Laracasts forums crave for moderation

• On moderation

I agree, but only a few moderators are needed. It's nice to have them just in case.

• On search

I agree that it doesn't work properly. it doesn't look for the right words when looking for a thread. Let's say that I want to look for all the threads about DDD, so when I search for "DDD", I get some results (not all of them) and half of them are not even about DDD at all, or the title of the thread doesn't contain DDD at all. For some cases, advanced search is a good idea and a nice to have feature. The search works only when you guess the right words in the right order.

• On organization

Currently, the general channel/tag is way too general and sometimes new threads fall down quick and they don't get any answers so people have to bump them (which is generally not a good idea). I believe that if the forum is reorganized into a few more channels/tags/sections, it will open a door for the forum to grow outside of Laravel and become more than just a Laravel & PHP Forum (Having channels for Front End, Servers, Questions etc. [I have a lot of channel ideas in mind] with subchannels is a nice to have feature). This idea of reorganization might need a full UI rework for things to fit on the screen which might be strange for people who are used to the old (web) design.

Agreed, I echo the above and I'm starting to feel like I can't contribute as much. There's just so much going on and I can't manage to see what is what in the sense of topics. There's a flood use of the "General" channel, people use other channels to post stuff (requests) for their own code as well...even though it was originally meant for Laracasts lesson requests?

• There's no way to see topics you've created/started.
• There's no way to properly watch or get good notifications for replies to certain topics.
• Emails are hit and miss with subscribing to threads.
• Not even worth using the search.

Humbly, I find the search unusable. I find some of the responses here un-professional and downright nasty. I have taken the general attitude of not responding. There are some great people up here who truly demonstrate experience and a spirit of cooperation. I am getting more info out Laravel news at this point. I signed on because I took a Tuts JQuery course given by Jeff and it was excellent. Sadly things of late are getting stale. Lumen was the coolest thing I have seen. When I read the info on the PHP benchmarks and the scores I was not surprised. On and off I have been looking at how much Laravel does on startup each time we make a call. In the Java Web server world much of this gets done on server startup or when a Servlet container gets loaded. Taylor went ahead and addressed this with Lumen.

Also, I forgot to mention about more info on what is what. Like channel name descriptions so people know what channel to choose when they post a new thread. A little bit more description on some parts of the website is also nice.

Oh yeah, and before I forget, a good documentation / help page on how to use the website and explaining what is what exactly is nice to have so new people don't have to hit the forums and ask questions about it. I am not saying that it's a bad thing, but there should be a page explaining the site with a little bit more info than the Frequently Asked Questions page.

I will volonteer tribute if @JeffreyWay needs moderators :D I guess that I am the most competent person here.

Just kidding :) but maybe a little bit of UI redesign and few sub-forums could help.

Hey, all -

• I added a way to view only the threads created by you. Hover over "My Threads" and choose "Created By Me."
• Switching over to elastic search this summer, so that should solve the less-than-stellar search.
• Not convinced we need official moderators.
• I agree that we could use with better categories and tagging. I'll make a note to work on that.

Great start :)

Moderators aren't as such needed but there could be one or two just to keep things in order (spam) when they arise.

@JeffreyWay If nice to filter the posts that you created but the URL could be just a bit more friendly.

Currently https://laracasts.com/discuss?owner_id=whateverText gives the result but can be simplified as ?my or something which will look nice.

Another point of view could be to filter by owner. Instead of giving the posts that I created https://laracasts.com/discuss?owner=bashy could give the threads that he created.

@Ozan Not really a useful feature if you ask me. It's better if we get a twitter style feed on our profile so we can follow people and see their contribution. Also, follow/favorite threads without replying is a cool idea.

@Ruffles The feed on the profile page is too crowded if you ask me. :/

There can be tabs like "My Timeline" and "People I follow Timeline"

I also got a nice idea!

• Multiple answers for a post.

Allow multiple answers to be accepted (up to 5-6, just a number) and show them in a separate tab on the same post!

Oh boy, the monthly -- laracasts needs help thread.

It'd be nice to have a suggested video section too. It be nice to also allow a poll to see which ones are needed most by the community.

moderators, hey, if you can keep up with the work load then I can agree.

Although I think the price point is awesome, it could be that a lot of people who are quitting are doing so because they felt that Jeffery would be here more (like the old days) and that the videos would be more targeted towards laravel and best of practices ala Jeffery Way style.

Running a business is not easy ;-)

@JeffreyWay a video on how you implement Elastic Search would be awesome.

Awesome! Jeffrey already mentioned updating the site in the summer so can't wait for that!

I agree on the moderation part, as long as you don't need them, don't use them. Keep it clean and simple!

a better breakdown of the topics already would help tremendously.
Just a General area which is used for the very most of the questions is definitely not enough.

I agree with you Jeffrey. I don't think forum needs moderators, but some kind of organization.

+1 to making a video on implementing Elastic Search.

As someone new to the Laravel community ( 6-8 weeks ), I've already seen a massive change in the Laracasts community.

The "flat-file" all in one forum isn't really working anymore as we increase the number of categories in the Laravel ecosystem (Lumen, Forge, Envoyer), coupled with the increase in video subjects (react, bower, testing, composer etc). It's a positive that so many are seeing Laracasts as the ideal place to come, but with growth comes great responsibility (or whatever Uncle Ben).

Whether it's a direct consequence of this, or simply a co-incidence, the number of "RTFM" responses is growing. If you're new-ish to PHP (or at least this type of development in PHP) or if you haven't come from Laravel 4 (so most of your googling gives you answers that don't work) then there's a steeper learning curve for Laravel 5 that alot of the experts on here think :) The Laravel documentation is great once you know what you want to do and how Laravel works. If you don't know what things are, or what they're called in Laravel, the documentation (and of course googling gives L4 answers) makes it tough.

e.g. (this is a real threat from yesterday for someone who joined the community on 17th April)

Expert: You can use a root_id left_id right_id level schema. New person: i don't understand Expert: Then do some research on it

@kevinjohn That's taking that out of context, I am no expert either. I sent them a link to details about how it's done, it had clear diagrams on how to learn what it does.

Expert: You can use a root_id left_id right_id level schema. New person: i don't understand Expert: Then do some research on it

Here's the thread if interested: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/some-advice-needed-for-menus

I don't read that as a threat, but I understand that it can be read as one. Also, the expert provided a link. It also depends on how you read the answers, but that's a different discussion.

@kevinjohn On the other hand newbies comes here without the basics and want to create complex things. How can you answer this.

I agree with @pmall and @bashy

Most question are about stuff that either could be learned by just learning the basics or by just googling! Most of my answers is based on what I googeled for them! So it's more laziness then real thinking... And of course I have more expierence in what I need to google but still.. It took me some time to learn all this stuff so why can't they?

so why can't they?

because, as you've already said:

it's more laziness then real thinking...

might be off topic but I think just the forum section alone is a mammoth build , unless @JeffreyWay is hiring to upgrade and maintain, what if the forum section could be public domain? building in the moderation functionality ect could be expedited with a community as dedicated as the forum members . public domain I just mean a github repo where users could test and offer enhancements and seeing how jeffrey builds things anyhow I am sure this forum is just some package he is hooked into the site so the standalone functionality would not be too much of a workaround.

JUST a thought.

I remember the favorite "expert" answer was "it works in the route file so ..."

Learning the laravel has gotten easier since L4 beta days but I can still remember the pain of breaking through the "language barrier of laravel"

Are we getting Flarum? Made by the eso guy and franz?

@bashy

That's taking that out of context, I am no expert either

with the greatest respect bashy the forum stats clearly show you are THE expert here! And you gave an answer so full ack for that, but based on the level of the question it probably wasnt that helpful.

So I also saw that thread and had a conversation about it with a couple of 'newbies' off-forum. There is a feeling out there that the laracasts forum has become somewhat ellitist. Probably it hasnt really, but probably the perception it has is true.

Laravel has moved a lot of people (me included) thru a steep learning curve the last couple years. But there are still a lot of new people jumping over to laracasts that are way way behind the curve. Based on laravel's hype there are people with little experience wading in wanting to build complex stuff - So what to do? Its a problem.

This is reckoned to be the place to learn about laravel AND php ("The best PHP screencasts on the web"), but its a victim of its own (and laravels) success so much so that parts of the site desperately need an upgrade. There's a lot of good suggestions been made in this thread. I expect @JeffreyWay is smart enough to know what he needs to do. (Just do it quickly please - esp. search)

Just one last point: In my opinion accommodating those coming into the community who are new or less experienced should be an important part of laracasts - including its forum. Basically however its done, people should be welcomed and encouraged, and my suggestion is that perhaps a part of any upgrade needs to be a dedicated newbies area: vids, forum section, faq, pointers, useful lists etc. And/Or create an experts corner.

Regards

l.

@londoh In all fairness, the reply "I don't understand" wasn't helpful for me to know what part they didn't understand. If people want to know more, they ask. I'm not going to write out a big reply just to have them say "I knew that part".

So I'm sorry if one reply wasn't helpful, it wouldn't of been my last reply on the thread...

@londoh I agree with most of the stuff you've said, but I believe the perception of Laracasts forums getting elitist is just wrong.

I would love to help all Laravel newcomers wholeheartedly, but I am unable to because the forum is becoming a mess, and I've been driven away from the forum for quite some time now because of the mess. Can't remember last time I've been on for more than 30 seconds, excluding posting to this thread, and I know a bunch of people whose Laracasts-forum experience has started to become... unpleasant.

When I say forum is becoming a mess I mean people are posting questions that have been answered dozens of times before or have nothing to do with PHP/Laravel, crowding the forums so I'm having hard time helping people that have gotten some real unique questions.

Implement some automatic duplicates thread detection. Let us up-vote and down-vote.

Or the most simple of them all - let us ignore users! So we don't see their threads/posts anymore. Perhaps once their questions are not getting as much attention, they'll have to seek for alternative and learn to google.

You've said it yourself - there are lots of suggestions in this thread. Hopefully something gets done soon!

At some point I wanted to retrieve and format of all my accepted answers so we have a compiled collection of frequently asked questions and their answers. It could be useful I think.

So we have to find a way to discover what the most important problems are. Reading the posts in this thread it seems several issues arise:

• Better search. Would hopefully help some people find answers before posting the same question again
• Better organization. The problem here (I think) is that most questions go into the "general" category, from very simple questions to complex architecture questions. Because the community grows and more and more questions are being asked, the main forum thread is getting 'full'/disorganized, unanswered questions, etc. Maybe splitting the forum in specific sections would help. Personally I always like browsing to specific sections on forums to see what's being discussed, if I can help/participate, etc, because on some topics I have expertise or find the topic interesting, others not so.

@bashy - I take your point re the why/how etc of the OP and your reply. I wasnt being critical of you per se, dude you are the expert here and I value your input when reading threads. It was a convenient example, there are others by others.

@toniperic - agree with your definition of 'mess'. Whether you agree with elitist or not, it was a word that was used in a conversation re laracasts. So between us we now have an unpleasant elitist mess!

Which of course it isnt.

Its got growing pains and just needs some @JeffreyWay love, tenderness and a bit of code

regards

l.