El Aura

Apple Discussions - making sense of the nonsense

Apple’s new discussion pages offer a lot of options viewing the content. But as usual, just adding options rarely makes for a useful product, something that Apple is normally keenly aware of. Alas, this time they threw it all out and did not even attempt to provide a useful default view. Here is my overview of the available options, bold text referring to actually useful elements:

A) Content

• Apple Featured Topics (a global selection of threads Apple considers useful, unlikely to be useful as way too much and way too widely spread)
• Community Annoucements (this category seems to have disappeared again, though I still have it on my homepage)
• Recent Activity (current global background noise)
• Recent Announcement Posts (announcements by Apple)
• Recent Content (the same as recent activity, maybe minus announcements?)
• Recent Discussions (the same as recent content, minus the basically non-existent documents/user tips)
• Recent Documents (currently only two single entries from this month)
• Top Liked Content (most often user-voted posts)
• Top Rated Content (the same as top liked content)
• Unanswered Questions (current global background noise minus the small proportion of answered questions)
• View Document (sole way of editing any documents, if you did not find place for this widget among all the other 50 widgets on your home page, you cannot edit documents, not that you could create documents, that seems to be broken at the moment)
• Watch A Tag (put a subforum on your homepage, would work if people actually used tags, unlikely to happen)
• Watch A User (unless you stumble upon a user that mainly posts stuff useful to you, which is pretty unlikely, just some only slightly filtered noise)
• Your Content (only way to get to all your posts, or rather all threads with posts of yours, hopefully all, only useful when put at the lowest position of your homepage as it will be very, very long since it has no page breaks)

B) Places

• Communities (put the list of forums on your homepage)
• Places (same as communities but puts forums you have joined on top)

C) People

• Newest Members (if need some inspiration on choosing a username, a random list of new names)
• Recent Activity (same as recent activity, very original)
• Top Participants in Communities (across all forums, just look at the points and you don’t need this list)
• Watch A User (same a watch a user)

D) Other

• Formatted Text (add random text to your homepage, eg,  ‘This list below is completely useless)
• HTML (add random anything to your homepage, eg, if you prefer AD to Facebook)
• Recent Bookmarks (delicious for Apple Discussions)
• RSS Subscriptions (if none of the above gave you the right mix of AD content, add RSS subscriptions to it, if you don’t have an RSS reader, you use your homepage here as one)
• Your Bookmarks

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So, besides forcing users to wade through 24 categories to find the handfull of them that are actually useful and then to configure the categories further it offers a parallel universe with the controls in the top-right menu:

1) Your Stuff

• Bookmarks (ditto as above)
• Discussions (similar to your content, except incomplete)
• Documents (presumably the same as edit documents, except that documents are non-functional at the moment)
• Communities (same as places)
• Notifications (that is new or is just another name for announcements?)
• Preferences (yeah, that is new, but creating your homepage is not part of your preferences)
• Profile (another section of preferences)

2) History

• (replacement for your browser history limited to AD, needed as a lot of pages do not get their own URL, partially overlaps with your content)

3) Browse

• Announcement Posts (ditto as above)
• Bookmarks (ditto as above)
• Discussions (ditto as recent discussions, ie, useless)
• Documents (ditto as above, and useless as non-functional)
• Communities (ditto as above)
• People (ditto as above)
• Tags (ditto as above)

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And to top it all, people who are just browsing (ie, not logged in) get only a search box and a listing of the forums and the posts therein. They cannot see announcements, bookmarks by others, top-rated posts, featured posts, or documents. Great job.