Topic: Feedback request about web forums

Feedback request about web forums

This topic has 1 voice, contains 18 replies, and was last updated by admiral-doty 1023 days ago.

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Author	Posts
November 22, 2008 at 10:17 am #755
jhogan	Hello all, My name is James Hogan, and I work with TSI as a voulnteer coordinator. I’d like to kick off a discussion about our web forums. Many of you would agree that our current forums aren’t very good. We intend to do an upgrade of some sort soon. The question is, to what? We’d really value feedback from the community on this before we choose a direction. Please post your thoughts here by next Wednesday, 11/26. If there is lots of feedback, we may keep the thread open longer — but we’re anxious to pick a direction and start making improvements, too! If you’re willing to volunteer to help implement a solution, we could use help there, as well. Complaints I’ve seen about the current forums include: – No easy way to browse new posts since last visit – Inflexible UI for browsing — can only view posts grouped by thread, and sorted by date of last reply – No breadcrumbs when browsing in a thread (e.g. “You are here: Forum -> Community -> ThreadName”) – Can’t embed images or Flash videos in posts – No quoting functionality – Random UI quirks (e.g. inserting a newline while writing a post moves the cursor to the wrong place) – Formatting lost when toggling between plaintext editor and rich text editor – Confusing UI when adding a link to a post – Buggy RSS feeds with multi-page threads – No e-mail integration for those who want to keep up over e-mail – No search functionality – No private messaging capability Is this mostly complete? Or would there be a hundred more issues if we actually tried to create an exhaustive list? There are a number of options for upgrading: – Code fixes to the above issues with our current forums – Switch entirely over to Google Groups or Yahoo Groups – Upgrade to Drupal 6, which has new forums – Use other web-based forum software, e.g. phpBB or vBulletin Thoughts? Thanks, James
November 22, 2008 at 12:03 pm #4301
Carl-Pålsson	Ah, great. I managed to erase my rather long reply…. In a nutshell, get rid of drupal and get a more standardized (and production tested) flat forum software. Try to keep the clean uncluttered layout though, that is one of the good things about the current forum. If there is a way of integrating all the different parts of the TSI that contains discussions that would be cool (forums, blog, wiki). I´m really not sure if this is possible though. The current website is rather fragmented… No to categories/subforums.
November 22, 2008 at 12:10 pm #4302
Eelco	Maybe not a forum thing per se, but it does significantly detract from my forum experience: speed. Although it seems to be pretty good the past days, ive often had to wait a minute for loading a page with only text on it.
November 22, 2008 at 4:49 pm #4303
jhogan	Eelco — when you say that the site speed is pretty good the past days, how long as had it been good? For example, has it been months since you’ve seen a problem, indicating that this might have fixed itself? Or is this still an issue? Do you have any other details you can give? e.g. when the site is slow, does it seem to pop back to normal speed a few minutes later? Or does it stay slow or a day or two at a time? Do you notice the slowness in any particular areas of the site more than others? Thanks.
November 22, 2008 at 7:05 pm #4305
Wayne-Gramlich	The reason why getting individual posts to show up as E-mail messages is important to me is because it allows me to use a threaded E-mail reader (Thunderbird). This means I do not have to learn the quirks of N different web forum sites. Instead, I learn how to use my E-mail reader. I am literally on dozens of Yahoo groups and it occupies only 10-15 minutes a day to track them all. When it comes to posting, I have no problems with going to a web site, logging on, and posting. The volume of posts by me is way way less than the total number of incoming messages.
November 22, 2008 at 9:36 pm #4306
Carl-Pålsson	Can´t you read RSS feeds with Thunderbird? I haven´t tried it myself but I would think most decent forum software would support this feature. e.g. http://fluxbb.org/forums/feed/rss/
November 22, 2008 at 9:47 pm #4307
Carl-Pålsson	Just adding some more suggestions here… How about using a forum thread instead of the talk page on the Wiki? This way those discussions would get some more “publicity” than what is the case right now… http://fluxbb.org/ Just a software suggestion. I have tinkered around with this one a bit a few years ago and I seem to recall it was focused on speed and efficiency rather than feature bloat, and worked finel for me (not in a production environment though).
November 23, 2008 at 6:58 am #4310
Wayne-Gramlich	I’m running a somewhat older Linux distrabution, Kubuntu 710 (Hardy Heron), and I am running Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (20080925). I’ve never gotten RSS feeds to work for Thunderbird. For an RSS feed reader I use Akregator 3.5.8 (I think). It actually works, but is leaves a lot to be desired.
November 23, 2008 at 11:32 am #4311
Jeff-Chan	Does Google or Yahoo have free forums we can use? There ought to be an acceptable free (advertising supported?) solution somewhere. This is something that would seem to be much better to outsource than to administer ourselves. Wikipedia maybe?
November 23, 2008 at 12:25 pm #4313
Eelco	Good questions: i was only commenting on the past days, as they are still in my short term memory. Not sure about the medium term actually, but i do know that a few months ago, it was really bad. The way it is now for me at the moment is ok.
November 23, 2008 at 8:39 pm #4316
Christian-Siegert	Test forum We should use a real forum software, like vBulletin or phpBB. I have set up a phpBB test forum. Take some time to get to know it (start threads, reply, post stuff to see whether the forum is sufficient for our needs, etc.) Please be aware that the test forum has not been customized yet. User accounts You can either register or use the test account: Username: testuser Password: passpass You can make changes if you want (name, new forums, etc.), log in as adminstrator: Admin username: admin Admin password: passpass If I get a copy of the database of the current forum I can try to write a converter, so we can transfer the threads/posts to the new forum.
November 23, 2008 at 11:22 pm #4317
Eelco	Great job, thanks for taking the time to do this! Hard to comment on what its like to use it yet, but its gets high marks for snappiness.
November 24, 2008 at 5:53 pm #4319
bhuga	Thanks for the feedback. I opened a ticket to look into the performance.
November 24, 2008 at 6:17 pm #4320
Joep	Here: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=489446 I like phpBB much better myself btw, thanks for your work!
November 24, 2008 at 6:19 pm #4321
duffomelia	Another option is to use the open source code that runs a website like the following: http://theconnectedrepublic.org/ as a starting point and then customize it as necessary. It’s kinda like tumblr for forums. I like it because it has a simple, clean interface that’s easy to navigate without little sub-sections everywhere which can be difficult to find. There are discussions that people can create, comment on, and tag. That’s it. Admins can mark some discussion as featured. Then some users might care about the important featured stuff and others can browse around all of the discussions. I think you want to make it quite easy for users to contribute content without them having to classify it and figure out where on earth to put. Let them get the content in there and then be smart about how to present and how to allow them to navigate.