When the new C9 started the team also launched a feedback site. It was used a lot during initial launch but had now been starving. (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/Feedback )

I want to bring (back) under attention some new features which have been requested for quite some time. Because we did not see many updates of C9 including new features for the basic C9 user. Events were a great new feature but they immidiatly AGAIN showed the need for a notification system. Some of the stuff I would love to have on C9.

• Read/Unread status for Video/Event/Blog comment (or notifications of some kind altough RSS helps to solve that problem. Or have a 'video forum' to show a texttual list of all current active video's.(https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/feedback/details/580755/read-unread-status-for-video-comments ) (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/feedback/details/579455/add-email-notifications-for-comments-and-forum-threads)">https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/feedback/details/579455/add-email-notifications-for-comments-and-forum-threads)

• Integrate the CoffeeHouse/Feedback/TechOff forums in one view showing less topic per forum, So you don't have to visit 3 forum pages to see updates. (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/feedback/details/676942/consolidate-3-forums-in-one-view )

• Rate posts to give C9 users a STAR rating of their community involvement. Couple a rating of 1 or less to a 'Troll' status and overlay their avatar with a TROLL banner. (https://connect.microsoft.com/site1133/feedback/details/676943/rate-c9-comments-to-rate-c9-users)

What do you think? Vote for the stuff you are missing out the most on or create your own feedback tool.

this is the first version of the C9 web site in a while that seems to be ok in terms of beeing up and working most of the time so that we are not all having to complain about that.

BUT I do feel that WAY WAY more could be done to make this a really top rate site. however at this point i am not looking for them to do much more to it.  why?  that's a long list of things that i will just say it follows my general concern for what MSFT is doing as a whole.

one thing i would love to see fixed is the problem with formatting / css that happens to threads sometimes... can make them un-readable.  if that's a side effect of allowing custom css then get rid of that option, we do not need it.

Connect == Fail

i have seen very few times when posting things to connect has resulted in MSFT fixing anything.  perhaps i am just un-lucky or something but i have seen beta feedback from 40-50-60 users on a product just be ignored or told it was not going to happen even when the fix would have been simple.  so in what i have seen most of that system is just a place to vent and be ignored.

I would like some new features though to make it a more Top Rate site and spark discussion even more.

C9 editor - see this post for an example:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/A-trivial-question#c406c44ac2bb7481c97f89f0d00cb9211

To be honest, a TXT button next to the HTML button in the bar that gives you a <textarea> rather than a funky wysiwyg editor is probably good enough for me and would reduce the amount of suck in C9.

On another issue, I strongly disagree with the notion that users of this/any forum should be allowed to ban or label other members in the forum - it leads to incestuous thinking. Sure C9 has it's trolls, but I'd prefer an admin ban abusive members and decides to close threads than allowing the community to ban people on spurious grounds such as disagreeing with the prevailing opinion. It's bad for discussions and its bad for the community. I do however think that threads relating to "OMG Microsoft is a conspiracy" and any thread to do with politics should be actively closed more quickly by the admins.

As for Connect, it looks and feels quite inferior to something like User Voice, and I also believe one or more Microsoft teams use that service for community involvement, both in terms of bug reports, feature suggestions and general product discussion.

In a way Connect and Channel 9 are topically linked but I don't know if it'd be a good idea to bring them together. Could be. In any event, Connect should receive more "care".

10 hours ago,evildictait​or wrote

++ On the formatting / CSS thing. This textbox for adding comments is often less useful than a default <textarea> and the server isn't good at sanitising out unmatched </divs> which is usually the thing that utterly derails the formatting of a thread.

To be honest, a TXT button next to the HTML button in the bar that gives you a <textarea> rather than a funky wysiwyg editor is probably good enough for me and would reduce the amount of suck in C9.

 

On another issue, I strongly disagree with the notion that users of this/any forum should be allowed to ban or label other members in the forum - it leads to incestuous thinking. Sure C9 has it's trolls, but I'd prefer an admin ban abusive members and decides to close threads than allowing the community to ban people on spurious grounds such as disagreeing with the prevailing opinion. It's bad for discussions and its bad for the community. I do however think that threads relating to "OMG Microsoft is a conspiracy" and any thread to do with politics should be actively closed more quickly by the admins.

the real problem with trolls is that so many folks seem to be un able to just not post replies ...

i see just about every day that a certain entity we all know quite well make some kind of bait post and at least 2-4 folks feed it like they love it.

so if that is what the users are going to do then no kind of ban hammer will ever work that i can imagine.

4 hours ago,exoteric wrote

The most important aspect of C9 to me is the videos so I don't pay that much attention to forum development, although it's annoying to post to the forums on an iPad, because you end up with one text blob without any paragraphs. So things like that could be handled.

As for Connect, it looks and feels quite inferior to something like User Voice, and I also believe one or more Microsoft teams use that service for community involvement, both in terms of bug reports, feature suggestions and general product discussion.

In a way Connect and Channel 9 are topically linked but I don't know if it'd be a good idea to bring them together. Could be. In any event, Connect should receive more "care".

and it's full of bugs....

for example i can login from one pc and it has the threads i was watching.

but if i login from another pc they are gone.

also i can't navigate from a list of threads to read one and "go back" to the list i had , the stupid tabs on the one page re-load everything back to the defaults and i then have to re-set or find what page is was on and wate time getting back to the next item.

when it was in beta years back (ladybug) it was cool and useable.... now? it's junk.

I also dislike not being able to see how may views a post has had

However, we would not be rating people but rate individual posts to form a score of the person. It would stimulate people to write more tought out responses and provide feedback to first time users. Google ends up in the C9 coffeehouse a lot.

It would also make stuff like "Nineys" a bit more objective and discourage people to feeding the trolls. A general moderator has more power but can sometimes act less fast. Just look at the post of beer the last couple of weeks. Their is nothing to really ban him so he does not get banned but if the community would have its way he would have been labbeled a 'troll' by now.

Labeling people is generally a bad idea. You don't want to walk arround the streets with a label 'Thief' on your shirt because you stole something years ago. However if you keep stealing stuff you will get labbeled by a system and if you get into a store their might be a "wanted" poster of you behind the desk to warn people. In short: we need a online justice system!

Also: it would be nice to know how many of the readers of this post agree with my statements or thus what rating the above semi rant would get. People love to be loved.

In terms of other features that I think everyone agrees on:

• Email notifications -  for comments on a video or forum thread. Not only will this help conversation, this should also help
• Video Queue - There's a couple of ways you could make this work - Make it a private queue, add the option for making your queue public, add a way to make a "list of videos", more like Amazon or Twitter lists where someone could make wholly custom lists.
• Improve C9 on devices - This would be for phone apps, iPad, Xbox, and TV

Another one we've discussed that I think would be useful would be "content suggestions", much like Amazon or Netflix, this would be a people who like This Week on Channel 9 also liked reading a Kinect programming tutorial. As a Netflix subscriber, I discover a lot of good content based on my ratings for previous content. Just recently the series Firefly was rated 4.9/5 for me based on previous ratings and it was right

As always, your feedback is welcome and we should clean up the way we take feedback.

20 hours ago,Dan wrote

@CKurt: Taking a step back, we've had a lot of things come down the pipeline for Channel 9 and some had to happen sooner versus later, like the Events section and Coding4Fun integration. That isn't bad and overall it's great that instead of having to go to 10 different sites for 10 different event content, you have one place for Microsoft events.

In terms of other features that I think everyone agrees on:

• Email notifications -  for comments on a video or forum thread. Not only will this help conversation, this should also help
• Video Queue - There's a couple of ways you could make this work - Make it a private queue, add the option for making your queue public, add a way to make a "list of videos", more like Amazon or Twitter lists where someone could make wholly custom lists.
• Improve C9 on devices - This would be for phone apps, iPad, Xbox, and TV

 

Another one we've discussed that I think would be useful would be "content suggestions", much like Amazon or Netflix, this would be a people who like This Week on Channel 9 also liked reading a Kinect programming tutorial. As a Netflix subscriber, I discover a lot of good content based on my ratings for previous content. Just recently the series Firefly was rated 4.9/5 for me based on previous ratings and it was right

As always, your feedback is welcome and we should clean up the way we take feedback.

 

 

 

C9 editor and code pasting / formatting !!!!

posts that break the thread formatting and make the thread un-readable !!!!

# A ranking for posts to build up a ranking for the user. Like most forum and stackoverflow have. A
'star-rating' based on the total numer of posts and how they were value by the community. Another way would be if you get a certain 'rank' you get an image like the one saing 'microsoft' of the 'C9 guy' watermark in your posts indicating you are a respected community member. The other way is the scale would be a warning you are 'trolling' and showing a troll or something to warn first time users not to feed it...

# Show below avatar how many posts you have made in total.

# Show number of views for threads. Because people don't always respond to threads they are following, but still like the content.

So that's what I mean with user centric. I'm not talking about fixing layout bugs or personal user stuff like video queue's and notifications, although those are important to, but about better interaction between (new and old) niners.

13 hours ago,CKurt wrote

# Show below avatar how many posts you have made in total.

That's meaningless.  Having a lot of posts does not equate to having posts with valuable content.

# Show number of views for threads. Because people don't always respond to threads they are following, but still like the content.

Again, that's meaningless.  Just because people are viewing the thread doesn't mean they find the content useful.  It just means they found the title interesting enough to read further.

User-ranking of other posts just degrades into uprating posts one agrees with and downrating posts one disagrees with.  Few people rate posts/users at all in any volume, so the results become very skewed to the opinions of a few users.  These are ego-stroking systems that promote prolific posting, often at the expense of quality posting.

It doesn't take very long reading a forum to figure out which users are posting valuable content and which users are along for the ride.  Judge the posts by their content, not how many stars it has or what the post count is.

As for updates, the post editor needs to be at the top of the list.

I know a ranking system can be misused, but I do feel like the community needs a bigger voice to show what they like. With 'what' I mean what kind of content, what kind of oppinions, what kind of video's. Not "who" , but it can be hard to make that distintion.

If people like a show "Going Deep" , do they like Charles? Or do they like the way Charles askes the questions? It's a hard problem.