called https://www.discourse.org for their forum. I think it is free if it is self-hosted.

What do others think of this meta post (i.e., a forum post to create a new place to post forum posts) ?

emilianoeheyns

I wonder whether a subreddit couldn't just replace these forums.

jazow

Potentially!

aborel

Forum categories have been dropped a few years ago if I remember correctly. Apparently they were more trouble than they were worth?

Voting: not interested.

Images could be useful, I agree with that one.

adamsmith

Yeah, the categories were a disaster with people posting multiple times because they were concerned they had posted in the wrong category. (And definitely no to voting...)

The lack of image and markdown support (e.g. having to manually type HTML for links & blockquotes) is by far my biggest annoyance.

I've also found that the search isn't great, so I tend to use google site search, but obviously people aren't necessarily aware of that. Migrating forums can be a pain, though, so I understand why Zotero is not excited to do this, and the forums do work reasonably well as they are.

jazow

Thanks for your input.

I also don't like the search.

Related, I would love better sorting of posts (e.g., time created, Amount of responses, views etc). I don't always like seeing what has been most recently posted/commented on.

@adamsmith maybe instead of categorising, tags would be better? There already seems to be an announcement tag; maybe a few more would be good (e.g., Feature idea, Feature types (PDF, Tagging, Collections, Search), Bug, support request, workflow ideas, solved).

I think this would make it a lot easier to find posts. For example, I have a feature request about PDFs but it is hard to see if anyone else has also posted the same idea. If we had a tag for PDFs, then this would be much easier to find.

Markdown support or a better text editor would be solid. For me, I miss dot points, bolden and images!

Also, why no to voting? I think it might help developers get a better sense of what is most requested. It also saves time for forum users; we can simply vote instead of commenting our support or not.

I think the ability to close or archive posts might be good too. For example, I post a feature request but realise there is a similar post or it turns out my feature request is solvable. This might reduce the number of posts and help people find useful posts. Could be done with a tag too.

aborel

"why no voting": apparently the developers do not see this as a useful way to collect feedback, so adding it to the forum would just cause frustration. See this thread for a second-hand comment along those lines:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/95056/can-users-affect-zotero-feature-prioritization

My guess is that they probably have more than enough items on their roadmap, and just indicating one's interest in one feature or another will have no effect until they run out of already planned things to do. And by then the desired feature might be obsolete anyway.

jazow

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that link.

DonnaCoxBaker

If we could help with tagging, that would be great. Our developers are working 24/7 already, or it sure seems that way. Their responsiveness on this forum amazes me. I can't imagine they'll ever have time to read back through old posts to flag what is obsolete or to think of new topic tags that might be helpful in other people finding information. But we users read the old stuff all the time and know what keywords might have led us there more easily. We're also often aware that something said in a post has since been taken care of.

I'd love to be able to flag PORTIONS of discussions because there can be awesome evergreen material and obsolete material in the same post. It will always be true in a product that is constantly evolving like this one.