We can only hope that before the Brax 3 phone is released this community forum receives some kind of make over. If I were to spend £300 on a brand new phone I would be expecting a more organised form of support. A dedicated section for Brax users at least is a must, but I’d go further than that. It really is an absolute shambles.
The braxtech team will be joining in on support, so this will help to deal with issues as they come up. As the client base continues to grow and funds more team members, i imagine support will be more responsive, and more development resources can go to problem solving. Aside from a dedicated section for the brax3, what would you recommend happen with the forum itself?
The first thing I would do is to split the whole listing by official releases and unsupported community releases, then split into the relevant manufacturers for each section as most all the problems are phone specific and a fix or a getaround for a Samsung for example, won’t necessarily work for a Sony. Then I would sub divide each manufacturer by OS, Apps, Updates etc, etc.
When the Brax 3 is released it’s not unreasonable to expect to see users that are not tech savvy arriving on the scene asking let’s say ‘fundamental’ questions that some tech’ savvy users will find frustrating. So you need to direct them to a reserved place on the board and tell the tech savvy user’s to keep their mouth’s shut unless they have something friendly and/or useful to say. Scaring new users away is easy, getting them to come back after they have been humiliated is nigh on impossible.
It might also make sense to have a linked FAQ page for newbies so as to minimise the amount of duplicate posts. Links from the iode shop to the iode community (and from here to the iode shop), would also be beneficial as right now you have to search out the two sites as seperate items.
With only three categories (one of which might as well be named ‘everything else’), to post in, the problem is self evident. A more classified presentation will give a more professional feel to the list and just make the whole iode experience a lot more pleasant.
Most of what you are proposing could be done quite easily, with a combination of the following
- better use of topics and tags in this forum
- creation and maintenance of a few well structured wiki pages
- easy access to lists of bugs, issues - open and fixed
It’s important not to create too much documentation: Iodé don’t have the resources to create and maintain an elaborate documentation scheme, which would quickly become a maintenance nightmare.
For what it’s worth, and while e/os is not the best OS IMO, their forums are actually pretty good, and topics are broken out much as what is being discussed here.