Geni Forum vs. Public Discussions

The main problem most people have complained about is that they have been totally separate requiring different logins.

The activity is however much higher in the Geni discussions now than in the forum and it is time to phase out the forum and make the discussions better organized.

As a first step the link to the forum is removed at the bottom of this page, but I guess they cannot close down the forum before we have similar or better functionality in the internal discussions.

Brox, I think the decision to discontinue the Forum was a serious mistake by the Geni staff. Forum and the Public Discussions served two mainly different purposes. Discussions are for more genealogy related matters and the Forum focused on admin of the Geni site.

I find that I am not as interested in Geni as I was previously when discussions on the Forum between users (and staff) were fast and interesting and am considering giving up my Pro membership.

Ron,
Geni staff are very much present in these public discussions.

I miss the older Forums as well. Guess I was just used to it since 2007.

I've got no problem not being anonymous (with fake avatar name), which is one reason they may have dumped it. For the new Discussions (not called a Forum), could 20 topics be displayed instead of the 10 now shown? Do I type @Geni to ask them?

We're listening, Jim. :-) I'll pass on your suggestion.

MIke

Taking up Jim's point, I would suggest that the number of entries displayed in a page should be a user controlled variable in the following areas:

1. Number of discussion titles at http://www.geni.com/discussions - currently fixed at 10, though in the past I have seen 100 displayed when I accidentally went to the discussions list without being logged in to Geni

2. Number of discussion posts listed in a discussion thread such as this one - currently fixed at 20

3. Number of entries shown in Search Results in the main search engine http://www.geni.com/search - currently fixed at 20

4. Number of entries shown in a List such as Family Group / Tree / Added By / Managed By etc. listing http://www.geni.com/list/index - currently fixed at 20

5. Number of entries shown in a Merge Centre page http://www.geni.com/list/requested_merges - also tree matches, tree conflicts and data conflicts - currently fixed at 20; used to be higher; I think at one point it was variable?

6. Number of profiles listed in a project (as profile subjects or as collaborators) - currently fixed at 20

7. Number of "popular" profiles listed at http://www.geni.com/popular - currently fixed at 25

8. Number of projects listed at http://www.geni.com/projects - currently fixed at 25

9. Blog entries at http://www.geni.com/blog - currently fixed at 5

There may be more - these come to mind. You get the idea - some are fixed at 5 / 10 / 20 / 25. Not consistent, and user control would be great!

Thanks for listening!

I agree with you about the inconsistency, though some of these are intentional due to the expected height of a single item. I don't always agree that user-configurable = better, though -- it adds complexity to our code and confusion when two users are seeing different things. I've asked Noah Tutak to review the suggestions here.

Mike - understood and agreed. Blog entries are much longer than lists of discussions, etc.

It was when I saw 100 discussions listed on one page - and it loaded pretty quickly - that I thought about this. Jim's post prompted me to pass this thought on to you.

Understood that it adds complexity to your code - but surely not as much complexity as the different view options you now have on discussions and merge centre - which are great. I don't think it creates confusion.

Geni already has very flexible user-configurable tree view (including numbers of generations of ancestors and descendants shown, and all kinds of other options such as whether to mark deceased, handling of single parents, etc.) and if anything that must add more complexity and radically changes different users' views. And it works very well.

We're doing some things with logged-out views to prioritize speed over accuracy / timeliness, so don't assume we could/would do the same when you're logged in.