Hi Guys,
The forums are a really great source of information, however working online seems somewhat slow even using a fast internet connection, searching takes a long time and is often frustrating.
Is there any chance of making the contents downloadable in some shape or form (excuse the pun), I know of other forums that support offline readers and some of those that don't have weekly snapshots that can be downloaded.
Regards
John
John,
We am going to get with the team that manages that and will get some more information. We have heavy integrated with the forums to help make sure questions get answers and to allow you to have just one sign-on and not have separate user-names and passwords from the main site.
A few tricks I use…
1. We get indexed by Google pretty well and you can use specific search terms to make sure you zero on on our site. In the google search bar type in the below text. You can change the GDI+ to whatever you want to search for and it makes sure the results are always from our forums. Note that there is a space before the GDI+ search term.
Desktop Edition 3.0
site:gis.thinkgeo.com/Support/DiscussionForums/tabid/143/aff/21/ GDI+
Web Edition 3.0
site:gis.thinkgeo.com/Support/DiscussionForums/tabid/143/aff/12/ GDI+
2. I subscribe to the forums to get the e-mail as messages are posted. I have a rule in outlook to place them in a subfolder and after awhile you get quite a little collection you can quickly search using you mail client.
David
John,
Another thing I wanted to run my the community was this option.
We are thinking of creating a zip file which has all of the topics as single HTML files inside of file folders by forum. In this way you can unzip them on your drive and then use Windows or whatever search tool to find phrases or whatever and then view the files. We would re-generate the zip file daily or weekly. What do you think? We have so many international users that this kind of searching, while low tech, will find what you are looking for an I think be very useful.
David
Hi David,
That would be fine for me, good old grep will do the searching…
John
David,
Thanks for your sharings on this.
Yale
John,
Before we do this we are working on getting our stuff indexed on demand through Google. I guess they have a search system that we can participate in and they will ensure the stuff gets indexed much more quickly. If this works out then we will want to go down this path as creating the offline files would be a bit more to support and having all the pages in Google would be better and you can view them using the cache as well so it doesn’t need to hit our site.
David