Seventy: LingQ Update - Forum and Assignment Limits
Mark: Hi again, Mark Kaufmann here for the EnglishLingQ Podcast.
As usual, I'm joined by Jill Soles. How's it going today Jill? Jill: Good thanks.
How are you?
Mark: I'm great. Today we've got another LingQ update and we've got a couple new developments this week. Major developments would be the addition of the Forum and even since we added it yesterday afternoon we've had quite a bit of action on it and we hope to have more. Jill: Yeah. I see there are some people who have already posted several times.
Mark: Oh for sure and it's always nice when you post and there's other people answering and it makes you more likely to post again. And, of course, when something is new people like to get in there and start playing around with it. I hope people continue to use it because it's certainly great for us to get feedback and suggestions and interact with the members of our community. To all of you listening, please do get on and share your thoughts with us.
Also, if you are in English in the Forum section there is an EnglishLingQ Forum, which is where we would love to hear feedback from you regarding the podcast. You know, tell us how we're doing. Tell us if there are topics you'd like us to cover or talk about. If you have questions about English, please ask them to us there and we will be glad to answer them. I guess you talked with Steve on Wednesday. You had an Ask the Linguist segment and we would like to have more questions to answer on that segment and really on the Monday segment as well; please do. Any questions on English let us know.
Regarding the Forums Jill, if you're looking at them maybe you can rundown, explain a little bit better what each Forum's purpose is? Jill: Okay, so there is an Ask Your Tutor Forum, which will appear in all the different languages. Plus and Premium members only are allowed to ask questions or are able to ask questions on this Forum and their questions will be answered by their tutor.
Mark: The Forum is open to all though as far as reading it. Like from any open content item in the Work Desk if you click on the View Forum link you can look at any questions that have been asked from that item. Obviously, if you click on the Forum directly you can go in and see any of the questions that have been asked and answered by our tutors.
Jill: Right.
Mark: But, only Plus and Premium members are able to ask questions and have them answered by our tutors or even post in that Forum.
Jill: Right.
The Ask Your Tutor Forum is basically for English words and phrases that you would like for their explanation on and you can access it right from the Work Desk area from a content item that you're studying Mark: …from the LingQ widget or yeah, you're right, from the View Forum button and then to ask the question you can ask it from the widget for any term that you have saved. Then you can click on the Ask Your Tutor link right there and ask about that term.
Jill: Right or you can click on the Forum tab, of course, and also you will see it and you can create a thread, which means you may post a question, ask a question that we will answer.
Mark: We should also mention that all the other Forums are open to everybody, so it's only the Ask Your Tutor Forum that has some restrictions on it. All the other Forums that you see with the green LingQ logo or speech bubble there beside them are all completely open to all members to ask questions and respond.
Jill: Right.
You will not always, though…if you are asking a specific question about the language a tutor will not necessarily respond to your question…
Mark: That's right. Jill: …on these other Forums. I mean, anybody can post, but often it's other members who will be answering and creating responses to your posts. Mark: Right. I mean, I guess it depends on which Forum. Obviously, Support Forums, Updates, Known Issues, Open Forums, I mean, we're all going to be fairly active on there, but if you are asking language-specific questions there you're probably going to be relying on other members providing answers and, of course, you're more than welcome to help other members who are trying to learn your language in the Forums. That's what we would like to see is a lot of interaction between our members to build up our community. Jill: Right.
So, I mean, maybe somebody is studying Spanish and they have a question and somebody who is a native Spanish speaker is on LingQ studying English, but they can go in then and, if they want to, answer this person's question related to Spanish. Mark: Exactly. It will be interesting to see how the Forum evolves and how different people use the Form and how our members talk to each other. Obviously, the more of our members that are using it the more different things will start to happen there. I think we'll just kind of wait and see how things evolve, but so far, so good. It's been fun; people interacting. Jill: Yeah and I guess we talked a little bit about Ask Your Tutor Forum and then there's the Open Forum on LingQ which, of course, anybody can access and you can ask us questions about the system; give us your feedback. There is the Support Forum, which is more for technical questions that people might have about the system if they are having problems and they need some help. There's the LingQ Updates and Known Issues Forum where we will post stuff like what we're talking about right now, updates to the system and also different issues that…maybe bugs or features that we're going to add or changes we're going to make that we know about, haven't been done yet, but they'll be a list so that people can see that we do know about that issue and then they don't have to worry about sending us an email or posting it on the Forum because they will see that we already know about that issue. Mark: Right and right now both the Support Forum and the Updates and Known Issues Forum don't have much in them, but we will actually start adding stuff into them from our LingQ Central Blog and from our Customer Service questions that we receive, so those will start to have more information in them now that they're up there. Jill: Right.
Mark: The Content Forum…sorry Jill.
Jill: No, go ahead.
Mark: The Content Forum is there for you to share any thoughts you have about content in our store or if you've found content on the Web that you've imported and it might be copyrighted so you can't share it with everybody on the site, but you can certainly put up a link to where you found it. Very often our members will find interesting content and want to share it. You know, if you found something on CNN or somewhere like that, so please do share any hot tips on content and, of course, any thoughts on the content.
Jill: And then there's the EnglishLingQ Forum, which we would like people to go to give us feedback about this podcast, this EnglishLingQ Podcast. Mark: Right and I think I spoke about that earlier, did I not? I think so, anyway.
Jill: Yeah and then there's the Open Forum in English or in whatever language. If you're studying in German you'll see Open Forum in German. Mark: Right and the idea there is that we would have a Forum, basically, in each language so that whether you're a German native speaker or a German learner the conversation in that Forum will hopefully always be in German so you can ask questions about German that are answered by German native speakers or German native speakers can ask questions about the system that are answered by German speakers; just, basically, any and all questions in German. Jill: Or English or Spanish or whatever language it is that you're studying. Mark: Whichever Forum you happen to be in. Yeah, I think that covers the Forums. I think, more than anything, we just want all of you to go in and check them out.
The other major change that we made in the past week was to increase the Active Assignments limit for all of our paying accounts, which means that Basic, Plus and Premium accounts all had their Active Assignments limit increased. Really, the reason we did that was we were finding that the limits should be higher because a lot of our members do end up studying a lot of items and we want to increase the benefit to people for being paying members. Obviously, we want people to pay us, but it's got to be worthwhile. Also, we want to reward those people that are paying us. Not that there's anything wrong with being a free member, but obviously… Jill: …you're not going to have all the perks; the benefits. Mark: That's right. From our perspective, paying members are good too. That's right. Pay for our salaries and our site. That's pretty much all we had in the way of updates this week. As usual, please let us know any of your thoughts on the updates and now we have a good place for you to provide us with that feedback on the Forums and I hope you enjoy becoming part of our community there. I don't know Jill if you had anything more to add? Jill: No, I think we covered it.
Mark: Okay, so then we'll talk to you next time. Jill: Alright, bye, bye.
Mark: Bye, bye.
