What is with this Thwack forum...Can't stand it!

I'd be glad to help you out.  Have you tried limiting your search to just Web Help Desk?  That would be a good place to start.  Start typing what you're looking for in the search bar and you'll notice a drop down starts to populate.  At the very top of that drop down there is an option to show all or limit the search to whichever forum you are in - in this case it would be Web Help Desk.  Another good way to search for specific content is in the "Content" tab of the forum.  Here is a direct link to Web Help Desk's content.  You can limit the type of content you want to search for on the page and utilize several filters.

I apologize you are having difficulty but once I have a better idea of what you're looking for, I can assist in showing you how the forums work.  Also, just to address why the forums are the way they are - this site is home to support for 20+ licensed products and 30+ free tools, therefore we need to divide content by product rather than topics.

I might also suggest that you check out an onboarding mission we've put together to alleviate some of the learning curve when members first come to thwack.  If you're interested, there is a good incentive and we're giving away some prizes.  Not to mention it's been found very helpful by several people who have been in your same situation.

Please let me know how else I can help.

Thanks,

Danielle

Agreed, this is a horrible mess. Everything is all over the place, impossible to find any answers. Whoever designed this gets an "F" in User Experience.

If you need an "onboarding mission" for your help forum, you're doing it wrong.

I agree that your users should not need an "Onboard Mission" to understand the Thwack "Forum", its not a forum at all. I don't care how many products you support, it is still horribly organized. I can't find anything. Look at sites like XDA Forums! They have structure that users look for in a forum and I can find what I need quickly. Here my head spins and I can't find anything and I give up shortly after starting and want to scream! You can have a section for each product and then sub-forums for those products to break it down. I've put a few together and guess what? Users use them and find what they want and get help from the community. Please scrap this Thwack and move back to a traditional forum so we can find things. Its really not that hard, don't recreate the wheel, swallow your pride. Take a look at the old WHD forums, they made sense.

============================

Product A

  - Product A > Sub-Forum 1

  - Product A > Sub-Forum 2

============================

Product B

  - Product B > Sub-Forum 1

  - Product B > Sub-Forum 2

I completely sympathize with your comments, tech_guy.  I'd like to share that the community team has kicked off research to improve the site structure.  This will include the navigation, forum layout and page structure.  We have been conducting calls with customers who've expressed they would like to share their feedback with us.  I have noted your comments above but if you would be open to walking through this on a brief webex, I'd love to hear more of what you'd like to see change.  We understand the frustration we're on a mission to fix it.

I completely have to disagree.  I've been apart of this forum for quite a long time and have not had any issues with either the layout or finding information.  There have been some growing pains, but anyone who expects 100% perfection has a skewed sense of things; nothing is 100% flawless.  I've yet to run into a time where any question I've asked in ANY forum be it WHD, NPM, SAM, UDT, etc has gone unnoticed and unanswered.  This is actually one of the more helpful forums I've been apart of throughout my career.  It's also one of the most engaging in regards to how well they have taken user feedback and incorporated it into the changes for the forum to continuously improve it.  The mission is simply a way to get help those who need extra assistance with using the thwack forum.  I'd suggest, if you have not done so, rather than merely searching for answers, posting a discussion regarding the question(s) you have and allow the forum to assist you.

I actually like the forum. It's not 100% perfect, but design wise I think once you get used to it the forum makes sense.

I agree with @tech_guy, you shouldn't need to get used to it - it should be intuitive.  I've been using Thwack since its inception and hate the current way that it works.   And yes, I have expressed it before while on a conference call with some user-experience folks...

I never had a problem finding what I need using the thwack search bar, google, and youtube.  Think outside the box!! Use other ways to search!

I'm forever oscillating on this issue. Sometimes I am frustrated when something is hard to find on Thwack. Or when I know the subsite I want to view, but I have to click through a few pages to get there. Or when you want to find drafts of blog posts you've saved. I'm sure there are other examples.

But then I think that, for the last 10 years, technology has been less about organizing information, and more about finding information. Remember when Google Desktop Search appeared, and the mantra was, "don't sort, search?" Maybe that's the tack we should be taking with Thwack. Focus on making the search more functional, and concerns about layout and navigation would become less urgent.

Of course, my best advice is to just ask questions if you're having trouble finding something. And try to frame your criticism in a more constructive manner; that's just good manners.