e-survey Forum

I may have said this before:

Can you look at switching the forum over to a PHP-based bulletin board such as IP board www.invisionpower.com or similar?

This would allow for better searching, the ability to privately contact contributors, and email notifications of updates on threads (among other things).

There is an added cost, but it is not prohibitive ($400-800p.a. depending on license and whether you want continual upgrades) and this includes full support and upgrades. For $200 you can buy the basic license and opt out of the upgrade package which equals minimal on-going costs.

Not high costs based on the benefit, and the slick interface may encourage greater use of the forum.

Helpdesk staff could use the forum to answer general questions, and private message users with specific solutions. Helpdesk staff could direct users to the forum for help and free up call lines.

While on the topic, I would use a IM-based (Instant Messaging) help desk if one were set up. Once again there are inexpensive IM products on the market designed for help-desk solutions.

Just some ideas. Landonline is cutting-edge in many respects. The forum/help desk is not quite up to the same level of advancement.

That said, I applaud the help desk staff. The Landonline help desk is the most customer-friendly and knowledgeable I have ever dealt with. kudos.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. As you will be aware, we are about to pilot the use of Wiki software for six weeks during the e-survey prioritisation pilot.

Another issue with this forum is that it takes too long for posts to be moderated / posted. I have found that recently, I have doubled-up on posting as I noticed that it had been too long since my post, that I assumed that something had gone wrong, so I made another similar post. Then both posts turned up.

Probably more importantly, if someone is waiting for input to allow them to progress their job, they have to wait for their own post to be posted, then additional time for a respondent's post to be posted. The initial post and the reply may take readers only a few hours or a couple of days, but the moderation process may extend that by a week or more. Definitely undesireable.

My point being - if a forum is to be moderated, it needs to be actively monitored for activity.

(I suspect that this leads back to Graham's suggestion - if the forum is not to be actively monitored, then the moderator needs to receive alerts from the forum when articles are posted)