[Sticky] a little update on some things to come  

RE: a little update on some things to come

I came here to ask the same question.  No reply button in those posts... and why is posting not in dedicated categories allowed anyway?

RE:

looks like image upload is restricted to the size, would be nice to upload higher resolution images.

Post-processing of the image failed likely because the server is busy or does not have enough resources.
Uploading a smaller image may help. Suggested maximum size is 2500 pixels.

Nowadays making photo with a phone camera in 8k is quite normal.

RE: a little update on some things to come

It seems like this is attracting a few other suggestions, so hopefully this is the right place: I understand the need to prevent spam, but disabling PMs by default until a certain number of posts is reached is not the best way to do that. Particularly given the purpose-driven nature of these forums, it encourages meaningless posting just in order to unlock the ability to send or reply to PMs. At a minimum, a moderator/admin/etc. PMing you should unlock your ability to reply automatically, and ideally anyone who's made a purchase should be able to immediately PM as well.

RE:

Glad to see you posting, and thank you for asking!

And, since you did...

The primary issue that I see with the forums is not the format, or the content, but the frequency (or lack of frequency) of interaction from Prusa. This is not a criticism of you, as you are only one person, and can't engage across such a large foot print, but what I have seen is users will come to the forums for help with problems that they can't get traction on with support. This is a great use of the community, and many open source / hybrid source companies will use forums to get the power of the community supplementing their own support efforts.

HOWEVER, for newly released products, an unsupervised forum becomes the blind leading the blind - people are chasing down rumors of fixes to self-diagnosed issues which drives frustration. Having a team of internal experts monitoring "hot threads" to be able to jump in with tested advice would go a long way to helping these folks, and reducing FUD around the products. This thread is a great case in point: https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/original-prusa-i3-mmu2s-mmu2-hardware-firmware-and-software-help/i-found-serious-design-error-in-mmu2-electronics-hardware/paged/2/ Someone from Prusa could have waded into this early on and saved a lot of people a lot of pain.

At a minimum, in other similar companies that I have worked with, product managers will monitor the community forums for their products, especially in the month immediately after release. Doing so helps in developing customer empathy, identifying issues not raised in testing, understanding pain points that can be addressed with knowledge base articles (PETG on an MMU, anyone?), and increasing customer perception of being heard. 

In general, Prusa as a company has the problems of success - it has helped 3D printing cross the chasm from early adopters to reaching the early majority. As a consequence, it has attracted the attention of aggressive competition, while grappling with the quality and delivery issues that come with production scale, for an audience that has less patience for complex or unstable technology. Of these issues, supporting your new audience is the easiest to address because it involves a shift of culture rather than capital expenditure - customer enablement as a whole-of-company responsibility, and not reserved for "support" or "forum" employees.

Probably more answer than you were looking for, but the upshot is engagement not features is going to be what takes your forum to the next level, and helps to cool the frustration you see from your user base. I guess I don't need to tell you it's getting hot in here.

Posted by: @same-old-shane

That is just a small list of things. The first 2 will be happening soon and the rest are vauge (yes I know) but are also long term plans. But let me know what you would like to see.

RE: a little update on some things to come

Posted by: @fuchsr

• Have a "stay logged in" option or at least log people out less frequently. 

This please, I might as well be logging in every hour.

RE: a little update on some things to come

For the bits about the file retention, I will see what can be done. Most were removed not to save money / space, but because we noticed somethings and had to take action, but we are working on a way to prevent such things again while keeping forum related files.

RE: a little update on some things to come

In the Mini forum I can't reply to any of the posts that aren't in the dedicated categories.

RE: a little update on some things to come

Hi Shane, thanks for the update! It's great to hear about the upcoming changes, especially the new section for Printables.com – that's going to be super useful. I appreciate the effort to keep the forum engaging and up-to-date. Just a thought – it might be helpful to have a dedicated thread for troubleshooting common 3D printing issues. It could be a go-to resource for quick fixes and tips. Keep up the good work

RE: a little update on some things to come

As a very new user, my most frustrating experience has been trying to search the forum for topics - for example, how to print text on an item with manual filament changes, how to address x/y-axis noise issues, etc.  Searches for "print multicolor text" generate too many results that aren't relevent.  The forums are obviously growing and collecting a lot of great info!

I think an "advanced search" capability where you can "+require" and "-omit", wildcards, etc. would greatly enhance the results.  Maybe this is available and I just don't know it.  It could be more of a fancy "filter" with dropdowns etc., or a regex-style query that's well-documented.

The other frustration which maybe is specific to my browsers (with ad-blockers although I disabled those for Prusa) is that when I try to go to the next page of search results, it just kicks me back to the top level.  Isn't anybody else seeing this?

Thanks for the update!

RE: a little update on some things to come

This is very old issue that you can not select anything after first page in results. I'm surprised it is still as is since update in August 2023.

Personally i just go to google.com and write question ad add 'site:forum.prusa3d.com' to the query to limit results to the forums.

RE: a little update on some things to come

Agree with KaszpiR the forum search is useless, it always has been, I stopped using it years ago in favour of google with the Site: limit.  Finds things much easier.

The built in search appears to be the standard wordpress one so its bundled in with the forum software.

RE:

zomg, the next page in search results works!