What's Up With This? Gather needs an online forum!

Digital Dogs... I cannot address your issues with the group search function. I think everyone on Gather knows that it sucks. However, I can make finding groups a little easier for you, and everyone else. I have created a categorized index of all Gather groups, which will be going live tomorrow. I have broken down all groups by genre, or interest, with links to each group, and vital stats.

Note: There are significant changes planned for groups in June (that is what I heard). This is supposed to address all of our present concerns.

Bless you Kevin! What a service that is to all of us. I am looking forward to this article. What group(s) will it be posted to?

Gary, The most efficient method was to make the directory into it's own group. Each article will then represent a genre, or interest. Some groups will appear in more than one category. For example, poetry groups have their own category, but also appear under general writing.

I feel your pain. I can tell you that we are working on several enhancements to alleviate most of the issues you mention here. Some highlights include better search mechanisms for groups as well as images and people. We are also planning significant enhancements to our navigation to make frequently used pages and features more accessible.

As for the problems you are having with article editing, we're looking in to this problem. The occurrences of this are both very recent and rare. One thing to try is to refresh the article editor screen if it appears plank and your article and image access should return in the editor. This has worked for others who reported similar problems with editing an article. If this problem persists for you please send an email describing what images are missing (include the original image file names and when you published them if possible) from specific articles to support@gather.com and we'll attempt and recover your content if possible.

We're working hard to keep up on enhancements based on Gather member feedback so please continue to publish articles like this to the Building a Better Gather group . This group is where the Gather team continuously reviews member thoughts, issues, and ideas as we plan the evolution of all Gather features.

Jim Bostick - User Experience Architect at Gather.com

by the way, Building a Better Gather can be found at improve.gather.com.

I spent an hour browsing all the groups last weekend. Many have only one member, the founder. These were not posted simply to snag Subject areas in advance of Gather's breakout moment. They've been out there for months and have failed to attract any members. Many are personal items, like a group for a family member or other subjects that have nothing whatsoever to do with good writing.
I thought the intention of Groups was to create areas where articles of quality that might be lost in the ratings process can get a second chance at good exposure. I don't believe groups were intended as an Internet within the Net, eventually becoming so scattered as to ruin the concept of Gather.
A few online forums would be ideal not only for FAQ's but the chatter that threatens to swamp Gather with trivia.

Right on DD. Good comments and suggestions that I agree with. In addition, try finding a member you are not connected to by using the connect search key - it returns a limited list of people with the first name "Steve" for example, with no way to ask for more.
On the other hand, I have been a member here for a long time and I've seen Gather respond to and improve this site at what I would consider a remarkable pace. So I'm confident that many of our current issues will get resolved and new ones will appear as the numbers, geographic spread and complexity increases.
To solve Errol's problem how about classifying groups - public versus private,

I hear you.

"I would also like to see a complete alpha listing of all Gather groups somewhere on the site. Does that exist? If it does it all but hidden from a Gather user's view." DITTO on that one.
I think there are so many similar groups because, just as you stated, people cannot find them.

I agree 100% with Errol Lincoln Uys. G

And another thing for the wish list:
- a "favorites" or "bookmarks" tab that would allow me to collect links to Gather articles I want to revisit later

And no one from Gather has responded to my request for additional options for publishing/editing articles. Those seem like "gimme" ideas. I'm surprised they're not available options and even more surprised at the lack of response from Gatherites regarding that.

I do appreciate the responses from Kevin & Jim - thank you guys! Keep up the good work.

is anybody listening?

Digital Dogs...

1) FYI, I don't work for Gather...I am a member, just like you.

2) The lack of response to your great ideas may be due to the fact that they have been brought up before, in various forms, and the community assumes that Gather will address them in the next release.

3) I agree with having better documentation, and a searchable database, as a forum would provide. Until that becomes a reality however, you might try using the Gather Help Forum (I'm too lazy to do a hyperlink right now). You can usually get a fairly quick response from other members there, and they might be able to direct you where to look, or minimally share in your frustration.

thanks muchly Kevin!
You're such a good Gatherite that I thought you worked for them.

I love the idea of a forum, however forums are resource intensive and it looks like Gather is still experiencing growing pains. Also, phpBB in particular because it is open source-- is updated often [meaning system updates are required about 6 times yearly] and easily hacked because it is so popular. I know because I have one.

All of that said... I think the more informal discussions Gather members are having would work really well in the forum environment.

I do agree that a phpBB, or some sort of forum, would be nice to both have a place to directly ask questions and find answers as well as a better place to be able to just chat with other members so that can be sepearted from articles, stories, and the comments and discussions that come after.

DD, have you thought about composing your articles in your favorite word processing program, then copying and pasting it?

A tip regarding images that I stumble on (I have certainly NOT seen this guideline posted officially anywhere on the site!) - resize them to about 550 pixels in width before posting, this seems to be the ideal size for the site.

Jim;

the lousy navigation is killing the energy of Gather.. I've sent a number of people here and all left shaking heads wondering..

needs to be addressed soonest.
Lloyd

Good comments, DD and nice to hear from Jim.

I hate to always be gripey about the functionality of the site but I agree with DD that almost everything she asked for seems like a gimme.

Jake, I like your new avatar!

I do all my writing for my Gather articles in a text editor without formatting and then paste the text into the Gather text editor and format & add my outside links there. But as I mentioned the Gather text editor leaves out too many obviously necessary edit functions. I have PM'd the Gather PTB and have made requests about the problems I've written about in this article. They have responded telling me they are working on another release, but I have yet to see any changes implemented.

Adding a few additional edit functions seems to me to be a pretty simple task and I've no idea why this hasn't been done yet... especially considering I wrote this article 6 weeks ago. Sadly I also haven't noticed any changes in the Gather 'search' function... which desperately needs help.

What I have noticed, as many comments above have also mentioned, is that there are more groups being started each day that focus on subjects that already have copious groups on those same subjects! WHY?

Having duplicate groups that all focus on the same subject, with no way to differentiate between them will only serve to further divide our readership - not increase it. In the end this will only weaken Gather's strength.

I only hope that TPTB at Gather will wake up and begin some sort of edit process for new groups before these new duplcate groups can be started by any newbie who joins and can't find an appropriate group to publish their articles to (considering how poor the search function is, it's not surprising this is happening so frequently).

I certainly hope that someone in Gather's PTB group is actually reading this thread - and trying to respond to the issues we raised in this conversation.

DD- You have given voice to a lot of ideas that most of us have been just thinking. I came to this article backwards through embedded references in other articles. I am especially keen on Gather providing a compatible and full-featured offline editor. The suggestion for providing a shareable "favorites" or "bookmarks" tab rings bell with me.

One more thing I would like to add to the wish list is an easier mode of navigation for the comments section running into numerous pages.

Great suggestions Dolphi! And to add to the 'publish an article' page... I would also like to have all the groups listed on our 'groups' page in alpha, the way it is right now makes it very hard to be sure you've selected the correct groups to publish artilces to. Turning the list into alpha has to be one of the easiest coding tasks of all.