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Possible issues with this forum?

By: Jane Onorati | Asked: 08/07/2022
Forums › Category: General questions › Possible issues with this forum?
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Jane OnoratiJane Onorati asked 2 years ago
I would expect that this forum is monitored by someone at Formidable but have not seen any posts by a moderator yet.  I don't get a lot of results when I search and often get no results.   I am wondering if any threads were transferred to this from from the Slack Community.  I see there are threads from at least a year ago on this forum but don't know their origin.  If they did come from Slack, I think there must be problems with the search function on this forum.   I searched on the Slack channel for "tooltips" and find several threads that are 6 to 9 months old.  When I search this forum for the same thing, no results are returned.  We need some information about this from Formidable.  Thanks -Jane
4 Answers
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Best Answer
Chris AdamsChris Adams answered 2 years ago
Hi Jane, This forum was orginally created by a group of Formidable users who wanted to have a place where knowledge and useful information wouldn't get lost after a period of time. The Slack group was great however, Slack only allows for 10,000 messages to be kept on the free tier, so for every new question that gets asked, an old question & answer is lost. I was one of the developers who built this Forum initially and it was set-up while the Slack group was still up and running as an alternative place to ask questions and get answers but it wasn't anything to do with Strategy11 or the Formidable Forms developers; just a community run forum for users to help other users. Since then, Steve and Steph at Formidable have seen the benefits of this forum and we've handed over the ownership and running of it to them, although it's still moderated soley by the FF community. To answer your question about the search feature, the search works fine, it's just that there isn't much content on here yet as it's still quite new. The more people that use this site and ask questions, the better the search functionality will become as more content becomes available. Hope that helps. Chris | FDM Digital
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Walter JonesWalter Jones answered 2 years ago
Hi Jane.  This forum is hosted by formidable forms but is strictly a community support site.  There are several of us developers who spend our time trying to assist where we are able.  Rarely will you find FF employees here   If you need specific support for Formidable and have a valid license you can open a ticket with them through their support site.   My understanding is the slack community is no longer available, I’m not sure the slack data was migrated.  
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Jane OnoratiJane Onorati answered 2 years ago

Hi Walter.  I wanted to see if anyone from Formidable would answer or if anyone using this forum knew the answer.  I'll submit a ticket for support on my Formidable account to see what I can learn and post the answer back here.  I can still access the Slack channel and search existing posts, but it has been closed to new posts since June 2.  
Mainly I want to know why I get so many searches on this forum with no results - because it is new or because the search function does not work very well.

Victor Font replied 2 years ago

The search functions work fine. This is a relatively new forum. Chris Adams from FDM Digital originally built it with a little help from his friends in the community. Strategy 11 provided content from the original community supported forum that was replaced by Slack. As far as I can recall, Chris imported it and the content is still available here although some things are missing because of differences in the two different forum structures.

This forum was built by the same volunteers that answered questions on Slack. The impetus for building this forum is Slack's lack of ability to search old answers without paying for a Slack license that provides access to old content. Nobody wants to pay to be able to search for old answers. Slack doesn't count "old" as in age. To Slack, old means over 10,000 posts.

When Slack's lack of functionality became a hindrance to helping the community, Chris donated this site to Strategy 11 who took ownership and has been maintaining it since. All the moderators here, myself included, are community volunteers with no affiliation to Strategy 11. The forum is new to us as well and we're still getting the hang of things.

You will see an answer here from time to time from Steve Wells, but it's rare. You'll also see posts from Bobbie Deveroux. Bobbie is Strategy 11's community liaison. As moderators, if we need to communicate anything about this forum to Strategy 11, we do so through Bobbie and she takes it back to Strategy 11.

Until this forum matures with more content, the best way to find an answer is to ask your question even if you think it's been asked before. Many of us all provide tutorials, code snippets, and more to help the community. I own Formidable Masterminds and welcome you to search our tutorials and many resources that I make available for free to the Formidable Community including our Formidable Codex and Developers Directory. I also run the Formidable Masterminds Facebook group that you're welcome to join.

Quite a few other community volunteers have sites where they offer free content and limited support. Formidable is a great product and those of us that support it are passionate about helping others use it to its greatest potential.

Steve WellsSteve Wells replied 2 years ago

Hi Jane,

Steve from Formidable Forms. We try and keep an eye on this forum, but we aren't involved on a daily basis. We do have a few community members who have graciously agreed to help moderate this forum.

Regarding the history, As mentioned, this site and forum was donated by FDM Digital. They had this forum up on their independent community site before we launched this site. Old forum posts were from that site.

We haven't migrated any of the Slack history or conversations over to this forum. Honestly, I don't even know if that is possible.

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Jane OnoratiJane Onorati answered 2 years ago
Thanks to all that replied.  The information you provided helps give some context and background to understand the current state of this forum and how it's set up.  I do have a couple of suggestions for improvements. 1. I did not find any information on moderation or admins until today.  I found it in a link in the footer - About Us.  I suggest this link or the contact info for the admins be placed more prominently on the forum page or in multiple places.  Another idea would be to add a category to the forum for questions to the admins/moderators so all can benefit from the answers. 2.  I'd like another forum category for new feature ideas or suggestions for improvements to existing features.  If there is any way for forum users to rate or give a thumbs up for these ideas, that would be nice too. -Jane

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