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A place to check on the weather around Unfettered Mind. Is it rainy, stormy or fair?

This is a place to offer feedback and make suggestions for changes and improvements.

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At 5:28am on August 31, 2009, Margaret said…: Well that was very kind, generous and thoughtful of whoever, and I'm grateful.

At 4:27pm on August 30, 2009, Ann Braun said…: Going ad free costs USD $24.95/month. Somebody made a donation that will cover the cost until Jan 2010.

At 6:41am on August 30, 2009, Margaret said…: Okay, so it takes me time to notice some things... but it has finally penetrated to my foggy little brain that there aren't any ads on the pages any more. (My excuse for my slowness is that I never looked at them anyway.) Who's paying the freight, then? UM (i.e. Ken)?

At 2:55pm on August 13, 2009, Valerie said…: Bravo! Wow, reading and adding topic tags to all the discussions must have been lots of work! Thank you, Ann

At 8:36am on August 10, 2009, Margaret said…: Yes! I really like it now! With the forum at the top and all...
Thank you for your clarifications, too.

At 5:27pm on August 9, 2009, Ann Braun said…: Margaret -- Thanks for these excellent questions and suggestions.

The difference between Other Questions and Unclassified is that the questions filed under "Other" are ones that didn't seem to fit into any of the present categories, while "uncategorized" refers to questions that haven't been classified yet.

When someone starts a new discussion topic they will be able to select the category that they feel best fits their question. If people forget to do this, site administrators can go back and do the classification. As time goes on, adjustments to the classification may need to be made ( e.g. addition new categories, refinement/splitting of existing categories -- for example, it could make sense to split the Exploration of Texts category into three right now -- one for Longchenpa/30 Pieces of Advice; another for Milarepa's song on the Six Perfections; and a third for Langri Tangpa's 8 Verses of Mind training)

What do others think about the number of topics listed on the main page? Very few people contributed to the poll posing this question -- this was up for nearly 2 months. While few participated in the poll some people send feedback via messages suggesting that they found the main page very busy and asking for the amount of detail posted there to be reduced.

Putting a drop down panel under Forums to give the categories, unfortunately, is not possible. We could suggest this to the developers, bearing in mind that Ning is free and has been designed so that very little technical knowledge is necessary to create a site or serve as an administrator.

At 5:36am on August 9, 2009, Margaret said…: I've just checked the new layout for finding Forum discussions.
I'd call it a good start... I have just a few comments:

The notification sent around doesn't mention that once you click 'view all' under the Forum tab, the 'nests' still don't show all the available discussons and you have to click on 'view discussions' under each heading if you want to see everything that's under that heading.

What is the difference between 'other questions' and 'unclassified'? Surely items are in 'other questions' because they aren't classified under any of the existing headings?

Why does this mean that we now have only two forum headings on the main page? Remember that the main page is designed to attract new people to the ning and it looks pretty thin if there are only two forum discussions up. In fact there are at least three forums being contributed to on a daily basis at the moment. Why can't we have ten forum topics showing? Presumably those with the latest posts? e.g. new post on 'Podcasts etc.' from Valerie should show up.

Would it be possible to put a panel under Forums on the main page with just the headings of the different topics (e.g. 'Practice Questions', 'Exploring Texts', 'Sharing Experience' etc. with links to the Discussion Forum page so people exploring the site could see the variety of topics we discuss? Also so that anyone can jump directly to that heading rather than having to scroll through a couple of pages of other topics on the Forum page? (If you want to make it convenient, make it really convenient).

I like the idea, as I said I think it's a good start, but would appreciate some tweaking. In particular, restore some life to the Forum panel on the main page.

At 4:13pm on July 13, 2009, Ann Braun said…: Margaret, I haven't found any way of tracking chat use. Any suggestions from the technical experts out there? Polling or asking people to leave comments here might tell us something, but few people are doing that.

I've noticed that the events calendar is used quite regularly by people who want to let others know about both virtual and face-to-face events.

At 5:51am on July 8, 2009, Margaret said…: Something that I think could be cleared off the front page is the calendar in events. It doesn't add anything and takes up quite a bit of space.
About chat--do you have any way of finding out how much it's actually used?

At 2:06am on June 8, 2009, Ann Braun said…: Fourteen people responded to a poll about whether to keep the new chat function, Only two prefer to have the chat removed, so it seems we'll keep the chat.