Hi Everybody!
It is very gratifying to make a suggestion and find support. Since I still think of myself as being new to this business, I am hesitant, feel at risk, and so greatly appreciate seeing a comment welcomed and put to use.
Risk is inherent in the situation of anyone arriving late upon the developer's good work and suggesting a mid-course adjustment -- entering terrain someone else has already mapped out considerably, messing with someone else's baby, etc. We do it with the understanding that it is ok for someone to say, "now Bruce, the issue is more complicated," or, "we have other priorities here." Assuredly, users of this forum are well aware of this, so maybe all I am doing right now is writing myself an insurance policy against the future, but I think the forum dynamic here quite remarkable and worth identifying as a protocol for our User Advistory Board.
The protocol, as I understand it, includes using the occasion of someone's thread to: a) enriching the understanding of the problem, and b) translating the discussion into a concrete suggestion or bug fix.
As with the previous posts, Dee Dee enriched my understanding by highlighting how I want users to feel free to start new threads, like in the present .LRN forum, and how I would like to amend the interface to educate people to see "threads" as conversations. Her comment reminded me how switching off the new thread feature would help instructors structure the conversation and that this might be a very good thing, too. To answer here question: yes, our group administrators can switch the posting to open, moderated, and closed: my prejudice had swept me right by it.
The comment of Matthias I like very much because he selected relevant features, created concrete suggestions, and entered them into the bugtracker and so onto the next stage in our application development, and thus, demonstrated a powerful mechanism for translating the forum discussion into an enhancement of functionality.
Martin's generous comment at the end, as the "owner" of the thread, has sustained our adventure nicely.
Together, I think these moves suggest a powerful way of working for our little UAB -- something others have likely known for a long time but which we, in our new group, have to establish for ourselves. I hope others agree!
Thanks!
Bruce
