Tips on how to use the new Fortinet forum?

[ispcolohost]

Maybe I'm missing something, but with the conversion from the old Fortinet forums to this new community software, is there no longer any categorization so you can simply read through threads on a topic of interest to see if any apply to you?  I used to regularly skim the product-specific sub forums for the Fortinet hardware/software we use to see if there were posts that would be of interest for either security or performance/optimization concerns.  I can't see any way to do that now, it's just an endless news feed style interface that takes up so much screen real estate you have to page forward every few posts, making it impossible to ever read through it.  There are literally 14,000 pages of content with four or six posts per page.

I see where I can switch to threaded, and if I click into the right post from a random person first, I can then try to backtrack to a category that seems to exist, but still get this inflated post listing where I have to see the first portion of the post below each subject, so the page stretches on forever now that I've set more posts per page.

The forum seems to have morphed into just a Q&A system, where it's only as useful as your search terms and the hopefully matching content if you're trying to solve a problem, but the other helpful aspects are no longer present.  Even then, your question being answered seems only as likely as someone coming to read the forum while you're lucky enough to have the thread appear on the first page.

Unless I'm missing some way to make it work like it used to?

[mhe]

This is exactly the suggestion I made months ago: bring back the categories, and with them the searching of the forum. Unfortunately, I have never heard anything more except for a "we will forward this" and nothing ever happened.

[Debbie_FTNT]

Hey ispcolohost,

you can use the labels on the right-hand side - for example, clicking on the 'FortiGate' label should only show you forum posts that are tagged as 'FortiGate'.

This should at least provide some filtering for you.

Other than that, I can forward your's and mhe's feedback internally if you would like me to; the community page is still being worked on and new features are introduced regularly.

[xsilver_FTNT]

Hi ispcolohost,

I guess you heard "we are working on that" already, but even internally we are pushing community team to improve what we spot as sub-optimal :)

I have to agree I liked separated KB and Forum, but neither one was perfect even before.

Left side of the search bar is where you can select if you'd like to search in forum, in KB, or everywhere.

Hint: if you search for something we can not find (like "cabigwbkjsdb") then "Click here to clear filters and perform a fresh search" will appear alongside of note we have no match, and  click on that sentence let/brings you to advanced search menu, with more options..

Alternatively you can select at the top under Community logo, where you can get, to Forum or Knowledge Base. And pull down menu will let you jump into specific section.

Here in Forum, you can use Labels (as mentioned by Debbie) to refine which topics you'd like to get.

That vertical 3-dot icon will let you then to subscribe to specific labels = feeds.

Giving you notifications only to forum posts about topics you are interested in and so selected (FortiTokens for example).

However that Labels system has one caveat.

Users should post their questions to respective topics/labels. As otherwise it will become one big pile and unmanageable.

Labels categorization, Labeling and proper placement is also what our community managers are handling and what we are trying to improve.

Hope this helped at least a bit to relieve stress from new system.

[ispcolohost]

I can see how labels function, but it doesn't seem to create effective improvement.  If I click FortiGate, instead of 14,000 pages I only have a few hundred pages, categorized in no more specific way (i.e. vpn or other sub-cats that had been present), and I don't see a way to have it only give me topics that have been created or updated since my prior visit, let alone in a thread-title format to not have endless pages of posts I don't want to read the first few sentences of.

If it's being worked on, that is great, I just can't get much use out of it in its current form unless I'm searching for a specific issue and luck into finding a relevant match.  I can't imagine subject matter experts on specific things are going to take the time to page through everything that isn't relevant looking for a post they may answer.  For example, I have no knowledge whatsoever on sd-wan, dkim, ssl vpn, fortiswitch, and fortianalyzer, but that's the first page of my FortiGate-tagged posts.  Those would likely have been better categorized in the old forum, and after marking them read, I'd not see them again, or could easily bypass them even if a new post had occurred because there'd still be a limited number of unread posts.

[Anthony_E]

Hello all,

Thank you all for your contribution.

I am taking good note of every suggestions and as xsilver_FTNT is saying, everybody is doing everything to improve the Community platform.

Community will celebrate his 1st Birthday in November and we will continue to improve and provide the best platform for everybody.

We are working on that.

Regards,