The Seasteading Institute

Priority scale: 1=must have, 2=should have, 3=nice to have

[jhogan: There were a number of comments in the forum referring to a plaintext vs. rich WYSISYGish editor, so I added them all to the list. But for the life of me, I only see the plaintext editor. What am I missing?]

General:
* (1) Bug: RSS feeds don’t point to the correct page with multi-page threads
* (1) Bug: Once it gets to a second page on a given thread, you cannot find the new posts at all. It flashes the new post, then slides to the first page and eliminates the “new” tag beside whatever post was the latest. Given that each reply may be to a specific post and not to the thread at large, this means you have no way to determine where the new input is, and unless you’re intimately aware of the entire previous content, you can’t even figure out if there is a new post or if the DB has just not updated your cookies to show you the new post.
* (1) Good, useful functionality for browsing new posts
* (1) Search functionality
* (2) Private messaging capability
* (2) Breadcrumbs in the UI (e.g. “You are here: Forum -> Community -> ThreadName”)
* (3) User rating of topics and posts
* (3) More flexible UI for browsing — e.g. be able to filter/sort by different criteria besides thread name

E-mail subscription functionality:
* (1) *EASY* and prominent e-mail subscription to forums and individual threads
* (2) Ability to easily e-mail subscribe to groups of forums (or all forums!)
* (3) Ability to get e-mail subscriptions delivered in a daily digest

Improved message editing:
* (1) Bug: Can’t insert arbitrary line breaks in forum posts, even by manually inserting HTML — it will strip everything after one paragraph break
* (1) Bug: Formatting is lost when switching between plaintext and rich text editor
* (1) Allow image embedding
* (2) Quoting functionality
* (2) Better UI for adding links to posts
* (3) WYSIWYG editor

Unreproducable bug reports — please provide more details so we can fix them!
* (1) Pressing ENTER to create a new line in a post the page jumps to focus the cursor at the bottom of the screen. (What browser and OS? Can this be reproduced in different browsers?)

ENTER bug reproducable with:

• Firefox 3.0.4 in Ubuntu 8.10
• Firefox 3.0.4 in Windows XP SP3
• Opera 9.62 in Ubuntu 8.10
• Opera 9.62 in Windows XP SP3

ENTER bug not reproducable with:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 in Windows XP SP3

Edit: In your Google spreadsheet you write “Visual look and feel” for phpBB is “So-so (wouldn’t be integrated with TSI)”. This is not true, you can visually customize phpBB to make it look like the rest of the website.

That’s a good point, Christian, re: phpBB’s customizability. It would take more work, but we should be able to create a similar aesthetic if we need to go that way.

Thanks for the research on the “ENTER” bug! I think Ben, our volunteer sysadmin/developer, has gotten a fix in — let us know if you are still seeing it.

Hey all,

I just wanted to provide you with a status update on our work to improve the forums. So far we’ve* implemented:

• Bugfix: Pressing ENTER to create a new line in a post the page jumps to focus the cursor at the bottom of the screen. (What browser and OS? Can this be reproduced in different browsers?)
• Search functionality for many forum pages
• E-mail subscription enabled for forum posts
• Private message capabilities (available from a user’s profile page)
• New page showing list of recent forum comments (linked from the “Active Forum Topics” box on the front page)

There are more improvements coming. Some of them are listed in the original post in this thread. Some are improvements to the items listed here — for example, we’d like to get the e-mail subscription links positioned next to the RSS subscription links for ease of use.

We appreciate your patience. We’ve also done a push to recruit more website volunteers (which is of course tough during the holidays) — if you know of anyone who might be able to help, please send them to volunteer@seasteading.org.

Feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

James

* And by “we” I really mean Ben Lavender / bhuga, who in addition to handling day-to-day sysadmin duties has probably spent dozens of hours doing the work outlined above, and research/prep work for much more. Thank you Ben!!

Thanks for the confirmation on the newline bug. That’s good to know.

We’ve been getting a lot of spam user accounts created on the website despite the current captcha, so I think we need a better way of preventing that before allowing anonymous comments.

Is anyone else seeing issues with website speed? I haven’t heard complaints on this in a while, and it seems OK to me, so I’m wondering if it’s something with the overseas connection between you and us.

Thanks for the feedback, Thorizan! We’ll eventually get functionality to scan only unread posts (as opposed to all recent posts) but I’m glad this is a useful step! Ben / bhuga implemented it for us.