In an effort to improve the QIIME 1 Forum for our users and to make it easier for us to moderate, we’re making a few changes to the Forum effective now.
First, new posts will be of type “Question” rather than “Discussion”. This enables replies to be up/down-voted, assigned to specific moderators, and a (single) response can be marked as the best answer, at which point the question is noted as having been answered. See this post, which is a test question. Notice that it is “answered” because we’ve selected a one reply as the “best answer”. We think this will help our users find the correct answers to questions in threads that have a lot of back-and-forth discussion. Be sure to make use of this new up/down voting functionality – by up-voting replies that are helpful to you and down-voting ones that aren’t, you’ll help others find answers to their questions quicker.
Next, we now disallow posting by email. This means that you’ll have to use the web interface to post new questions and reply to messages. You will still get email notifications of activity on threads that you’re involved with, and these emails will have links that can take you directly to the thread. While we realize that this is a little less convenient, it will help users identify duplicate questions when a post is created (see Figure 1), which overall will improve the forum by reducing duplicated discussions. We also hope that it will reduce the time that developers spend moderating the forum, which means we can spend more time working on QIIME itself (including QIIME 2!).
Figure 1: Posting a question now suggests posts where your question may have already been answered.
Finally, we now disallow replying to topics that are over a year old. We hope that this will help keep Q&A focused, and therefore easier for other users to follow and learn from.
We hope these changes will make the Forum easier to use, and even more useful to our users. Talk with you on the Forum!
Greg
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