jhogan
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As you’ve probably noticed, our forum upgrade is live! A list of changes is below; please let us know if you notice any problems or additional suggestions.
- “Flat” forum threads rather than hierarchical threads, to better align with the behavior of most web forums and make it easier to find new posts
- “View unread posts” functionality added — this will make it much easier to keep up new activity on the forums!
- Various bugfixes related to message formatting and other things
- Quoting functionality
- Image embedding in posts
- Breadcrumbs added to the UI (e.g. “You are here: Forum -> Community -> Feedback for TSI -> ThreadName”)
- Search functionality now available on all pages
- Improved RSS subscription UI. Unfortunately, it still requires two RSS feeds to subscribe to all of our forum posts; limitations in Drupal 5 make it hard to change this. However, subscription links for both feeds are now placed right next to each other.
- Link to subscribe to a particular thread via e-mail available on each thread’s page
- New rich text editor configuration settings available on your user profile page
- Other miscellaneous UI improvements
Thanks to Hell Design for implementing these changes, and an extra big thanks our volunteer sysadmin, Ben, for helping create a smooth rollout!
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Lasse-Birk-Olesen
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Looks good!
James writes: “Unfortunately, it still requires two RSS feeds to subscribe to all of our forum posts; limitations in Drupal 5 make it hard to change this. “
There are numerous web tools that can merge two feeds. I have done it with the two forum feeds in Yahoo Pipes. Feel free to use it:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=viRLGz3q3RGHcHqwrbQIDg&_render=rss
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Carl-Pålsson
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I agree with Lasse, the new forum functionality is a great improvement so far.
A couple of things:
Discussions on blog posts don´t bump the blog entry to the top of any lists, as far as I have seen. It should.
The forum should allow comments without logging in. There are anti-spam tools for Drupal available, like reCAPTCHA: http://recaptcha.net/
Drupal spam control modules: http://drupal.org/node/206787
I personally volunteer as human spam-eradicator for anything the automation doesn´t catch.
Login is killing the internet! It is stupid, primitive, and wasteful. Can you imagine a store owner demanding his customers “log in” before they enter his shop? Of course not, because he would go out of business within five minutes.
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jhogan
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Thanks for the comments, Carl!
I’ll add something to our project list to try to figure out a solution to getting blog comments included in the various “latest forum activity” feeds.
Good point about allowing anonymous posts as well. We do really want to get some better captchas installed so this is something we could think about after that point.
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admiral-doty
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Any chance of replacing the single window showing blog/recent topics/press releases with separate, permanently displayed lists of each as before? The former design was easier and faster to use, with all of the current info available at a glance without having to flip through the arrows.
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jhogan
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Actually, part of the reason that window is paged is because we expect to have many more pieces of content in there in the future — highlighted sections from the wiki, volunteer needs, popular forum post excerpts, etc. The page shows a random one each time it loads. The idea is to give infrequent site visitors exposure to site content they might not otherwise see.
However, we also intend to create a “What’s new” hub so frequent site visitors can see all of that stuff on one dedicated page. That way you can just bookmark that and have something even more functionally useful than the old front page.
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jhogan
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Just realized I only responded to Lasse’s suggestion privately, rather than here, but I wanted to let everyone know that we’ve added his suggestion to our project list.
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Lasse-Birk-Olesen
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@Antispam methods: I think the whole CAPTCHA thing is taking the wrong approach to fight spam. Spammers will keep developing more and more advanced spambots that can read tougher and tougher CAPTCHAs, but before we have true AI they will not be able to answer even the most simple questions. Like “How many fingers does a person have?” and only accept the post if the answer is “10″ or “ten”.
On a website I run with some others we got a lot of spam when we used a CAPTCHA. We then replaced it with “Type fortysix with numbers” and only accepted the post if the answer was “46″. We haven’t had a single spampost since.
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Dil
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Is it just my internets, or is anyone else experiencing really random glitches? I had just struggled to log in at all. I had to find a way to log in through the back door, so to speak.
I use firefox and I seriously can’t post new topics in the ideas section. It says access denied every time I tried to do things. Took a while to get to this stage of posting a glitch report at all.
Revolution starts in the mind.
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Patri
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Our host has problems when we get traffic, unfortunately. We are filing tickets w/ them, and will move to a new host soon. I should blog about it, thx for the reminder.
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vincecate
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I am trying to make a yahoo pipe that has the parts of seasteading.org that I really want to follow. Can you make a feed that has blog replies? Or tell me where it is?
http://pipes.yahoo.com/seasteadengineering/main
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jhogan
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I’m not sure offhand, Vince, but I’ll put it on our list of bugs/feature requests. Sorry I don’t have a more helpful answer.
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Thorizan
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I think the “More Recent Comments” option may be inadvertantly reducing the amount of discussion on the forums as it only shows threads that have been modified since you checked last. I know this is precisely the functionality for which it was intended, but this also makes it more difficult to comment on recent-but-not-new posts. I think a line of some sort seperating the “new” posts from the otherwise “recent” posts would be great, thus giving you the knowledge of what is, in fact, new, with also maintaing the ability to quickly find and comment on the rest.
That seems awfully muddled… did I make my meaning clear enough?
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jhogan
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Hey Thorizan — yeah, I see what you’re saying. I’ve put something on the proejct list to try to address this at some point in the future. Just so you know, though, it’s hard to say when we’ll get to it right now.
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bhuga
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Good suggestion Thorizan.
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