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Welcome to the new Perch Forums

If you are reading this message you are on the new Perch Forums, part of our relaunched support system.

First things first, we’re not importing all of the old content. Partly because it’s a whole lot of work to do that, but also because a lot of the time old threads were being dug up and causing confusion. We’ll be keeping the archived forum around for a good while - see the archived forum link above - so don’t worry if there is something in there that you need to reference. If you want to continue a discussion you were having there just include the link to it when you post and we’ll read back.

We hope these new forums will make Perch Support a much nicer place for staff and Perchers. Behind the scenes we now have tools to see the posts we are responding to and also see which posts have had no responses. This was something we didn’t have with the old forums. It meant that on busy days posts got missed. We know how frustrating it is not to get an answer or for someone to appear to drop your post - it was never intentional and the new forum should stop that happening.

When posting you can mark something as a Question or a Conversation. Questions add the ability to mark a response as “solving” your problem. We would love you to do that as it helps people searching the forums to see which answer fixed that issue if they are having the same problem.

Marking a reply as the solution will award a point to the person who gave the right answer. Drew is pretty convinced that he is going to win on points but it will be interesting to see which non-staff Perchers are picking up points as well. To help you see who s answering your questions we also have a bird icon for staff users and a feather for anyone who is part of our Registered Developer Programme.

Rather than having separate forums the navigation list is essentially a filter on tags, if when making a post you add the relevant tags it will help people find posts more easily.

You can format your posts and replies using Markdown, we’re very pleased as this means that code will be formatted nicely. Add four spaces before the start of your code and it will be formatted as code and highlighted. It should be far easier for you to read our responses when they include code.

As before we expect that the majority of questions and problems will be posted to the forum. We’ve moved “private tickets” to email using Snappy. If we are helping you and realise you need to post private information such as your full Diagnostics Report or some other detail about your hosting we’ll ask you to contact us either via the Snappy widget or just via email. If general questions are emailed we will redirect them to the forum as the help given then forms a resource for everyone and forum support will take priority to anything else so you’ll get the fastest response from posting there.

Let us know what you think of the new forums, we hope this will be a good platform from which to develop the community side of things of Perch. We’d love to hear your suggestions for future developments!

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points

  • 7 years ago

Great job !

Looks great! Will there be any way of getting notifications of new comments on threads.... or is that automatic now?

Well done! Can't wait to start using it!

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Clive Walker said:

Looks great! Will there be any way of getting notifications of new comments on threads.... or is that automatic now?

As in email notifications? It doesn't do that yet, but if there's demand we can look at adding it.

Yes, email notifications. I've certainly found them useful.

+1 for email notifications - very useful

Yes I would like email notifications please. Great new forum, thanks.

This looks really nice and clean, and yes email notification would be a nice touch.

If there aren't email notifications how else could we know there has been a response? "Checking back" seems antiquated.

lovely UI - well done!

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points
Perch Support

Notification request noted! We're looking at it.

Glad you all generally like the new forums, we're really happy to have been able to switch as they are so much easier to use as Perch Staff.

The basic forum is a fork of the Laravel.io project (discussion boards for Laravel). Richard Bagshaw has been working with us to implement the Perch specific bits. Finding a good forum solution is really difficult so we were pleased to find this to use as a starting point.

It's so nice to see the new forums in action, inspires me to rebuild my own site in Perch so I can be part of this awesome community :)

Rich

Another +1 for notification emails on threads being watched. I'd also like to see 'view unread posts' and 'mark forums read' functions. Its very helpful when diving into a forum at the start of the day and being able to see what's changed since the last visit. The forums are a huge improvement and so much nicer and easier to use. Thanks!

Graham

Another suggestion ... Having 'last update date/time' on the list of forum threads would also be very helpful in trying to identify what threads have changed since I last visited. At the moment, I right-click on all the ones from the top downwards - until I reach one I think I've seen before.

The new forums are great, but notifications would be even better.

I’ve also just noticed Rachel gave me the solution to a problem and I can’t mark it as so, however I can mark my reply to her as the solution.

How does marking as the solution work, can only an admin mark someone else’s reply as the solution?

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points
Perch Support

How does marking as the solution work, can only an admin mark someone else’s reply as the solution?

There was an issue with marking as Solution, hopefully it is fixed now. Notifications are just being tested and should be deployed before too long.

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points
Perch Support

I'd also like to see 'view unread posts' and 'mark forums read' functions. Its very helpful when diving into a forum at the start of the day and being able to see what's changed since the last visit.

Another suggestion ... Having 'last update date/time' on the list of forum threads would also be very helpful in trying to identify what threads have changed since I last visited. At the moment, I right-click on all the ones from the top downwards - until I reach one I think I've seen before.

Yes I think we'll need to implement some way to see what is read/new. We'll have a think about the best way to do that.

It would be handy to display the forum post title in the <title> as now all Forum pages appear as "Perch Forum", which makes searching in history, browsing through tabs and bookmarking not as convenient as it could.