We’ve been using this communication platform (Discourse) for two months now, and I think that it is time to reflect on how it is going.
Please answer this poll:
It is fantastic as is!
Pretty good, needs a few tweaks to hit full potential
Going okay, but has some major flaws
Not meeting our needs and we should look at alternatives
0voters
Please put any comments / suggestions in a reply to thia post. I encourage you to be brutally honest here - I’m going for constructive criticism, not an ego massage!
Thank you for the assessments so far; please do write down some stuff for me to work with. If you don’t wan’t it to be public then IM me or email me about it.
The thing about Discourse is that it is very configurable - and open source. And the developers are accessible. We can change annoying things - unlike many clinical IT solutions.
Nathan seems good idea but not sure how much i would log on as it is just a time issue. When i first signed up i was bombarded with emails until i worked out how to turn off all the links it seemed to default me in to.
I agree with the comments from Sax re: default setting being to be part of every group. It would be easier to just give up than to go through everything and deselect from groups. Also I feel that we need a bit of direction, all user will have slightly different bents and needs. So it would be good to hear and see evidence based use of digital health in a positive way rather than opinion based threads.
Yeah, I end up deleting a tonne of emails, often as a large block from the network. I try to review the authors to see who I need to read/reply to, but at the moment it’s just too much spam!
I suppose I spend more time working out whether I can filter out the stuff I don’t want more readily, but have struggled to find the time or energy!
Yes, I have tried to find filters with no avail so stick with sending them to a separate inbox and checking the ones whose name I recognise. Hoping to find some time soon to work out a better way. @NathanK what’s the solution?
Agree with others. Loving the sharing but the phone pinging all night, and the volume of emails from threads not relevant, is highly annoying and has made me consider leaving the group at times. Any tips/tricks to turn off groups not relevant would be fab!
Hi there and sorry to hear you are getting notification overload. I though it would be a good time to opo up and offer some help. I’ve been meaning to record a short screencast about managing these settings for some time actually!
Discourse (the forum platform we use) has numerous ways to manage notification frequency in your user settings.
Top level notifications settings (controls all notifications)
Click on your avatar (top right, this is either a photo you’ve chosen or the default coloured letter)
Click on the icon
In the left sidebar, click on Emails, and you will find a detailed panel to enable you to cut down the notifications. Remember, Discourse is a web based forum so if you switch off the notifications the content is still here on the site, you don’t need to keep an email copy of everything in order to have a history, unlike the older ‘listservers’.
you can unsubscribe from any topic by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link on each email notification, and this will suppress that thread from notifying you.
Feel free to play with the settings, you can’t break anything.
Let me know if there’s anything else we could do to try to improve the user experience for you. One thing we have historically not had to be very good at, is always posting content in the right part of the forum. People tend to use the ‘Open Forum’ for everything, which obviously goes out to more people than it would if UK-CCIO-relevant content was posted to the CCIO Network. We will definitely have to address this now that we have other groups such as your using the same forum.
Thanks Marcus - and thank you everyone for highlighting this issue. I confess that I have been blind to it because Gmail nicely shuffles it all into a ‘Forums’ tab where it stays out of sight.
@pacharanero, can we change the settings of our users in our network so that Mailing list mode is de-activated? This seems to be the major culprit. I don’t think that we particularly mind getting a summary (perhaps once a week) of the open forum - this is very helpful for the occasional user. Just not emails every time someone posts!
Yes John, it certainly would!! However, opinions aren’t all bad, as the evidence out there (particularly if you are pushing the boundaries) is pretty scanty. But yes, some good science would be most welcome. Particularly science that we ought to be applying. Perhaps @i.hunter and @rebecca.grainger could guide us in this direction.
I could also help with evidence, providing as I do any research or teaching that corresponds with a topic you’re talking about. How are you situated re accessing journal articles? Due to copyright issues I can’t post copies of articles I find. I can post citation details and you can source the articles in the way you usually do.
Most of us have access to a lot of clinical journals via our institutions or colleges; unfortunately this can be a bit limited for Health Informatics journals.
It is usually possible to get them, but involves significant hassle / multiple emails / etc. A pubmed citation (if it exists) is often quite helpful for us.
Any help that you can give us on this front would be deeply appreciated, @KarenDay!
You could ask your organisation’s librarian to include certain health informatics journals into their subscription collection as health informatics/digital health is increasingly becoming core to clinical care. Not sure which journals to recommend but worth considering.
Delayed reply: My lack of engagement has been that when the email topic headings come through, a lot were UK/NHS so I didn’t feel relevant to me. I do like the feature of just getting 1 email per week with summary of topics being discussed. Cheers, emily
Hi @emily.gill - @NathanK and I have recently made some changes to try to reduce the non-NZ notifications you will recieve, so hopefully this should be better, but let us know right here if your experience differs from this. (You should still have access to the UK-based content should you want to view it, but you won’t get email notifications for this by default, although you can set your personal preferences on this in your user profile.)
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