Stan (and others) - I've passed your input along to the ITRC upper management.
--
Greg Cagle
gregc at gregcagle dot com
"Stan Sieler" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message news:9gqp7t017t@enews4.newsguy.com...
> Hi,
>
> Out of curiousity, I wonder if other people's experiences with the
> ITRC forums (particularly the MPE forum*s*) have been as miserable as mine.
>
> I posted a question yesterday, and got an email notification today that
> someone had posted a reply ...
> that's a nice feature ... but unfortunately,
> that's the last good thing I can say about the forums :(
>
> The email I got from the ITRC said:
> > From [log in to unmask] Wed Jun 20 06:05:07 2001
> > You have asked IT Resource Center Forums to notify you about the replies to this discussion topic:
> > looking for error rate specs for HP disk drives (e.g., HPC2490AM, HPC3010M1, HP7937H)
> > http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x6d96e7e60861d511abcd0090277a778c,00.html
> > Someone has posted a reply to this question. Please visit the message by clicking the hyperlink above to get the most updated
information.
> ...
> > When you return to view the answers, you'll have the ability to rate (on a scale of 1-10) each response you have received.
Simply login and click the 'Assign Points' button next to each response. Please use the following scale when rating each response:
> > N/A: The answer was simply a point of clarification to my original question
> > 1- 3: The answer didn't really help answer my question but thanks for your assistance!
> > 4- 7: The answer helped with a portion of my question, but I still need some additional help.
> > 8-10: The answer has solved my problem completely! Now I'm a happy camper!
>
> (watch for line wrap on the "When you return..." line above
> ... it's badly formatted for some mailers to read :)
>
>
> 1) I gave up four minutes after "clicking" on the URL above, and hit <reload>
> once or twice before I finally got the ITRC Forum stuff to respond.
>
> ...That's actually *much* better performance than I saw yesterday!
> Then, 10 out of 12 attempts to display forum postings failed after about
> a 5 minute attempt at downloading the pages. Even subsequent retries
> resulted in failure to get about half of the postings I wanted to see.
>
> 2) The HP provided "answer" was completely useless. With the Forum structure,
> the fact that there's been at least one answer may discourage others
> from reading (& responding to) my question.
>
> 3) There's no value suggestion for "Your answer was completely irrelevant
> and/or off-topic, but thanks for trying" :)
> (I might not have used that one, out of politeness,
> ... but I did rate the answer a "1", however)
>
> 4) There *is* no "Assign Points" button next to the response!
> Note: further reading of the response page revealed that I had to
> login to be able to see an "Assign Points" button ... something the
> ITRC email had failed to mention. After logging in, the button appeared.
>
> 5) I should have been logged in automatically, anyway! The last three times
> I logged into the ITRC in the last 24 hours, I checked the box that
> asked if I wanted to have my login remembered (via a cookie)!
> (Don't insult me by asking the obvious question here :)
> This used to work last month!
>
>
> More general Forum comments...
>
>
> 6) Which forum *does* one go to for MPE questions? We have:
>
> One top-level category with a 3000 subcategory:
>
> Servers:
> 9000
> e3000
>
> One top-level category with a lot of 3000 subcategories:
>
> MPE/iX:
> database
> general
> networking
> printers/spooler management
> more...
>
> and possibly:
>
> business related issues:
> business recovery planning
>
> At least the "MPE/iX" choice (or "more" within it) gives you
> all of the posts within it ... but not the "Servers / e3000" posts.
>
> 7) Once you get to a forum, you can choose to view:
>
> - all messages
> - messages you've gotten email about
> - "top read" messages
>
> The obvious two choices are missing:
>
> - new subjects (e.g., posted in the last week)
> - subjects I haven't read any messages in
> - subjects with at least one new message
>
> Wait: a "good news" item: they seem to be using the
> *same* URL from one day to the next for some of the messages,
> so my browser is showing me (via color differences) which
> top-level subject messages I've read! Wow! Now, if we could
> get that to happen on the KDB search result URLS...
>
> 8) The list of subject has a "date" column ... it may mislead
> you, because that's the date of the most recent activity, not the
> date the question was posted.
>
> 9) It Sure Would Be Nice to be able to search within a Forum.
>
> Sure, you can click on "Search", and you get a search page,
> and you can even click on "Forums" ... but your search
> covers all the Forums. If you click on the drop down
> "Filter Category" and select "MPE" ... well, when I tried it,
> I got nothing when I searched for "marginal data", even though
> that's the subject of one of the MPE Forum subject that
> a non-filtered search found for me!
>
>
> In short, HP's spending our support dollars creating a complex,
> hard-to-use, nearly unsearchable, alternative to our existing free,
> highly searchable groups and newslists.
>
> I, for one, would prefer that the money spent on this project went
> directly to HP CSY, and that the Forums be replaced by a static page like:
>
> - MPE/iX:
> newsgroup: <A HREF="news:comp.sys.hp.mpe">comp.sys.hp.mpe</A>
> mailing list: <A HREF="http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html">3000-L</A>
> (the newsgroup and mailing list are basically identical to each other)
>
> - HP 9000:
> newsgroup: <A HREF="news:comp.sys.hp.hpux">comp.sys.hp.hpux</A>
>
> ...
>
>
> Hey...maybe this can be brought up a HPWORLD? :)
>
> --
> Stan Sieler [log in to unmask]
> www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html www.sieler.com
>
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>
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