Xamarin forums kickoff

nat

We created these forums as a gathering place for Xamarin developers to ask questions, share tips and tricks, discuss recent announcements, and generally hang out.

We're hoping that over the coming months this becomes a vibrant discussion forum. Bootstrapping a new community area is notoriously hard, so we're going to need your help and persistence for the first few months to get things rolling.

So don't hold back - feel free to kick off a thread if you publish a new app, read an interesting article, come across a tutorial, or just generally have something to share. And please weigh in on existing discussions when you have something valuable to add.

Over time we will probably figure out some community guidelines, but for now we'll just keep it simple, with just two rules:

1. Be nice.
2. Try to help other people out.

Also, if you find bugs or issues in the forum infrastructure itself, or see anything that we can obviously improve, please let us know! You can just post your ideas in this thread.

We're really looking forward to watching this grow!

nat

Here's a nice tip: to get an email notification every time someone posts to the forums, you can turn on your email notification preferences by clicking on the globe icon at the top of the forum and then "Notification Preferences."

There's a section at the bottom of the page where you can signup for email notifications (see screenshot).

To be notified when someone comments on a particular thread, click the star icon next to the thread to bookmark it. You can set your bookmarked-thread notification preferences (email vs popup) on the same page.

Manski

First: Thank you for moving from the mailing list to a forum system. This is so much better (as I personally hate mailing lists ;) ).

Second: Is there a way to be notified whenever some one posts on a specific forum (say, the Android forum)? I only see settings to be notified about threads I bookmarked before - not for a whole forum. Also, I only have two columns in my notification settings (instead of four like in your screenshot - that can't be zoomed BTW).

Also, I don't seem to be able to upload images. When I click on the image button here in the editor, all I get is some Markdown code:

![]()

... but no upload window.

CodeMonkey

Great to see this new forum! I too do not enjoy the mailing list system.

So far it looks really good, clean, simple, just as it should be. I'll try not clog it up with dumb questions.

brajkovic

@Manski: To subscribe to a specific forum, head over to http://forums.xamarin.com/profile/preferences, and you'll see a list of forums down below and check boxes to subscribe to them, either via email or via the notification popup onsite, or both.

In terms of uploading images, the way to do it seems to be to upload it as an attached file, then use the URL that "insert image" links to in Markdown, like so:

Hope that helps!

JasonSteele

Great looking site - would be even better if it was responsive/reactive.

nat

Do you mean (a) it should scale better at different window sizes or (b) it should load faster?

samskivert

FYI, if you mistype your password when logging into the forums, it just dismisses the login popup and gives you no feedback to indicate that it failed, or why.

brajkovic

@samskivert: Thanks for the report Michael, we'll look into this!

MCS

Oh, yes... Yet another place to find solutions for issues. Stackoverflow, mailing list, docs.xamarin.com, github and now forum. One google for all of them.

Manski

@bojan.rajkovic It's now there but I could swear the "Category Notifications" weren't there before.

@nat It's working now. Before, nothing happened when I clicked your attached screenshot. Maybe the forum needs some time to settle in ;)

By the way: Is there a direct way to quote/reply to a certain post?

nat

@Manski - very happy to hear that everything's working now! We're still figuring out all the settings on this thing, and we have a bunch of customizations still planned, so with a little luck it will keep improving :-).

By the way: Is there a direct way to quote/reply to a certain post?

I think you just hit the quote button (which inserts a '>') and paste the part of their message you want to quote, like I just did. :-)

JasonSteele

@nat - scale to the window size. But I largely take it back - on my WP7 it does appear to be rendering differently so it appears to be browser sniffing. However in a small window on a PC its not adjusting its layout to match the size. But generally it looks pretty good.

mmuegel

A couple of editing comments:

• It would be great if the editor that is shown when you make an edit within 1 hour window would have the full capabilities of the standard editor. I could not, for example, change something to be a link w/out breaking out Markdown.
• The Markdown link near the editor should go to something custom similar to (or copy of ;-) Stackoverflow's tip sheet

Manski

It would also be nice to change the subjects of notification emails in a way that email programs/googlemail can group them more easily.

For example, when someone posts a reply for a topic in the forum, the subject reads like this:

[xamarin] jonp commented on NUnit for Mono

but I think it would be better if it said:

[xamarin] new comment in NUnit for Mono

Matthew

Or maybe it should be:

[xamarin] NUnit for Mono

and then we can use the first line of the email as a reference as it already has the line 'jonp commented on NUnit for Mono'

this will group both the 'xxx started a new discussion yyy' and 'bbb commented on yyy' into one thread.

hall28

How do I mark someone's response as the accepted answer in one of my posts? I don't see an "accept response" button.

nat

@hall28 You need to convert your thread to a Q&A thread first. I've done that for you so that you can now mark a post as an answer.

@Matthew @Manski - we've asked the forum folks to do this!

gshackles

Minor suggestion/request: add a favicon, I like to keep the forums up as a pinned tab, and currently just have to remember that the one pinned tab without a distinctive icon is for here :)

Manski

For some strange reason, the forum just created a second user account for me: http://forums.xamarin.com/profile/443/SebastianKrysmanski

This seems to be a bug, maybe because I was logged in while you updated the forum software? Could you delete the second account (i.e. the one in the link)?

brajkovic

Hi Sebastian,

I've taken care of the duplicate account. Seems like a bug arose with the forums, yes. Thanks for the heads up!

—Bojan

HairyJohn

Hi there, The forum says Im from the US, Im not Im from the UK. I can't see a way of updating that? No option in Edit Profile for this...

Cheers John