I've run into an obstacle, and just now I spent a half hour looking around and it's still an obstacle: I can't find groups that are about things I'm interested in.
I don't mean in general. It's easy to find random groups all over the place, and some of them are about things I'm interested in. But if I have an interest in mind, finding out if there's a group that talks about it is practically impossible. The "Find Group" feature seems, as far as I can tell, to only help if you already know the title of the group you're looking for. How do you find groups if you don't know whether they exist? How do you list groups that may be relevant?
I want to find whether there's a group that talks about African music, for example. And to list what other groups there are here about music. I want to find what group (if any) talks about election reform... and what other groups there are about US politics. I want to find groups to talk about cool new computer technology. etc.
Either this functionality has been completely left out of gather, or it has been obfuscated to the point where I couldn't find it in a half hour of searching.
And I don't want to publish most of the articles I have in mind to publish, before I find the groups those articles would be most relevant in.
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Comments: 6
It's much too indirect, roundabout, and luck of the draw.
Actually useful features might be:
1. Search group descriptions for words
2. Allow groups to be tagged, and list groups by tag
3. Search articles for words and list the groups those articles appear in, sorted by how many articles were in each group (so, if you search for "foo bar baz" and one group has 50 articles matching that search, another has 20, and four more have one each, it'd list those groups in that order.
I would add to your suggestions, if I may:
4. The ability to sort the results alphabetically, most recent first, oldest first, largest first, smallest first, or by activity.
5. Provide a simple index showing a list sorted alphabetically with Group Topic: Subtopic: Groupname. Groupnames should be hot links to the proper page for each group,
Groups still have small numbers of persons in them (as a rule).
Many of the best articles haven't been linked to a group, so my alternative suggestion is to go with the tags - the "metadata" authors provide with their articles. In the search box, type "tag:____", like tag:election or tag:african or tag:software. In each case you're preceding what you want with "tag" and a colon (:), no spaces. Election seems to get pretty good results.
Ron Hall said: Ofer, I share that frustration. What I do occasionally is go to Browse Groups, and click the "see all" (or whatever it says).
I found if I put just the first letter "A" , "B", ...."G" ...."R" ...... the search will return a list of groups beginning with that letter of the alphabet.
You can use tags to find groups that interest you. Clicking on any tag will give you a page containing articles, images members, and groups that use that tag. You can also add tags directly in to your web browser address bar by adding the tag following the Gather URL like this - www.gather.com/insert-your-tag-here.
Here's an example, use "www.gather.com/music" in the address bar will give a page that contains all the articles, images, groups, and members who use the tag "music".
When on this page you can click the link in above each section to see more of these things that are associated with the particular tag word you have chosen.
We're working to make this easier. I hope this help as we continue to work on this.
Jim Bostick - Gather User Experience Architect
I think the layout is too busy and confusing, overall. It's hard to find anything you don't already know is supposed to be there. Since I didn't know groups got tagged, I didn't know to look for that part of the page.