Hi Tim, Thanks for following up on my email!
According to my profile on the Flex Community website, I joined on June 30, 2014. My name is "Jack Haverty", my email is k3...@arrl.net, and my profile URL is http://getsatisfaction.com/people/jack_haverty_6654904 Seems like your search should have been able to find me. I did just poke around a bit in My Profile, and found the check boxes to enable things like getting an email when someone posts a reply. I checked that, but still don't know how to find the posting I made back in June to see if anyone answered it. But at least now maybe I'll get something if anybody answers. That profile page also mentions that posts are available through RSS, headlined "Get RSS feeds". It offers me a "fun explanation" of RSS in a 2007 Youtube video. But there are no details of how to get Community posts via RSS. I know what RSS is; I was there when we defined the NNTP protocol. What I need are the specific URLs for the Flex community feeds. I tried using the Community to solve that problem. Posting "How do I get an RSS feed?" produced 2206 allegedly relevant conversations. The first few weren't relevant to my question, but the third one was "RSS URLs for Flex Community Categories?", which seemed promising so I dove into that. It's an old thread, last touched 6 months ago. But it did lead me to the final post, which says "After digging, and digging, and digging.... There is only ONE RSS feed available. https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics.rss"; Well, one is better than nothing, so I put that RSS URL into my current favorite newsreader (Thunderbird), and sure enough it is a live feed. It produced a page of posts, with the most recent from yesterday. There are 20 posts in the feed, dating back to 12/31/2013. That number seems a little small for 8 months worth of community activity. Looking at the newsfeed posts, and looking at today's Home page on community.flexradio.com, there's very little correspondence between the two. It's almost like they're showing totally different community conversations. Digging a little deeper, it appears that the newsfeed posts are only the first post in a new conversation. Each contains a link to the Community website, where you can see any replies that might have occurred. But it appears that such replies do not get sent out on the newsfeed at all. E.G., there was a posting in May 2014, and several subsequent replies, but only the first post appeared in my newsfeed. This is not a newsfeed of posts. It seems to be more accurately described as a newsfeed of notifications of the creation of new conversations, each of which can have may posts. To see more than just the first post of any conversation, you must go to the website. So, there apparently are no "RSS feeds" from the Community. Or am I still missing something? I also have inordinate difficulty with the built-in search engine. It seems to generate an awful lot of noise. For example, when I post "How do I use this forum?" I'm presented with 2272 results. The top result is a post you made a year ago, which is on topic but not very rich on any details. The second result has to do with the HelpDesk, which I guess is marginally related to the question I posed. The third result is "How do I use an external keyer with SmartSDR?", which seems unlikely to be relevant at all. I didn't bother looking at any of the other 2269 suggested answers to my question. Life is too short. The tip to use "Tim - W4TME" as a search term is a good one. That's the kind of thing that belongs in that non-existent "How to Use The Flex Community" guide. Of course you have to know exactly what a particular user's name looks like. When I receive mail, new mailboxes are easily added to my contacts list, so I don't have to remember them - but is there a way to search the Flex Community members list to find a particular user's correct name for searching, if, for example, I know someone's email or callsign but not their Community Name? I just tried Googling 'community.flexradio.com roadmap "Steve - N5AC"', guessing that "Steve - N5AC" would be the right search term. It worked - I got a whole bunch of results that looked relevant. So far so good. The top one on the list is "Announcements - FlexRadio Systems Community", and the excerpt says "The roadmap details our software development..." This sounded interesting, so I clicked the link. I arrived however at the Community webpage for "All Announcements" - not the page containing that particular announcement with the text from Steve. There are 22 announcements. One of them might be the one that Google reported in the search results. But I guess I have to open each one in turn and see if it is the one I'm trying to find. I don't know why that link didn't take me directly there. I hope this helps explain why I find the Community "tedious". Too much work to get too much noise, not enough signal. I agree that there are some workarounds for some of the limitations of the Flex Community. Yes, I can save a conversation web page in HTML. But then I'll have to invent some way of naming the files, organizing them into folders, updating each such saved conversation as new posts emerge, and otherwise do all the things that my mail software has done for decades. Tedious. Yes, I can do a lot of things in a browser. But other organizations have seen the value of making applications which are optimized for a specific task, such as mail, newsfeeds, etc. Some of these are quite powerful, and available on multiple platforms. E.G., Google Mail provides a very powerful web interface for use with any browser. They also have made apps optimized for use on tablets and phones. Other function-specific apps run on Windows, Macs, Linux, etc - such as Thunderbird which I currently use on my desktop, and K9 which I use on my phone and tablet. These apps work quite well on small screens. It's even possible to use text-to-speech facilities if you prefer. You can view the same mail streams and archives using different apps on different platforms, using whichever is best for your situation at the time. If the Flex Community conversations were accessible through mailing lists or newsfeeds, I could use any of those powerful existing applications to participate. So could everyone else. I casually track a lot of SDR activity since I'm interested in it. I even built some SDR systems before I retired. In addition to blogs and wikis, I monitor a bunch of forums, e.g., SDR-Radio, HPSDR, Apache, KC9XG-SDR, SDR-Users, and of course FlexRadioSmartSDR and Flexradio. All of this material comes into my mail/news software, which does an excellent job of organizing it for me, allowing me to manipulate it efficiently. The Flex Community conversations unfortunately remain outside, since I haven't been able to figure out any practical (i.e., non-tedious) way to plug them in. Like many others, I monitor all these conversations to help me use my current radio equipment better, and to help me decide what to buy next. It has worked quite well. Now I'm finding that it is still easy to keep track of what's happening in the SDR world ... except for Flex. That's too bad, since I really am interested. It's just that the new world of The Community has made it much harder to stay "in the loop" about Flex, compared to the old forums. I find the workarounds too much of a chore - too tedious to use, and too much noise. So I've noticed that I just don't use the Community, even though I use my Flex-3000 a lot - it's my *only* HF radio, worked almost 200 countries with it using just a dipole, and used it in many contests over the last 5 years. If this is the new world of "Customer Engagement", count me as a Customer who declines to be "Engaged" this way... It's encouraging that you've discussed some of the problems with the developers of the Community software. And of course discouraging that they've made no commitment to do anything about it. If I were you, I'd look for another software vendor. 73, /Jack de K3FIV > Jack, > > I am sorry that you are having issues using the Community. I have some > answers to your questions and comments in-line below. > > Tim Ellison, W4TME > Customer Experience Manager > FlexRadio Systems^(TM) > 4616 W Howard Ln, Suite 1-150 > Austin, TX 78728 > Phone: 512-535-4713 Ext. 223 > Email: t...@flexradio.com <mailto:t...@flexradio.com> > Web: www.flexradio.com <http://www.flexradio.com> > > > On 9/2/2014 3:14 PM, Jack Haverty wrote: >> On 09/02/2014 10:41 AM, Neal Campbell wrote: >>> The email reflectors are things of the past, Flex uses its community >>> website for all customer interaction (and many of its customers do also). >>> Go to community.flexradio.com and sign up! >> I signed up for the Flex community website a while ago and found it very >> tedious to use. > Jack - I did a user search on you call, your name (first and last) and > your e-mail address and did not find you in the Community's list of > users. Are you subscribed under a different e-mail address and used a > alias for your user name? To be able to access some of the feature you > want to use, you have to be subscribed to the Community. >> Rudimentary "search" ability - e.g., no way to search >> for messages from a particular author. No way to filter messages, >> e.g., to hide, or flag, or tag, messages I've already read. No way to >> order messages, e.g., by date or author, etc. > That is correct, these are not core features of the Community software. > We have addressed it with the developers of the software, but we have no > commitment that for them to implement these types of features. >> No way to save, > To save an article, right click on the open article and select Save > As... You can save it in HTML format >> forward, > You can send a topic via e-mail or a wide variety of social media > options (~300) by clicking on any of the small icons in the post question. > >> or print, a message. > To print an article, right click on the open article and select Print >> No way to read messages except through a browser - >> in contrast to my desktop, tablet and smartphone where there are many >> quite good custom apps for handling mail efficiently. > Jack, Community is not a "mail" based system; it is a web based > application designed for customer engagement, so the capabilities you > refer to are not inherent in the capabilities of the community; a web > browser is required. I use my tablet to view the Community as a web > page while traveling on business. I agree it is a little tedious to use > an small screen device like a smart phone, but I don't think an app > would solve the screen real estate issue either. >> >> I searched for a way to set up a forwarder so that messages would be >> sent automatically to my regular mailbox, where I know how to do all of >> those things plus more. Couldn't find any way to do it. > When you post a reply or start a topic, you are automatically subscribed > and will receive e-mail notifications when there is new activity on your > post. You can subscribe to other posts individually or to entire > categories by adding it to your profile configuration. You can also > subscribe to the RSS feeds as well. Here is a URL that describes how to > "follow" topics: > https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/help/managing-email-notifications/ >> The "how to >> use the community" information posted by Flex is minimal at best. No >> answers there. > The intent if the how to use the Community page is a basic introduction, > not a comprehensive post for using all aspects of the community. >> >> Shortly after I signed up I posted a question about something. There >> may have been replies. But now I can't remember exactly how I posed >> the question, and I can't find that "conversation". There's no >> "SentMail" folder to capture all the messages I have sent, and no way to >> carbon-copy my mailbox as I send something. > See my comments above on following conversations. It sounds like the > replies may have ended up in your junk e-mail folder. >> >> It also seems that the Flex Community materials are somehow hidden from >> search engines. If I Google "flexradio.biz haverty", I get a list of >> postings I've made on this list. If I Google "community.flexradio.com >> youngblood" to see what the company president has said, I get nothing >> except a pointer to community.flexradio.com. > I just did a Google search on "community.flexradio.com GPSDO" and it > returned 24 relevant "hits" from the Community. Only the user alias is > in the HTML of the post, not the full name so Google will not return > posts using the search criteria you listed above. However, if you use > the Community user alias, in my case "Tim - W4TME", hundreds of hits are > returned. >> >> It's possible that I just didn't spend enough time to figure out how to >> do any of these things. But I find that I don't log in much at all, >> and when I do there's such a hodgepodge of stuff that it's hard to see >> if there's anything of interest since I last looked. >> >> Am I missing something? Is there a way to get a "feed" of the >> community messages into email, or a newsfeed, or any other such >> mechanism that is commonly used in the Internet? > Yes, see my comment about how to follow posts using RSS feeds above >> >> >> 73, >> /Jack de K3FIV >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> FlexRadio Systems Mailing List >> FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz >> To opt out of the Reflector: >> http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz > > _______________________________________________ > FlexRadio Systems Mailing List > FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz > To opt out of the Reflector: > http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz > _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz To opt out of the Reflector: http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz
