Faithlife Discussions

We are excited to introduce to you the new Faithlife Discussions feature!

Faithlife groups now have the ability to have their own forums, unique to each group. Those of you here on the forums with us know exactly what kind of benefit that can bring to you for communication: structured conversation, the ability to quote previous comments, and a way to engage the whole community at once.

In our initial release of discussions, you can:

Create a new topic
Search for forum threads
Like a thread
Reply to and quote a post
Receive notifications of new topics and replies

You can find the Discussions feature in your group's tabs, under the arrow at the far right.

If you'd like to rearrange your group's tabs - so that they always see the Discussions feature - you can change your tab order in the group settings.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on how we can make Faithlife an even better tool for creating community within your groups. Please let us know what you like (and don't like!) about Faithlife Discussions!

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Comments

MJ. Smith

Thank you ... this is likely a big help for discussion of a text not available in Logos

David Paul

This is one of the things I suggested months (years?) ago--I'm glad to see it. But I still have a question...has the character limit been removed or considerably bumped up? The one time I participated in a Faithlife discussion I was shocked to find a character limit that seemed to be attempting to beat Twitter at their own game. Without a change to that, this is only an incremental improvement.

Patrick Nausha (Faithlife)

has the character limit been removed or considerably bumped up?

Bumped up substantially. The limit is 40,000 characters for Discussions [:D] which translates into a several page Word doc in 12pt font.

-Patrick

David Paul

That should do. [:)]

steve clark

in one of my groups i tried twice to add a post and it showed (did it a third time to get screen capture) failure each time

Below is the text pasted into the new post

Below is the error screen that pops up

a single page of text was pasted in from Word, it was just plain text with scriptures bolded.

Logos you can see the group (which you should be able to get to, but other will not as this group is locked to my family members).

EDIT: word shows 473 word. Perhaps the superscripts of the Bible verse caused problems (hopefully superscripts for Bible verses will eventually be added, since this is a Bible type forum).

NB.Mick

Aaron,

Thanks for this feature!

Over in Faithlife Beta group, I started a topic to test the feature: https://faithlife.com/faithlife-beta/topics/146

One thing I didn't see (in a group where I'm admin of) was the ordering of tabs you wrote about. I could deselect the showing of tabs, thus making "discussions" visibible, but it didn't appear in the group settings at all.

Graham Criddle

One thing I didn't see (in a group where I'm admin of) was the ordering of tabs you wrote about

As per my answer in the faithlife discussion you started you can drag tabs within the group settings menu.

NB.Mick

One thing I didn't see (in a group where I'm admin of) was the ordering of tabs you wrote about

As per my answer in the faithlife discussion you started you can drag tabs within the group settings menu.

I've seen that, but even after generating a test post in this group, something is amiss:

Jonathan Sine

I've seen that, but even after generating a test post in this group, something is amiss:

I can confirm that I'm seeing the same.

Charles C.G. Miller

Is Faithlife linking people? I am not getting anything useful. I have started several groups with almost no activity. I have joined several groups and they have almost no activity. I have browsed through the groups by putting one letter at a time into the search box. I find a lot of churches have groups and many of those are closed. Even more seem to be empty. Where is the action? How do I find active groups that I can join?

Aaron Linne

Hi Charles!

Faithlife is built to help facilitate real-world groups and communities. We have many active groups across the country, but they are intentionally very focused groups like a church or ministry.

Faithlife is built to help you create community and communication online. Think of it more as a tool than a big, giant social network. If you are looking to connect with active communities, do a search for "Logos Bible Software" or "Faithlife Beta."

Thanks, and let me know how we can best improve Faithlife to meet your needs!

NB.Mick

Charles,

adding to what Aaron wrote:

The Faithlife group/people search functionality is bad. For example, I scrolled through dozens of hits for Charles Miller and for Miller, Charles without getting a hit for you as a person (your profile is linked from the forums which helped a lot). There simply is no way to find all the interesting stuff, should it be there. I hope this will change sometime in the future.

Faithlife groups that are online equivalents of real-life groups often will be closed or even secret, so you can't find them or - if you see the group#s page - can't determine any activity. For privacy reasons, this is a good thing. In addition to that, Logos pre-populated Faithlife with groups for churches, seminaries and denominations - these may be empty or not, but clog up search results.

There are thematic groups that exist only in Faithlife, but these are hard to find. Some look good but have very limited activity (which may in part be due to the limitations of Faithlife - after all, we are writing in a thread that announces the first public beta of the discussion feature!). There are a number of threads discussing this. My advice:

go to where activity is, check out the active users and look at which groups they are member of and (if these are interesting) work your way through these.
Check out groups "advertised" in the forum or the various Logos blogs.
Faithlife Beta is probably still a "must" in the current stage of Faithlife development
Currently the most "trending" group is Verbum, due to the recently started Lenten Grace reading plan. Check out not only News, but also Community Notes in this group. This group picked up speed much faster than e.g. last year the large active group Logos Year of Faith
Remember, only a limited number of group members will actively participate - in groups I am member of, this may be around 10-20% of members (unsure whether the discussion feature will change this). Thus, a group of say 20 members may have three to five active participants.
This "critical mass" idea makes it probably better to join an existing group (e.g. for apologetic interests, this might be the "50 questions" group discussing atheist Guy Harrison's book) than to create another one by oneself.
If you start a group, members won't just drop by - you need to advertise the group e.g. here in the forums or on any social media where you are expecting potential members (othe forums, your blog, your facebook page etc.). You may invite members of another, active group - but be civil and don't overdo it.
If all else fails, state your interests and ask in the forum, maybe you'll get some advice (or at least answers).

hope this helps at least a bit,

Mick