The Affinity Forum Needs These 2 Upgrades

[David in Mississippi]

This forum is a GREAT idea, but the biggest frustration I have with it is that there is so much material here, it is very easy to spend more than two hours searching the forum, trying several different ways to phrase our problem, only to find either nothing applies, or the thread is old and closed to new replies. Most times, when I encounter that, I then have to begin searching for how to start a new thread / conversation in that topic. That takes another 30 minutes, just to find it.

This forum would be MUCH more useful if (a) you would add a "Start new conversation in THIS Topic" button on every post; and (b) you would implement AI searches, so when, for example, I enter "How to move an asset to a different category," the response would be something intelligible, such as: "I'm sorry, I couldn't find any posts that match your exact search. However, I did find these posts that might be close enough. Check them out, and if none fit, then click the 'Start new conversation' button at the bottom of this page."

Implementing this, or something else that solves the "Wall of irrelevant information" problem would go a long way to moving Affinity Forums to the top of the UX pile.

Thanks.

[Alfred]

25 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

This forum would be MUCH more useful if (a) you would add a "Start new conversation in THIS Topic" button on every post; and (b) you would implement AI searches

(a) In the context of forum discussions, the terms “topic” and “conversation” are interchangeable for me. When would new posts in this thread, for example, constitute a new conversation?

(b) Why give the forum software a load of natural language to process, rather than simply choosing a few relevant search terms such as move asset category?

[David in Mississippi]

Thanks for your thoughts, Alfred.

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

Why give the forum software a load of natural language to process, rather than simply choosing a few relevant search terms such as move asset category?

Because I what I said earlier - the forum has massive quantities of posts, and no matter WHAT search terms you enter, most of the time you won't get ANY threads that are exactly what you want. Instead, you get a very long list of "close but no cigar" topics that you think, "These HAVE to apply, or they wouldn't be on my search results," and you have to spend about an hour filtering through them, reading all of them, before finding out they don't really apply to you. This is a huge waste of my time.

On the other hand, computers are very good at processing a large amount of data, very quickly. Depending on the server, all it takes is 1 to 4 seconds to find what is sought, OR tell you "No precise matches." AI software could make these searches infinitely more relevant and targeted, and save us immense amounts of time and frustration.

I hope this answers your question. Bottom line, it's much easier and faster for a computer (the forum's server) than to offload that work onto me. It's also more user-friendly.

Unlike ChatGPT or other AI large language models that process the entire internet, the forum software would only have to process the content of the forum and the Affinity HELP content. I think it's time they implemented this upgrade.

[fde101]

In the meantime you might try searching for it in Google and adding site:forum.affinity.serif.com to the search terms.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, David in Mississippi said:

This forum would be MUCH more useful if (a) you would add a "Start new conversation in THIS Topic" button on every post;

If you need a new conversation the chances are good you should start a new topic, not continue it in the same topic. You can scroll to the top or bottom of the page, click one level up in the breadcrumb, and then click on Start New Topic.

[v_kyr]

 

[David in Mississippi]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

In the meantime you might try searching for it in Google and adding site:forum.affinity.serif.com to the search terms.

That's a good thought, fde101. However, I've already tried that, with mostly the same result as here on the forum. Four million results in 0.133929438121 seconds (I just made up those numbers, but they're representative of the true numbers), none of which are truly relevant to my issue.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[deeds]

11 hours ago, David in Mississippi said:

That's a good thought, fde101. However, I've already tried that, with mostly the same result as here on the forum. Four million results in 0.133929438121 seconds (I just made up those numbers, but they're representative of the true numbers), none of which are truly relevant to my issue.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Try with bing. Weirdly, the last few months, it's become MUCH better than google. Not that google's gotten worse any faster than it normally does slide, but bing has gotten vastly better.

 

Anything you MUST have in your results, just "put in quotes" as this is the same as using the plus sign like this: +"this phrase" in google. 

 

And don't be afraid to try natural language questions in bing, as it's doing something with AI to help with processing how and why questions.

[deeds]

And if you want a big shock, try using natural language questions in you.com, like this. But, keep in mind, these things can lie with confidence, sometimes: