Technical development

First, to celebrate an achievement: most new posts are now coming from you, the real members of TalkPhysics. After some time stimulating discussions by IOP staff members and freelancers, it now looks like the community of teachers of physics will be able to sustain itself. Particularly, we are reaching a new audience – most people posting comments are people who have not previously used the IOP’s PTNC or CAPT email lists.

Thank you!

While we got a lot done with our last batch of development funding (bugs, security including anti-spamming, some vital administrative tools), I was disappointed that we didn’t manage more on the usability. Particularly, we did some usability testing at one of our Summer Schools in August but managed to implement very few of the excellent suggestions that resulted.

We’ve found a little more funding, and expect to do the four most important usability improvements by the New Year, so hopefully we can show an even better TalkPhysics site at ASE Reading, where you can look out for the IOP TalkPhysics Area, and come to meet our staff. The improvements will be:

• clicking on a link in a TalkPhysics email notification when you are logged out takes you to the relevant page, not just the log-in page then the homepage.
• tweaking the email notifications format, to cut down the clutter, so they look more like our PTNC emails and show who posted in the header.
• users can remain logged in for up to 24 hours (at the moment, most systems log you out after only one hour as a security step).
• simplify discussions: making it more obvious who to begin topics in any group by adding “new topic” buttons to each group homepage, and rewording some links and buttons.

Also, we’ll publish the improved profile page as soon as we’ve solved some last nagging internal problems.

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