Not planned XF2 - Move Help, Contact & TOS Elements into Main Nav

Gladius

Gladius

Well-known member
Please move (or duplicate) the small Contact Us, TOS and Help links from the bottom right on top into the nav bar because literally nobody is looking for them down there or even notices them where they are. This (especially Help and Contact) is something that needs to be right on top by default because you want everyone to see it, maybe under an "Info" tab or something like that.
 
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The bottom is a pretty standard location for these style of links -- they're the sort of "sitemap links". That said, there wouldn't be anything from preventing you adding them yourself via the navigation manager.
 
I know I can do it myself, that wasn't the suggestion. :D I'm trying to cut down the list of things that I need to do myself. ;)

Putting something that nobody ever looks at like the privacy policy and TOS is kind of standard at the bottom, but a contact form and help? Not really. Every time I link someone to the help, they comment that they never noticed it "down there". Same with the contact form. This isn't something that anyone would look for in that bottom corner.

I mean, isn't the whole point of help to have people notice and read it, especially those who need it? Because where it is now, people evidently don't. Just sayin'...
 
Out of the box, the help pages are more "policy" pages or quite minor pages (smilies and BB codes, which are generally discoverable in other ways). I would definitely say that contact is another common thing to put at the bottom of the page as well.

I think this might depend a bit on your specific needs. You can create a tab to cover this stuff in XF2 if you want. (I suppose it was possible in XF1, but a much bigger deal as it was all hand written.)

As is, I don't see us doing this out of the box, so I'm going to tag this as "Not Planned". Of course, there's always a chance that we can be persuaded if others share this opinion, though in this particular case, I don't think it's likely to come as standard.
 
That's another problem, really -- the help is not much help at all by default and needs considerable expansion to be, well, helpful. We've partially done this ourselves but relatively complex software like XF should have help at least on the same level that the final versions of vB3 had. Many people new to XF don't understand even something as basic as how to send a PM... because obviously there's no way for them to know that a PM is a "conversation" in XF because it's not explained anywhere. And that's just one of the more obvious issues that I see all the time.
 
Gladius said:
because obviously there's no way for them to know that a PM is a "conversation" in XF because it's not explained anywhere
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At the top-right of the navigation bar, there are three links: [User], Inbox, and Alerts. Opening the Inbox dropdown shows Conversations and Start a New Conversation or clicking Inbox brings one to the full conversations page, where "conversation(s)" is plastered in a few different places. It's pretty easy to put two and two together (to make four). :)
 
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Neither you nor I are the inexperienced users who need help in this regard so your post is really quite pointless. It's usually incorrect to assume that something is "pretty easy" for everyone based on an advanced user's experience.
 
Gladius said:
Neither you nor I are the inexperienced users who need help in this regard so your post is really quite pointless. It's usually incorrect to assume that something is "pretty easy" for everyone based on an advanced user's experience.
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Gladius said:
I know I can do it myself, that wasn't the suggestion. :D I'm trying to cut down the list of things that I need to do myself.
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XF cannot serve you everything on a platter. As a forum admin its your job to help your users understand features available with guides, faq's and expanding help pages. They have given you the tools, you just need to use it and not be lazy/expect others to do it for you.
 
Don't be ridiculous, it shouldn't be an admin's job to have to provide instructions on how to use the software he's paid for. That's not the case with any other software and it shouldn't be with XF either. If you're happy to waste your time on providing missing documentation for a paid product -- all the power to you. Some of us actually have more respect for our time and higher expectations of a paid product, however.
 
I'm not sure what linking to that is supposed to mean, other than you haven't actually looked at it? As Mike has noted: "Out of the box, the help pages are more "policy" pages or quite minor pages (smilies and BB codes, which are generally discoverable in other ways)."

The actual help is missing to a large extent, only a handful of features are hastily described.
 
Software developers can't be expected to cover every possible scenario a user may come across. It is absolutely, as @Divvens points out, the forum owner's responsibility to create tutorials and the like on how to use said features. After all, it is their forum, not the software developers'.
 
What are you talking about? How is providing a help system describing the core software functionality and features "expected to cover every possible scenario a user may come across"?

Please don't keep making things up for the purposes of posting more nonsense and selling your opinions as fact.

Help on the level of http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/faq.php?faq=vb3_board_faq should definitely have been included once XF matured and if XF2 isn't high time to catch up on it then I don't know when it'll be.

@Kier will remember our heated debate on the same topic for vB3; I was happy with the outcome then.
 
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