Affinity forum feedback

[lphilpot]

Disclaimer - I know this is the app feedback area, but where do we post feedback on the Affinity forums themselves (I've looked)? So here it is...

I realize I may be the only person in the known universe who would would like this and I certainly understand it could be a significant effort / change, but I'll request it anyway. 🙂

IMO it sure would be nice to have the forums broken out into products. I.e., one forum for Designer, another for Photo and another for Publisher. For those of us who predominantly (or exclusively, as in my case) use only one product from the suite it would simplify the process of reading as well as finding info / answers, etc. Even for users of multiple apps it could still streamline the answer-finding process.

There, now I've said it.  🙂

[walt.farrell]

It has been suggested before, Len.

And the usual response is that many functions are common across the entire application suite, and therefore someone using Designer who has a question about (say), the Pen Tool, will generally need the same response as a user of Photo or Publisher who also uses that tool. And if the applications had separate sections of the forums, you might have a question that has already been answered, but you would not see it because you were focused on the one application you have, rather than looking for Pen Tool information in general.

[lphilpot]

Yeah, I can see that. It's the same basic situation as with any database driven environment. E.g., keeping email in separate folders vs. tagging all messages in a common folder. Slightly different problem domain, but the same basic decision. This was actually a significant real-world decision where I worked before I retired. There were more than a few of us (not me) who regularly kept 50k messages in their Inbox alone. My manager at the time had > 250k Inbox messages. Not me - Rules and folders all day long. 🙂

Speaking of tags, is there any way to tag (and filter) posts? Of course even if there was / is, it would be dependent on the poster to do so, and to do so accurately.

Anyway, not the end of the world.

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

Speaking of tags, is there any way to tag (and filter) posts?

You can add tags to any topic (not post) that you create. And if you click on a topic tag, that is a search for all topics with that tag.

The trick, then, is making sure that appropriate tags are chosen. Users are amazingly poor at choosing good tags, in my experience.

Beyond that, you can play around with the forum Search facilities, which are (in my opinion) better than many users believe, but they take some study/experimentation. Or you can use a tailored Internet search with your favorite search engine and incorporating site:forum.affinity.serif.com as one of the search arguments.

Of course, one big issue with searching, either in the forums or the Help, is that if you don't know the correct terms you probably won't find the results you want.

[Pšenda]

21 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Of course, one big issue with searching, either in the forums or the Help, is that if you don't know the correct terms you probably won't find the results you want.

This mainly applies to searching using the forum search engine (and even knowing the exact term often doesn't work at all - try searching for something about 3D). When searching with Google Search, the relevance of the results is significantly higher even with a very general description of the problem.

[lphilpot]

Not surprising...

Years ago when I was a Solaris admin (after Oracle bought SUN) we could often get better, more targeted and more helpful search results from Google's generic "outside-in" crawled indexes than from inside the Oracle support site, logged in with our very $$$$$ Oracle customer accounts.

Go figure...

[fde101]

On 9/6/2023 at 11:01 AM, walt.farrell said:

if you don't know the correct terms you probably won't find the results you want.

If whoever wrote the posts you are searching for did not know the correct terms (or the same incorrect terms as you do for that matter) you will wind up with a similar problem.

[v_kyr]

Well the common overall problem here is, that unexperienced computer users often don't know how to do/perform "more precise to the point" internet searches and information retrieval. As they often also don't know how something is really named/expressed inside the software and thus how to use the right search terms then.

Related to the forum here ... even if you try to show and teach people how make some better use out of it, it will be deeply hidden in the catacombs of the forum ...

• Quick Tips: for finding Affinity content with Google Search

... as nobody will obviously see and recognize that thread, which is usually such an essential and important one, that it should be pinned to top.

[Return]

Maybe people should read the manual/help first to at least know the right wording to search/find posts about that particular tool/feature.

 

[lphilpot]

3 hours ago, Return said:

Maybe people should read the manual/help first

I absolutely agree.

However that's another potential request: Serif needs to offer a user manual that's a true, comprehensive, complete manual, fully documenting all details of the software. The current help file isn't close IMO. It should fully document every setting of every control, slider, button... you name it... including how they interact, what they really technically do, the theory behind them, etc., etc. It should include workable (i.e., "followable") examples and maybe even larger scale tutorials.

In other words [old-codger-moment alert] - Like manuals use to be. For example, I remember when WordPerfect manuals (for MS-DOS, no less) were hundreds of pages and that was way back before such software mushroomed in terms of capabilities. I can't tell you how many times I've read the current Photo manual and thought... "Uh, yeah, but how do I use it?". Merely repeating what's already fairly obvious in the UI isn't "documentation" nor are five minute videos.

But I digress...