Ventana software support forum

Hi Everyone,

I am pleased to be able to tell you that Tony Kennedy has successfully
put the archives from this mailing list up on a searchable discussion
board. Posts on a subject have been combined in threads and most of
the email headers stripped out so that you can see just the discussion.
The archives are read only - but there is a an alternative forum at the
same location where you can make postings (you will need to register to
post things).

The forum is located at http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum

I plan to keep the mailing list going as a mailing list but this gives
us the opportunity to explore additional discussion opportunities. Where
forum discussion parallels a mailing list discussion it makes sense to
post summaries to the mailing list. I will try to keep a watch to see if
that is helpful but everyone shold feel free to post such summaries.

Many thanks to Tony for his work on this.

Bob Eberlein
bob@vensim.com

Very nice job; impressive technology. Much more elgant than what I had done
a few years ago...

Thanks for all your work

Jaideep
From: jaideep <jaideep@optimlator.com>

Jaideep Mukherjee, Ph. D.
www.optimlator.com

Thanks for the comments Jaideep.

I originally attempted to import the posts last year around the time the
following discussion was on the list (the Community Forum thread).

http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum/v ... .php?t=361

But I had a lot of trouble with non standard syntax and characters etc. So
made a fresh start again two weeks ago, of course some experience guided me
this time.

I hope it proves to be very useful. The SD list contains a lot of useful
knowledge.

Tony Kennedy.
From: "Tony Kennedy" <tony@ventanasystems.co.uk>
http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum

[Edited on 20-2-2009 by Administrator]

First of all, thank you very, very much for taking the time to put this site
together. There have been a couple discussions about such a site, but no one
was willing to make it happen. I only hope that every interested lists
member learns to utilize the features offered by such a site. I know the
next generation members will!


With that said I have a few suggestions for improving usability:

1) The text of the posts is quite small. I know some people prefer this, but
it does make it hard to read. Perhaps another "theme" could be made that is
similar to the Ventana theme with larger fonts? Is that possible? I hope so.

2) The searching feature is a great start. One problem I see, however, is
that when you run a search, then follow a link to the result, there is no
way to back out to the search (the page expires). You can either return to
the forum where the result is located or go and run the search again, which
is tedious. I see a couple ways of dealing with it. You could provide a
return to search link, you could have search results open new windows (what
I have been doing via "shift+click"), or you could time the expiration of
the search page to something reasonable like 30 minutes instead of
immediately after opening the page.

3) The search also often returns several results linking to the same thread.
While it is helpful to see where the search terms appear in individual
posts, I can see the return results growing out of usefulness as the site
grows. Is there any way to group the results by thread/topic? From there you
could maybe expand it to see which individual posts contain the search
terms.

4) What do you think of a System Dynamics Review forum? My thought on this
is for people to go back through the SD Review and post the article tittles,
relevant keywords, and potentially a brief summary. First would this be ok
legally? My motivation stems from the frustration of searching for SD Review
articles on the popular literature databases and getting only two results. I
know there is a lot of valuable knowledge in them, if only people could find
it! This could also help encourage membership since members get access it
all the past volumes online. I am volunteering to start with the most recent
journals as time permits. I'm fairly certain others would follow.



That is all I noticed thus far. I don't want you to think I'm trashing your
effort in anyway. I certainly do not have the skills to put something like
this up! I'm offering suggestions only because I'd really like to see this
be attractive to anyone. Keep up the excellent work!



Best regards,



________________________________

Bruce Skarin

Junior Modeling and Simulation Analyst

Aptima, Inc.
12 Gill Street, Suite 1400
Woburn, MA 01801 USA

Direct Dial: (781)-496-2405
Main Number: (781)-935-3966 ext. 205
Fax Number: (781)-935-4385
E-mail: bskarin@aptima.com
<http://www.aptima.com/> Aptima Website
________________________________

Thanks for the comments Bruce.

>>With that said I have a few suggestions for improving usability:
>1) The text of the posts is quite small. I know some people prefer this, but
>>it does make it hard to read. Perhaps another "theme" could be made that is
>>similar to the Ventana theme with larger fonts? Is that possible? I hope so.

I have created a two new themes, a 12pt and 14pt one. Click on "Control panel" and you should be able to access it if you click "Edit profile".


>>2) The searching feature is a great start. One problem I see, however, is
>>that when you run a search, then follow a link to the result, there is no
>>way to back out to the search (the page expires). You can either return to
>>the forum where the result is located or go and run the search again, which
>>is tedious. I see a couple ways of dealing with it. You could provide a
>>return to search link, you could have search results open new windows (what
>>I have been doing via "shift+click"), or you could time the expiration of
>>the search page to something reasonable like 30 minutes instead of
>>immediately after opening the page.

This is a limitation of the forum software. Although I can make changes to the code, this is probably beyond me so I will suggest it to the makers and see if anything can be changed for the next release. For now the only thing you can really do is the "Shift+click" to open the post up in a new window.

>>3) The search also often returns several results linking to the same thread.
>>While it is helpful to see where the search terms appear in individual
>>posts, I can see the return results growing out of usefulness as the site
>>grows. Is there any way to group the results by thread/topic? From there you
>>could maybe expand it to see which individual posts contain the search
terms.

The only thing I can think of here is to search only 'threads' rather than posts. I will look into adding that feature to the search facility. There might also be a possibility of only returning the thread headers after searching posts, again I will look into modifying the software.

>>4) What do you think of a System Dynamics Review forum? My thought on
>>this is for people to go back through the SD Review and post the article tittles,
>>relevant keywords, and potentially a brief summary. First would this be ok
>>legally? My motivation stems from the frustration of searching for SD Review
>>articles on the popular literature databases and getting only two results. I
>>know there is a lot of valuable knowledge in them, if only people could
>>find it! This could also help encourage membership since members get access it
>>all the past volumes online. I am volunteering to start with the most recent
>>journals as time permits. I'm fairly certain others would follow.

If there exists an index and it is ok legally, there is no reason why they could not be imported. I will look into it.

Tony.

A number of users have asked about the colour schemes for the forum.

If you click on "Control Panel/Options" and then "Edit Profile" you have a choice of a few different schemes. Let me know if you are having problems with the colours and I will try and find more schemes.

Tony.

Thanks for the quick response. The new font sizes are great!

I just want to clarify the SD Review forum idea since I received a couple of responses that indicate otherwise. I’m not suggesting posting the SD Review itself online. I know that is already available online when you are a member of the SD Society. This is great, but it is not searchable, at least last I checked (I’m in the process of renewing my membership) and it is not available to those individuals that are on the fence.

The reason for this is because despite the claim that the System Dynamics Review is Abstracted and Indexed by the services listed below, my results are as follows:

•Computing Reviews: Database of reviews, 0 hits for SD Review and it is not listed in Journals that are reviewed.
•Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences (ISI): Product of ISI, see bottom of results.
•Fluidex (Elsevier): Database of reviews, 0 hits, not listed in Journals that are reviewed.
•Geographical Abstracts: Human Geography: Published journal of abstracts. It does not seem to have online access and therefore be searchable. I do not have access to it.
•INSPEC: 86 hits for ISSN number – not as bad as it used to be
•International Abstracts in Operations Research: Review is listed and they do have online searchable access. I do not have access to it (though they do have a free 30 day trial).
•Psychological Abstracts: Published journal product of PsycINFO, I don’t have access, and can’t tell if it is searchable online.
•PsycINFO: 77 hits for the ISSN number. It is again better than a few years ago.
•Research Alert (ISI): Product of ISI, see bottom of results.
•Social Sciences Citation Index (ISI): Product of ISI, provides interesting stats regarding the citations of papers in the SD Review by the SD Review other journals.
•Social SciSearch (ISI). Another ISI product! Many of the ISI products have now been integrated to provide an extensive resource of journal papers. The results provide interesting cross referencing capabilities. Searches for the review itself returned 258 hits, the best by far. I was unable to distinguish between the different products, except for: Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences which appears to be a somewhat separate journal/publishing. Of course I don’t have access to it!

So, in summary the ISI database contains the most comprehensive listing of SD Review papers. The others tend to list those papers that are most relevant (obviously) or don’t actually find anything worth reviewing (at least according to my searches). This may seem ok if you are in that realm, but identification of relevant material is still not perfect.

With that said, until now I did not have access to ISI and I’m sure many other colleagues do not have access anyway. The advantage of placing this online ourselves is that it would provide a FREE extensive resource of reviewed System Dynamics papers. Since a good majority of the articles are available with membership, those that are not current members will see the advantage.

Also as we try to expand and improve upon the field of SD, clear access to past work will be crucial to new members of the field. I don’t think those that have been in the field for many years appreciate the difficulty of “catching up” on all the past knowledge developed.

Importing abstracts and indexes would of course be idea. I’m glad you are looking into it. But if there is no way to do it, I am willing to help do it manually and hope others would be willing as well.

I hope this clears up any confusion of the point I was trying to make!

Regards,

-Bruce