Upgrade StorageSuggestion/question - improve the forums
The current Zotero forums are extremely bare-bones. They discourage extended discussions, and (imo) make it basically impossible to form an institutional memory about features, suggestions, and more, due to the lack of any kind of categorization, filtering, sorting, etc. Posts from users asking for help are right alongside feature requests, general comments, and everything else. This makes it essentially impossible to stay appraised of the community unless you check the forums hourly.
For a tool that has so many users for whom it is an essential part of their workflow (and may have been so for more than a decade), the lack of a place to spread and store knowledge is a huge missed opportunity.
There are countless good FOSS forum options out there. Why does Zotero not utilize one of these? Even the Github "issues" section is a better way to communicate with other users as-is.
The degree to which these forums are stripped down makes it seem like a conscious decision to encourage users to go elsewhere for everything but troubleshooting requests. However, I haven't been able to find where the "other place" is. I think even an official Discord channel would be an enormous step up from the current situation.
Has this been considered? If so, why was it not implemented?
For a tool that has so many users for whom it is an essential part of their workflow (and may have been so for more than a decade), the lack of a place to spread and store knowledge is a huge missed opportunity.
There are countless good FOSS forum options out there. Why does Zotero not utilize one of these? Even the Github "issues" section is a better way to communicate with other users as-is.
The degree to which these forums are stripped down makes it seem like a conscious decision to encourage users to go elsewhere for everything but troubleshooting requests. However, I haven't been able to find where the "other place" is. I think even an official Discord channel would be an enormous step up from the current situation.
Has this been considered? If so, why was it not implemented?
Categories, metadata, tags — those all just complicate things and require additional moderation time, because people frequently don't actually know whether what they're reporting is a bug, a feature that already exists, something that works differently from what they expect, etc. Just having categories was a mess, and it created more stress and work for everyone.
Beyond that, there've been 82,487 threads in these forums in the last 16.5 years, or 5,000 a year. Including comments, there've been 444,904 posts — that's 74 a day, every day, for the last 16.5 years. The idea that these forums "discourage extended discussion" or that they're designed to encourage people to go elsewhere is absurd. The core developers and long-time contributors are here literally every day discussing features and suggestions directly with users. From How Zotero Support Works: Generally, given that this is your first post here, I'd encourage you to actually participate in the forums before passing judgment on them. There are various technical things we plan to improve (Markdown support, images, featured answers, etc.), and we're happy to discuss other features, but the forums really do work pretty well.
I saw that discussion. Having not been around for very long I didn't see what the forums were like when they did have categories, but I don't really understand the argument that they were more trouble than they were worth. What made the Zotero forums so different that made that the case?
Because so many people come here for technical assistance who might not be familiar with how forums typically work, I could see them posting in a bunch of places. However, that seems to me like even more of a reason to segregate the forums into at least two categories: "support," and "discussion," which would slow the new posts feed down and give the discussion posts more time before they are pushed off the first page.
By "extended discussion," I didn't mean sheer quantity of posts - these forums are absolutely quite active. I was referring to the number of replies on any given post, and the continued discussion on a single post over a long period of time. Because there isn't a tool to sort by quantity of replies or likes (although I am not a big fan of likes), it's difficult to find the posts which in the past many people may have contributed to.
This seems like the crux of the problem to me. It means that you can't discover popular past threads that may have generated lots of great discussion, the ones where the really useful tips, tricks, workflow advice, plugin discussion, etc. are. They surely exist, but they are lost in the annals of forumhistory unless you know what you're looking for and/or are willing to go through a bunch of search pages to find it. This means most threads don't see comments more than a few days after they're posted.
This may well be another point where Zotero has intentionally deviated from the typically forum design. However, I think that posts which stay active for months and years are the best kind. It allows for the creation of a narrative, per se, as users participate over time, and results in very useful repositories of knowledge being neatly organized into a single coherent thread.
I have been lurking on these forums on and off for a few months now, and I still feel that I am "missing out" on a lot of knowledge about Zotero and its development simply by nature of not having been around for long enough to see these threads come and go.
I can see that the forums are excellent at helping people get support, report bugs, and get general questions answered in a timely manner. I just think that those purposes are only part of the job of a forum.
You want to do X in Zotero. Is the fact that you cannot
- a bug (because it should just work and doesn't for you)
- a documentation question (because this is already possible, you just need to know how)
- a feature request (because it really isn't possible)?
Again, that meant that relevant feature request debates ended up as bug requests and vice versa. I can't count the number of times we told people to just not worry about the category they posted under -- so yes, getting rid of categories was definitely the right thing to do, you'll have to trust those of use who have been there on that one. I think that's a reasonable point, but (and this isn't defensiveness: for the CSL project where I have a direct say on infrastructure, we're running a discourse forum) I don't think technology is an easy solution there. There are a fair number of threads that do extend over many years (see e.g. the one for the ODF-scan plugin I co-maintain) but I'm not actually sure that's been that much more helpful in getting people to find the relevant solutions or workflows on page 20 of 25 (say) of that thread.
A lot of workflows used to be spread via blogs & social media (and you can still find a fair amount of that, but of course blogs have declined in popularity and social media... oh well). Is there actually any complex, long-running software where you think that works? The FLOSS software I probably use most outside Zotero are Firefox and R/R-Studio, both supported by significantly larger organizations, but I wouldn't know how to find specific workflow recommendations beyond asking experts and google for those, either.
Some of the things that dstillman mentions as feature plans are major annoyances. Decent support for images and markdown would save a *lot* of time and the search is indeed mostly useless for anything older than 2 weeks (I use google site search whenever I'm looking for something further back -- that works reasonably well).
I think those things would definitely help streamline conversations and make them easier for both newcomers (the screenshots, esp.) and frequent writers (oh, please give me md), and would also make discovery a bit easier -- but even that latter point is a two-sided sword: we do already have a significant (inadvertent) thread-jacking issue here and dstillman spends a fair amount of time splitting off unrelated reports/requests/discussions from existing threads. Better search might ironically make that problem worse.
But, related to that, I think some of what @al987321 is asking for is actually an anti-pattern. There are significantly diminishing returns in long-running threads: they make finding relevant info very hard, almost no one actually reads them in full, they generate more notification noise for more people, they often don't stay on topic… Much better to isolate good answers that address the opening post and start new threads for new issues.
An aspect of the Zotero Forums that might not be obvious to a casual observer, particularly someone used to other forums, is the degree to which Zotero developers and a small handful of experts read literally every thread and participate in the vast majority of them, so there are just unequivocally correct answers, standard guidance, or official responses on most topics in a way that you wouldn't find in many other forums. The "institutional memory" is the people who've been making and supporting the software for years, and the documentation we've created in direct response to the forums. There are obviously still topics where there can be value in others sharing workflows, suggesting plugins, etc., particularly when it comes to interacting with other tools, but there's just a lot less of users needing to figure things out on their own here. (Yes, one thing very much on my wish list: a feature that automatically blocks posts to existing threads that contain the phrase "similar problem" or "similar issue". Letting OPs close threads might also help with that.)
* bringing active discussions into focus by putting them at the top of the list
* remember which threads have updates since last I visited
* turn off self-close of issues by users
without these it is nigh-on impossible to do support with a group of people. I have implemented a bot for GH issues that sort-of addresses the last two points, but it's still a major pain, and I don't have to coordinate with others who addresses what.
I'd very, very much welcome markdown on the forums though.
Thankfully I've avoided most of the sort of problems listed above, partly by accident, and partly by Zotero coming for me decades after boxes of handwritten index cards, followed by some reference storage system on a Vax mainframe that I don't remember, then Reference Manager (DOS), then Endnote. ;)
Ironically, the fact that the developers are so good at responding quickly to problems here means that other users are perhaps less likely to chime in with suggestions. So if there was a forum section that was not obviously for dealing with problems then there might be wider discussions from more people.
I also wonder if a plugins forum is necessary. Plugins are both a huge strength of Zotero as well as a common source of problems. While the source of some of the latter might not be obvious to the person who posts a problem symptom, such posts could easily be moved to a plugins forum when that becomes obvious. Likewise feature requests that can actually already be met by an existing plugin could be moved if not in the right place.
Good. Never change a running system.
Please change this running system. Maybe conservatively. But please do.
Beyond github issues are a good example or not, I would like to add another kind of forum example, which is stack overflow/exchange communities.
Beyond that, I believe two features could be added from a conservative point of view, that is, maintaining the current "moderation" system, so keeping the said by @dstillman in the last paragraphs of https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/432830/#Comment_432830
1. Mark some discussions as closed, I mean, those about bugs or features requests which already have been solved, respectively implemented. If something more about them has to be discussed, I think it should be in a new thread (in line with @dstillman "splitting off unrelated reports/requests/discussions").
2. Allow tags, which you should give no importance at all, so assuming there are no "wrong" tags at all. These could be editable are not, limited to a few predefined tags (like in SO for most of participants) or free, etc. I suggest this because I believe it is better (for searching) to have tags (with some maybe not the most suitable) than not having tags at all. They shouldn't been moderated at all (maybe here having only a collection of limited predefined tags to be used is suitable; ideally, this collection could be extended after proposal of new tags in the forum or through other media)
This would allow the user to more quickly see which threads matter, how many relevant threads there are, but also to more quickly be able to move between different potentially (ir-)relevant threads.
Very true. But if I'm new, I have no idea who to trust. Is this a Zotero dev or just a regular user offering some help? A badge to say this is a Zotero dev, experts, plugin dev would be helpful.
It's also hard to know if a message I'm reading has a reply somewhere below.
Also, if the forum has some structure, I think it would help moderation as well? As one mod would be in charge of this section of the forum, etc. and only tag others, if necessary. You can help more people instead of each of you having to read everything?