new forum design?

[stevofc]

I think the site would be a lot better/easier to navigate if the

forum parts of it used something like Invision (which is free to

use). Don't take this the wrong way, the site it great, but the way

the forums are put together is kind of outdated and a pain to

navigate.

 

the site is http://www.invisionboard.com/ if you do not know it.

[bobatkins]

Not a chance in a million we will change things, sorry.

 

As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with what we have, plus we have full access to all the source code if we want to add or remove features.

 

Everything on the site (everything dynamic) sits in a huge Oracle database. Changing systems would be a nighmare, even if there were a need - which there isn't!

[mottershead]

What are the features of other packages that seem superior to what we have here? What makes the photo.net forums seem outdated? Are we talking about cosmetic appearance, or features? What navigation features would make it "a lot better/easier".

 

In answering, it might be useful to know that this kind of question has come up before, and sometimes the things that people think are better are things which many in the photo.net audience don't like and even despise, including the people who are running things.

 

For example, sometimes people claim to prefer the "threads" style interface that you see on many forum sites, where you have to keep clicking to see responses, rather than scrolling down through a thread. We aren't going to change to that because we like our way of doing things better (to be blunt).

[louis1]

It would be helpful when looking at the lists of questions if they

were sorted by date of last comment and also show when that

was.

 

This would mean you wouldn't need to use the notify facility in

most cases for current discussions

Louis.

[nikos]

I am glad to find out that photo.net is not willing to succumb to the threads plague!

 

Usability is part of my job, and I've always appreciated and rejoiced at the redabile, scannable, and straightforward format of this forum's format. Threaded forums, except in very special circumstances, is usually the result of feature creep and not of actual need for improvement.

 

The no-bells-and-whistles approach here makes participation much more enjoyable than in other forums I frequent where half of my time is spent discovering useless features under obscure icons or downloading entire graphical interfaces for something that normally only needs text, links and a reply box.

 

I have only one complaint: when people type in URLs the software should be smart enough to convert them to links automatically. It's a great pain to keep copy-pasting all the time (especially if you want to open the link in a new window) and it gets to my nerves considering how easy it is to implement. Brian, please, do something about it sometime soon. I've never asked for anything here in such a pressing manner, and I only do it now because I know that the bloody thing is not a lot of work while it will greatly improve the user experience.

[bobatkins]

If we were listing features that might be useful, I'd suggest these:

 

(1) "Sticky" posts. These would remain at the top of the threads list and could be used for site announcements etc. They could be made "sticky" or "unsticky" via the moderator interface so they could be removed after a certain time.

 

(2) Some way to make posts by subscribers more prominant, possibly by floating them to the top of the threads list (but underneath the "sticky" posts) for some fixed time period (2 or 3 days?), after which they would drop into the normal chronological order.

 

(3) A crossposting feature so that a given thread could appear in two forums, and posts made in either forum would add to the thread. This is a feature that needs to be used carefully or people will just crosspost everything everywhere in an attempt to increase visibility, but there are occasions when it might be appropriate to post in say the Classic Camera forums AND the Medium Format forum, or the Canon EOS forum AND the Digital Camera forum. Crossposting the to non-archived forum or the general archived forum shouldn't be an option though!

 

In general I find the photo.net froum layout to be better than just about any other forum I've used. The one possible negative comment I have applies to threads which have a LOT of responses, say 100 or more. On a slow dialup it can take quite a while for the whole thread to download so you can see the last posting. 95% of the time though threads aren't long enough to make this a problem. There is a "threads" format option for presentation which is built into the software and which would get around this, but it's much less useful than the Q&A format we currently use most of the time. I like to be able to read all previous responses on one page instead of having to click on each one to see it.

 

I just don't see any point in even considering other software for the forums. If small additional features are needed, I'm sure that adding them would be FAR less work then porting everything to new software.

[mottershead]

louis,you can have the forum sorted by most recent comment by clicking "New Answers".

[omeryair]

The only feature missing here is disabling email notifications on individual posts. I searched through the whole site for disabling some of my notifications and found no possible way for doing so. The only option is to disable the notification through the email sent and when this email is deleted, there is no way of disabling it.

[bobatkins]

The problem with "New Answers" is that it resets itself at random intervals (I know they aren't really random and it depends how often you login, but sometimes it seems random!).

 

I'd prefer it if "New Answers" contained ALL the new answers for the last 7 days at least, even if you'd already read them, rather than just the new answers since your last login (or at least based on your login habits). That way you could see which threads were "active" and reread threads if you wish.

 

If you wanted to have a real "new answers since your last visit" list, which really used the actual date and time of the last visit, you could list those in a different color or a different font within the list of the last 7 days new answers.

[markci]

The guy's been here one day and already he's redesigning a forum that's been around for 8 years and has hundreds of thousands of users. Hmm.

[stevofc]

Umm just because I only joined a few days ago doesn't mean that I haven't come to the site for a long time. I just won't come back anymore if you're going to get all smart about my post. It's people like you that made me not join for so long in the first place.

[phule]

Added features I'd like to see:

 

1) Auto link creation from http:// (i.e. mixed mode between "plain text and html" type of posts.

 

2) Linking to specific comments. It would be nice to find a single users response in a long thread and be able to link to it rather than just saying "see x's 4th comment in thread y."

 

3) Nested replies. Some people hate 'em some people love 'em. I find them very useful but I can see the other side of the coin.

[n m]

I like the streamlined forum here. I might like it better if the unified forum view was adapted to show threads in order of most recent additions. Of course I can check on old threads myself, but it presumably takes more of your bandwidth to serve me this way.