Hi, can you split the Mac forum into several colums like "problems", "beginners", "tech. talk", "latest beta" etc. ? It's always painful to read the 500th posting "were is my Alt GR key" or "USB 2.0 not working" posting if I just want to find the reply to my latest Beta problem report. Thanks, Petra
I don't think that would fix the issue. Parallels has been swamped with tech support requests. When the can't answer all their e-mail people turn here. I would guess that most people do not try to search the forum first for their frustrating problem, they just post their question. Considering that this is virtual machine software, I would guess that very few people here are truely beginners. Maybe a beginners forum is in order, but I don't see it getting too much attention. It would turn into the "howto" forum. People post questions and nobody goes there to post answers. I think that Parallels should release a more comprehensive FAQ (preferably both on the website and in the user manuel) that answers the questions here that have more then say 20 theads each on them. I would nominate: (1) What is this "Wait 5-10 seconds thing with USB" (2) USB2 does not work. (3) How to use a microphone with Parallels (4) How to get an ALT GR key (5) There are bad XP discs, check your disc if it does not install (6) If you are having a problem with BSOD or Sad-Mac-Of-Death then upgrade to the latest beta (7) Always reboot after upgrading (8) Upgrade the tools also (9) The video card is not 3d accelerated (Don't install radeon or nvidea drivers) I would suggest that all of these are put into a knowledge-base. Here is an idea for Parallals: Make a wiki where anyone on the forum with more then say 100 posts can contribute. (The posting requirement keeps spam off the wiki) The wiki would be a user-written FAQ. Then Parallels does not have to have any of their engineers write the wiki, and instead of us answering "where is my usb2" again, we can just copy the old answer to the wiki and link to it.
I'd vote for a wiki, too. For some of the threads it's become nigh impossible to follow any longer (like the "Build 3036 Beta" sticky at the top of the forum - 628 posts as of right now!). I wonder though about the number of beginners. From following this and the Boot Camp forum over on Apple Discussions, I think that Apple (and Parallels) have now made it so easy to get into virtualization software, but (at least with Build 3036) to run into some interesting bugs along the way... I do agree with you (unused_user_name), though, that I don't think a beginners forum would help so much, at least from the posting patterns that are showing up here.
On the other hand, the 600+ posts in one thread is a good thing. I've got other forums that are pretty much dead and useless because there are maybe 1 post a month. This one has exploded, with hundreds of threads and thousands of posts. While it's becoming harder to navigate (search is your friend), I think it's great that the user community has gotten so involved. Keep posting! Mark ps - I'd post the "lifecycle of user forums" but I'd probably get smacked with a repost....
Wiki is an awesome idea. I'm way too enthusiastic about this application, especially with the new version. Totally changing the way I work.
Oh, hopefully I didn't give the wrong impression - I also totally agree that it's terrific that we have such a good user community here. It's just with that one particular thread (and maybe the way I have my forum view config'd - hybrid mode), it makes my eyes swim trying to find the new posts in there... Bob
