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View Poll Results: Should we merge the CoCreate User Forum into the PTC/USER Portal Site?
Yes, I think the CoCreate forums should be part of the PTC/USER portal 16 18.60%
No, I prefer to keep the CoCreate User Forum separate 70 81.40%
Voters: 86. This poll is closed

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  #1  
Old 06-24-2008, 04:47 PM
John Scheffel's Avatar
John Scheffel John Scheffel is offline
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Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

I have started discussions with the people who manage the PTC/USER web site about merging the CoCreate User Forum into that site. Before we go any further I wanted get some feedback from the people who follow this forum because this decision will affect all of you.

Before you post or vote, I would encourage you to checkout the PTC/User forum at:

http://portal.ptcuser.org/


I have a few concerns about merging with that site.
  • You must register and login to access the PTC/USER forums. It does not allow unregistered viewing as this forum does. I typically see about 10 people viewing this forum for every registered member who is currently logged in.
  • The software they are using (Socius) seems to offer much more than forums, but I don't think the forum portion is as sophisticated as the vBulletin software which we use. The Socius interface is pretty basic and plain, but it does seem to have all the essential features that most people use.
As for me, I don't mind administering this forum, but I also wouldn't mind giving the responsibility to someone else. So I can go either way, but this forum is for the CoCreate user community and I wanted to get your input.

If you care one way or the other please vote and post any comments in this thread. You don't need to be registered or logged in to vote.
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  #2  
Old 06-24-2008, 09:48 PM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

A side-effect of the requirement to log in for access to the forums is that Google and other search engines don't index the site, or at least not the forum parts of it. This is not a big problem for those who already know and frequent the forums, but it makes it a little harder for others to find the forum and get help with problems.

See the attachment for the current list of public discussion groups at the PTC/USER portal.

Just my 2 Euro cents,

Claus
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  #3  
Old 06-25-2008, 12:15 PM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by clausb View Post
Just my 2 Euro cents
Which is worth a lot more that 2 USA cents these days.

I hadn't thought about the searching aspect, but that's a good point. I don't know how many people have found this forum from Google and other web searches, but I would guess that is how most people find it since there aren't many other possiblities. A solution might be to make sure that some CoCreate keywords are attached to the PTC/USER portal home page so that web searches will lead people to it.

Another concern is how the CoCreate forums would be added. I wouldn't want to see all the topics lumped into a single CoCreate forum on the PTC/USER site, but don't know how many CoCreate Forums they would be willing to add. As far as I can tell Socius doesn't support categories or subforums, at least the PTC/USER forum doesn't have any at this time.
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  #4  
Old 06-25-2008, 02:27 PM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Scheffel View Post
Another concern is how the CoCreate forums would be added. I wouldn't want to see all the topics lumped into a single CoCreate forum on the PTC/USER site, but don't know how many CoCreate Forums they would be willing to add. As far as I can tell Socius doesn't support categories or subforums, at least the PTC/USER forum doesn't have any at this time.
I guess we could lose some of our discussion groups without causing too much harm - if you look at the stats, you'll find that only 6 discussion forums have had a significant amount of traffic over the years: CoCreate Modeling (3531 posts), Customization (1684), Annotation (1603), CoCreate Drafting (1213), Data Management (830), Enhancement Requests (401). Oh, and the archives are important as well, of course. I'd definitely want to keep at least those discussion forums.

On the search engine topic: Even if we spice up the PTC/USER portal so that Google finds it more easily, we still have that registration hurdle for new and casual users. IMHO, making registration mandatory for posting is fine, but everybody should be able to read the forums without registering.

So my opinion is that we should explore if we can sort out these technical and organizational issues - and then we can (and should) make an informed decision.

Claus
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  #5  
Old 06-26-2008, 08:28 AM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

The biggest turnoff for me would be mandatory registration to view the forum. That's the main reason I haven't bothered registering on the SolidWorks forum, since even though there *might* be stuff I'd like to read, I really have no way of knowing until I go through the registration process. I'm a member of enough fora that I don't want to add another unless I'm sure it's worth my time.
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  #6  
Old 06-26-2008, 10:43 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Another thing that concerns me about the PTC portal is that it exposes your Email address. With vBulletin you can choose your login name and no one can see your Email address except administrators. This provides some protection from being added to even more spam lists. The PTC portal uses your Email address as your login. When members subscribe to a forum they receive an Email listing all the new posts including the Email address of the poster. See the attached GIF which is a screen shot of an Email I received after subscribing to the "Pro/Engineer CAD" forum (names and Emails changed to protect the innocent).

I guess you could argue that this is much less of a concern on the PTC portal because people must register to view and subscribe, but I was surprised to see poster's Email addresses included in the subscription updates.
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  #7  
Old 06-27-2008, 01:54 PM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

I share many of the concerns already voiced by others here. In many ways I think our existing setup is probably better. However, from my impressions at the PTC/User event it seems that PTC management considers the PTC/User organization, and the specific technical committees which also participate in the PTC portal, to be a very important part of its connection to the user base. They participate in the discussions there and that is the place they will expect to listen to users' issues.

So, it may be that if we really want the attention of PTC and to be full participants in the PTC universe, we just have to be assimilated. Or at least, despite the specific issues raised by others about the relative merits of vBulletin vs. Socius and so forth, it may just be better to join rather than fight.

Then again, maybe we can convince THEM to join US!!!
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  #8  
Old 06-28-2008, 04:41 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by coroto View Post
So, it may be that if we really want the attention of PTC and to be full participants in the PTC universe, we just have to be assimilated. Or at least, despite the specific issues raised by others about the relative merits of vBulletin vs. Socius and so forth, it may just be better to join rather than fight.
Excellent point. For this user group, it will certainly be helpful to make sure you have all the right connections into PTC, and PTC/USER is one way to achieve this.

While this user group will probably want to be associated with PTC/USER in some way, this doesn't have to mean we'd have to give up this forum and website. For instance, the CoCreate user group could become a member of PTC/USER, and have them link to this forum for CoCreate-specific discussions. (Their only CoCreate forum has two or three messages right now...)

So there are two areas of discussions with PTC/USER:
  • Some form of association with them
  • Technical and organizational discussions around the forum sites
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  #9  
Old 06-30-2008, 04:05 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

A forum which is closed for non registered user does hide it's information.

Such a forum does not give the possibility to potential visitors to see what's in. That's bad. And when registering they are asking for a lot of things. I should give e.g. my phone number (??) after they have been giving me such less information about the contents? Such a register-process want to be fooled and they are!

I don't like that way. Privacy is important.


To have a first look I felt forced to use a fake account! That's a bad start and not a good 'welcome' to new users.

ONCE you are registered and logged in the situation differs (it's "edit profile"):

It looks like
* You can change your user name (so not using the email address any more)
* there's a private and a public email address
* detailed address information is NOT required any more
* detail phone number information is NOT required any more

In addition there are 2 check boxes:
* Allow users to view address information
* Allow users to view phone information
IMHO it's not a good idea to have them checked on by default.

which email address will be used now for the notification mails you, John, received, I can not tell about.

EDIT: I found i a little bit later:
Note: Only your Public Email will be displayed to other users. Your Private Email is where all communications (including listserv posts, and file download links) will be sent.
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  #10  
Old 06-30-2008, 05:50 AM
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Lightbulb Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Scheffel View Post
The PTC portal uses your Email address as your login.
This is not true! As I figured out in the meantime. But it's not obvious.

Once you registered. You'll see a window - get an email with written:
Your initial username is: ...
I stumbled about the "initial"!

When logging in you can later change your USERNAME in the profile. So the username is not unique during the "life" of your user account. This is quiet unusual (I assume internally all is linked by the (5 digit) user id, same as we here in VBulletin have a user id, which is invisible most of the time)

After changing your user name your email address will not be shown at those places where USERname is displayed (hopefully)

For the public email address.... hmmm.. what will happen when this address will get invalid?

Summary: you can hide your email address. But you have to figure out how to and and you have to do some manually entries.

for registered users of ptcuser.org only: see 32608 for some (more) information. There's also a PDF file available : goto Category/Topic: PTC/USER Announcements / PTC/USER Profiles, Thread Id: 23166
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  #11  
Old 06-30-2008, 09:03 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by coroto View Post
Then again, maybe we can convince THEM to join US!!!
This might be hard to do , because PTC/USER are using Socious Tools for less than one year now.
"User Group of over 15,000 Members Using Socious Communication Suite"

www.cocreateusers.org has 1012 registered users for now. Since we don't have to sign in just for reading it's hard to count how many people are active. Nevertheless,
  • during the last 365 days 380 users signed in.
  • 308 users posted more than 5 times.
  • 433 of all registered users never ever wrote a posting.
  • there have been 181 new registered users during the last 365 days (the PE version might have an impact here)
these numbers were collected on 29jun2008 with normal user rights
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  #12  
Old 06-30-2008, 10:06 AM
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John Scheffel John Scheffel is offline
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Thanks to everyone for posting. Lots of good information.

Quote:
Originally Posted by clausb View Post
(Their only CoCreate forum has two or three messages right now...)
Where is the CoCreate forum in the PTC/USER portal? I couldn't find it.

I'm hoping they won't setup any CoCreate forums until we decide what to do about merging this forum. One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion. In my opinion that is the worst option for the user community because people will have to post in both forums to get maximum exposure and follow both forums.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang View Post
ONCE you are registered and logged in the situation differs (it's "edit profile"):

It looks like
* You can change your user name (so not using the email address any more)
* there's a private and a public email address
* detailed address information is NOT required any more
* detail phone number information is NOT required any more

In addition there are 2 check boxes:
* Allow users to view address information
* Allow users to view phone information
IMHO it's not a good idea to have them checked on by default.
While it is good that the portal allows you to change your login name and make your info more private, I would agree that the default should be maximum privacy. I also think the portal should prompt for a non-Email user name at registration time instead of expecting people to figure out that they can change it later.

So far not many votes. Of the 12 "No" votes, 6 came from guests (people not logged in). Not too surprising since this change would require that they register. vBulletin has an option to broadcast an Email to all registered users but I don't think I have ever used it. Maybe it's time to give it a try and see if we get more response.
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  #13  
Old 06-30-2008, 11:15 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Scheffel View Post
Where is the CoCreate forum in the PTC/USER portal? I couldn't find it.
You're right, there is none. I got this confused with PTC's own user forums ( http://www.ptc.com/forums/ ).

Quote:
One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion.
Yup - we've got enough fragmentation already.

Quote:
So far not many votes. Of the 12 "No" votes, 6 came from guests (people not logged in). Not too surprising since this change would require that they register.
One of them was mine - for some reason, I wasn't logged in when voting, but noticed it too late, sorry.

I voted 'no' because I think we need to sort out the aforementioned glitches and questions first, not because I'm fundamentally opposed to merging discussion forums.

Claus
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  #14  
Old 06-30-2008, 11:20 AM
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Wolfgang Wolfgang is offline
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Quote:
Originally Posted by John Scheffel View Post
I'm hoping they won't setup any CoCreate forums until we decide what to do about merging this forum. One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion. In my opinion that is the worst option
full agreement!

One thing to clarify is to get known whether PTC/USER would accept a 'no' of the majority of the cocreateusers.org - users ? Sometimes the wording sounds like "we are the one and only PTC forum". I don't like that, but it's more a personal feeling.

Quote:
vBulletin has an option to broadcast an Email to all registered users but I don't think I have ever used it. Maybe it's time to give it a try and see if we get more response.
Yes. it looks like its worth to figure out this possibility.

One remark on the votes: If people are able to vote without logged in.. may be there are also registered users among them... (there ARE )

-----------------------
For your information:

some remarks about the german speaking forum (for those of you german is too difficult ;-) )

http://cad.de
"With currently 83835 registered users CAD.de is the biggest and most active german speaking Community for CAD-CAM-CAE and EDM/PDM/PLM users and people interested in."

CAD.de covers various CAx products. -> http://www.cad.de/forenindex.shtml This is just the CAD index.. there are more on http://CAD.de

There are 6 forums for (former) PTC and 4 forums for (former) CoCreate. There have been a discussion during March 2008 without any decision about moving the cad.de CoCreate forums or not.

Last edited by Wolfgang; 06-30-2008 at 11:26 AM. Reason: I'm too slow for bigger postings. Claus got ahead of me, so I removed some things again.
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  #15  
Old 06-30-2008, 11:32 AM
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Re: Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

Hello - Jeff Zemsky here - PTC/USER Director for Internet Services. John Scheffel forwarded me this thread to add some comments.

Let me start by thanking you for taking the time to comment on this and I will probably forget to comment on everything above so I apologize ahead of time. If anyone has any specific comments or questions please feel free to forward them to me at:

jeffz@ptcuser.org

Let's start with the user account questions. The formality behind the user account has a few roots -
  1. This account provides you with PTC/USER membership.
  2. We use this information to vet the person signing up and confirm that they are not A) a competitor and B) not a spammer. We actually have domain based controls to sort this based upon email address. The following rules are in effect - domains that are competitors are rejected. Domains that are public generic (i.e. Hotmail, google, etc.) are sent to a queue to be verified (by me) that they are human generated and not a spammer or competitor.
  3. PTC/USER actually uses this information during confernce planning and other activites as we look at the demographics of our users. Additionally this information is used by the Regional User Group chairs to find people in their area that might be interested in attending a RUG. This information is never shared or sold.
  4. Email accounts - Up until last year we just used a Lyris listserv interface to communicate and everyone shared email address by default. With our move to Socious we moved to a forum interface that also supported listserv backend (This is optional - the Arbortext forum is setup as a pure forum for example). Even with the pure forum version we give users the option to subscribe via email to get notification and to respond via email if that is your tool of choice. For you web 2.0 people RSS is also available.
    1. Accounts with no email address are assumed to be competitors or spammers and have their accounts deactivated.
  5. Making information public or private - this will be improved over the summer with a project that will increase the granularity of what you can expose as public or private information. (Note this will include several other projects including Blogs
Making Forums public for read-only available without login -

No one has actually asked for this, but I like the idea. Certainly should work for the public forums.

No CoCreate Forum yet -

Yes - we have been working with members of the CoCreate user group (John Scheffel) to help guide the direction that we should go. We look for their guidance on making this effective. It could be as simple as one forum to as complete as migrating over all the existing data and forum topics. Our goal is to provide everyone a voice in the PTC/USER community

What else do we do on the Portal?

The portal contains more than just forums - here is some of the other areas we support
  1. Technical Committees - These are groups that work with PTC product management to set the direction about product development. Discussions and topics range from simple interface issues to complex business process topics and cover all the product range. This gives you a huge insight as to what is coming. The other important aspect is great networking with other users to learn from. Some TCs have also started to put together FAQ, templates, training and other files for the overall community. They can be found on their TC Update pages.
  2. Regional User Groups - Global interface to find and join local RUGs. RUGs have their own forums, file areas, calendars and events. Great place to meet and interact with other close by users.
  3. Files - File sharing for the whole community. Files that are MS Office, PDF or text get indexed and are searchable.
  4. Surveys / Polls - Support both simple surveys and polls for the community. Topics have ranged from "what physcial media do you prefer?" to "what impacts does DRM have your company"
  5. Coming this year are more social networking features, BLOGS, Wiki, and articles
Just some stats - we are over 19,000 members strong

Thank you.

Regards,
Jeff Zemsky
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