Poor old suggested list is very misunderstood.
At the highest priority it shows you any topics with unread posts, then any new posts. Followed by a less interesting algorithm.
It also updates “live” with new and unread topics.
Aha. That is helpful. As with anything else, this makes more sense with use. 
@sam Yeah, we’re so used to things being “suggested” by Google, Amazon and a zillion others for commercial purposes, we’re all a bit gun-shy on that one. Maybe a name change… 
----H
Out of curiosity: any idea about the traffic on the Rhino 5 Ning Forum ?
I think that a couple of numbers would help us to understand how many
users prefer Web forums to newsgroups more than many words.
( I have not been able to guess that by myself, sorry. )
Thanks, cheers - e.
Well, I don’t have any way of getting intermediate statistics, but last week there were ~65 posts, so about 9 a day. However, since its inception, there are 1,234 posts (that statistic is on the front page), if I divide that by 849 days since the forum was started (24 February, 2011), that makes a little less than 1.5 posts a day on average.
----H
The reason I think that isn’t a fair comparison is this: NING was never fully committed to by McNeel, and people tend to stay where the action is. Since NING was always second-fiddle to the NNTP newsgroup, it never stood a chance. Splitting off and testing on NING was probably valuable, but I’m glad they didn’t stick with NING – in addition to being inefficient, it was also owned and fully controlled by outside sources, unlike this forum, which is open source and run on McNeel’s choice of servers. They can tweak it as they like as time moves forward.
EXACTLY! That was my first thought. "Since you bought the movie Alien, maybe you’d also like to purchase “Immigration Policies of the 21st Century”… er… um…
Well, there is one group that runs against a lot of the current arguments - Grasshopper. That thing is a NING group as well and it’s going freakin’ GANGBUSTERS. And I’ve never seen any discussion over there as to how horrible the format is…
----H
I left off “in my opinion.” 
I never took to NING. But yes, GH is a good example of how a web forum will work just fine for a group if you don’t water things down by having multiple groups for the same thing in multiple places. You make a good argument against those claiming that people don’t use the forums as much because NNTP is better. My thinking is that it’s just plain old inertia.
There are also online forums for:
- http://python.rhino3d.com/forums/1-RhinoPython
- http://mac.rhino3d.com/forums/8.aspx
- http://support.irhino3d.com/forum
- and possibly the support forums for flamingo, bongo, …
Funny, I have been using iRhino for a long time and never even knew there was a forum for it!
Having the iRhino forum here as a category would make that even more “discoverable” to Rhino users who frequent this forum.
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I can’t read NING forums at work.
If I’m not alone in this situation, it’s a good way to prevent criticism in the forum itself.
Excellent point. Sounds like Grasshopper may be the only forum too busy to try to move over here, at least not in the very near future.
Yep. That was our thought as well.
Then about 40 messages/day versus 10.
OK, good to know, thanks ! -e.
Well, in Rhino’s web site the ‘Community’ link points to that forum, and there is not a word about the existence of a newsgroup.
And actually I see nothing directly pointing to this forum either … hmmm, curious.
BTW, I did not mean to say that Ning was better. I agree that a customizable software is certainly a better choice. - Cheers - e.
Again: newsgroup has nearly two decades of momentum behind it. Trust me, if we’d been on this forum for two decades and they tried to switch to NNTP, all hell would break loose with people screaming about the loss of features. And NOBODY would migrate. Oh, and I’d be screaming about the fact that I could no longer do what I’m doing right now: posting from my iPhone while I’m away from my computer! 
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When I was looking for one of the forums or the NG, I never knew where to look between Support, Community and Ressources.
And the layout made it so that it was not clear when I got to one of these that I was, or not, at the right place. I had to read every block of text. Maybe not Ressources as I recognized the list that was already there before.
Since Discourse is so new, we’re not liking to it directly yet. In the next few weeks it is looking likely that we’ll make the old newsgroup and the NING forum read-only and switch all our links to point here. Then, we’ll start moving other newsgroups and forums to this location.