Navigating the forums...

I was looking for a forum about potential for the "Update all" option on my xbox and found that the forums seem difficult to navigate, partly due to the amount of space on the page/layout and partly due to the counter-intuitive location of the search bar.
Similarly, I find its location implies that it is for searching all of Microsoft, not just the community, and will yield a large number of erroneous results. This does not seem to be the case, but I was wondering if we could talk about making the system/pages
more friendly to newcomers, as they are likely to have similar concerns. Thoughts?

:)

 

How to: Navigating the Forums

Heyo all. Since the Xbox Forum is new and full of a lot of changes, we thought it might be useful to create a short guide on how to get around. So without further ado, let's get started.

SEARCH TO GET STARTED

One of the easiest ways to find a topic (by far!) is our Search bar. Simply type in the name of the forum you're interested in and let our

Search do the rest. So here's an example based on Halo. If you go to the Search bar, and enter "Halo", you'll get something like the

following:



Now, you can select any of the individual games by clicking on one of the thumbnails or text. Clicking on the "Halo" thumbnail will bring you to an all-up view of that category. In addition to forums, your search results will also include related threads.
You can filter the search results by clicking on the available options listed under the "Refine Results" section on the left side of the page. The filter options will look like this:







NAVIGATING FROM THE HOME PAGE

From the home-page, you can navigate to any of our Forums categories right from the menu bar. Simply click on "Xbox Forums" and choose the desired Forum category.







OR JUST EXPLORE CATEGORIES

If you'd rather scroll through all available forums, just click on "Explore Categories", which is located below the search bar on the home page.



GETTING STARTED WITH FILTERS

Selecting a Category from the navigation bar (at the top of the page) will bring back thumbnails and links to all the Forums for that Category. You can filter on Category from the left-hand side of the page:







REFINING FILTER RESULTS

Further down the page (left-hand side), you can filter by Sub-Category
to further narrow your search for the right Forum:



SEEING RECENTLY PLAYED GAME FORUMS

Would you like to discuss a game that you've recently played? Just click the "Recently Played" tab to see a list of game forums that match the titles you have recently played. This section looks like this:



FOLLOWING A FORUM

Once you've found a Forum that interests you, give the "Follow" button a try. After you have followed a forum, it will be listed the "Followed Forums" section on the Xbox Forums homepage.



THREAD TYPE FILTERS

Finally, within every Forum, all Threads are organized and can be viewed by "Discussion" and "Support" topics. If you'd like to contribute to or read Discussion Threads (people just chatting about the game/platform/etc.), then select "Discussion."



If you need help and would like to ask a question, or you want to help others and you're looking for questions you can answer, then select "Support." From there, you can filter Support threads further by what's been "Answered" or "Unanswered."

 

Such a good system......

navigating to this forum is far more difficult then navigating to anywhere on the x1.

 

These forums are horrific, but the good news is they are changing to the below link. You can use it now.

Microsoft Community

 

As brandiesel stated, the forums are in the process of being incorporated into the larger Microsoft community forums. They currently exist in both places for now while public testing in ongoing but soon this forum will cease to exist and it will all be on
the Answers forums.