ILIAS open source Forums

Also beides zusammen scheint mir nicht zu funktionieren, resp. für den User nicht mehr verständlich zu sein.

Ich fasse die beiden Varianten nochmals zusammen:

(A) ILIAS wird in die Lage versetzt, sich für jeden einzelnen Beitrag zu merken, ob ein User diesen schon gelesen hat oder nicht. In diesem Fall würde "gelesen" heissen, der Beitragstitel wurde in der Baumansicht angecklickt, denn wie sonst kann ILIAS wissen, was gelesen wurde und was nicht.
Das Problem dabei: wenn der User in der "Sortierung nach Datum" von oben nach unten alles durch liesst, weiss ILIAS nicht, dass der User alles gelesen hat... daher die Idee, extra Links einzubauen, damit der User die Beiträge quasi abhaken kann.

(B) ILIAS merkt sich lediglich, wann ein User zuletzt ein Thema eines Forums angeklickt hat. Dies ermöglicht eine Anzeige: 'neue Beiträge', sogar eine Hervorhebung der entspr. Titel ist möglich.
Das Problem hierbei ist: wenn der User in das Thema rein klickt, aber nicht alle Beiträge lesen kann, dann weiss er später nicht mehr, wie weit er schon war.
Für Tutoren, und die sind wirklich wichtig im eLearning, hier kann man nicht einfach mit irgendwelchen Forenusern im Netz vergleichen, für Turoren also ist es sehr wichtig, dass sie viele Foren durcharbeiten können und nach Unterbrüchen den Faden wieder finden.

Somit spricht eben schon einiges für eine exakte Speicherung des Lesepfades. Ausser man würde eine Funktion einbauen, die einem eine Art Snapshoot (Momentaufnahme) eines Forums erlauben würde, anhand derer man den Zustand speichern könnte. Dies natürlich nur in Kombination mit Variante (B).

Grüsse, Jens

Hi Jens,



That's a common problem for everyone who reads many forums and uses them for a serious purpose.



On the other hand a user that has to read many forums would favour an automatic solution over a manual one. And the manual solution is only exact, if the user really marks exactly every read posting. A lot of work if you use many forums. I think users could cope with both concepts. But it would be helpful to get some other opinions on this issue.

Regards
Alex

Hi Jens,

I see the value for your suggestion (B). But I would like to get something even more sophisticated.

I very much in favor of convenient automatic marking of read/unread forum entries.

I suggest to add the following feature to the forum. It will help tutors and students to keep track of what they have done in the forum. Its a system based on color labels, as the one used on the Mac OS X operating system. It is very straightforward to use and very powerful.

Suggestion (C)
ILIAS keeps track of read/unread threads for each user.
In addition, every user can assign one out of 6 different color labels to an entry in a thread. The color labels have no special meaning to ILIAS, but they can be associated with a meaning by the system administrator.
Here are the 6 labels: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey, -no label-

Examples:
- A teacher who wishes to keep track of items she has read in the thread, can mark all read entries with Green.
- Or, she marks the first unread entry in the thread with Yellow.
- A student can use the colors in the same way or in a completely different way. e.g. a student marks important entries in a Thread with Yellow.

ILIAS could support two different types of color labels: Private Labels and Public Labels.
Public Labels would be visible to every user of a forum, Private Labels are visible only to the person, who made them.

Example:
- The teacher marks some forum entries with a Public Yellow Label and sends an e-mail to his students: Please read all Yellow entries.


What do you think?

Sorry: I meant 8 color labels.
Red + Orange + Yellow + Green + Blue + Purple + Grey + -no label- = 8

I try to give a solution for our read/unread/new posting problem:

A posting is either

(A) a readposting - following the cases Jens described - or
(B) an unread posting.

An unread posting could either be

(B1) a new and unread or
(B2) an old and unread posting.

Therefore postings could have three different stati that ILIAS should handle:

A. read
B1. new
B2. unread

The different ways of making a posting a read posting were already described by Jens. Are there any additional comments to that?
The difference between a new and an unread posting is the last visit of the user in the thread: postings after his/her last visit are new, others unread.

If we offer all the three possibilities for displaying the status of a posting we could help everyone, I guess. Those who are mainly interested in new postings see them directly. And if you enter a forum where already a lot of postings (all new at the first visit, later unread) exists, you can always distiguish between the new postings after your first visit and the postings that have been made before you subscribed to the forum and that you still want to read (if you do not want to read them, use the button "mark all as read" ).

Werner's idea of labeling postings is very good. But I would prefer to implement a solution like the one described above immediately to help those users like the PH Zurich team to handle their dozends of forums. And I think this way of implementation could be improved later with Werner's idea.

I m totally agree

First of all: no other forum has this logic and I am sure, no user would ever understand the difference between "new" and "read".

ILIAS can never know, what a user read or not. It only can track, when and what the surfer clicked. Therefore, we should use only one terminology, either new/old or read/unread.

Since ILIAS shows all postings of one thread at once (expect if the list is too long), and the visits are also counted due to the fact, how many clicks users did on whole threads, the assignment of read/unread should also fallow this logic.
That means, if the user clicks once on a thread, ILIAS assumes that the user has read the page.

Hi Jens,



We could provide the user with a small icon legend including an explanation sentence of each status.



I fear I lost your point. Your original concept was a complete manual solution:


Matthias only added the distinction of new threads to that. In my opinion his solution and a little explanation of the different status at the end of the page would be worth a try.

Best rehards
Alex

Alex, your right, I am not clear. The first suggestion I made, was a result of an internal discussion at our institution. The hard version, in which you can set every posting as read, represents the input of our specialist in forum tutoring.
I think, this would be very consequent, but results in a lot of tracking data and could bring us a bad performance within the forums. Therefore I am more for the next easier solution, witch I described in my last post and above (post 6201) as point (B).

I do not understand the solution of Matthias:

Matthias, can you explain that again for me? I can see the logic for new postings, but I do not understand when a posting is read. Or do you support the manual way respectively the consideration of clicked posting titles in the tree view?

Regards, Jens

I like to thank you for the implementation of our suggestions.

It might not look like it, because we are coming up with new suggestions all the time, but we really appreciate your work.

Jens and me were testing the new forum version. It works well so far and is a real improvement.

Peter

Hello,
after testing the new forum functions today, we want to post some suggestions here. As Peter Suter said, we like the new forum very much; we only have some miner improvements:

-- Infos on desktop: since you have more unread articles then new articles, we suggest showing this like that:
new: 2 unread: 7
If a value is 0, do not show it; the word "article" we would omit and we would put more space between the two infos;

-- Overview in repository and overview of threads in forum, last column (last article): on both views the same form should be used:
Title of the article with link to it
from author with link to the author's portrait
date and time

-- Tree view: a click on a title brings up the article in detail view, but the jump is not correct now; you can't see the title and this is confusing. In the detail view the start of the article should be visible (username or photo and title).

-- Detail view, left column: we think the "Registered since" information is not necessary and the "All articles" information should appear under the username. Like that, we had more place for the right column.

-- New postings, default title: for default, we would like to get the title of the article we refer on, not the thread title.

-- Navigation: to read the next tread, you have to click exactly the correct word in the location bar. This is not enough user-friendly. We have no solution for that yet. Perhaps the button "New Topic" should be removed, since it is visible also a level higher. Instead, on that place (after "Print Thread") two new buttons, "previous thread" and "next tread" would be possible.

Regards, Jens