posted by pefferie on May 21, 2011 | 9 comments
Here are a few suggestions.* Use 1-base numbering for topics (or, better still, no numbering). Seeing the first line as number 0 geeks me out.* Have a way to search posts* Have a way to see all posts or filter by date,sender, etc.* Merge forums with lesson discussions (for the purpose of navigation and search) - pretty much the same conversations are happening in both places* Make some discussions sticky (i.e. always at the top), such as "Site improvements", "How to use Popup Chinese", etc.These few features are what everyone has come to expect these days. Isn't there a bunch of free full-featured forum platforms out there that you can just integrate?Also, the feature of seeing all posts from a person by clicking on a person's name is good, but doesn't it truncate the list at a certain length? It also is broken for some user names (yes, I'm looking at you, David). It doesn't help that some messages are signed as trevelyan, others as Intermediate (you can't hide - the --dave signature gives you away :-).
I like the cleanliness of the current forum compared to the ad-packed discussion sections elsewhere, but these are good suggestions.
I have to concur with barrister. 泡泡中文 forums have a minimalist appeal to them...like a Japanese rock garden.
@Dave - Great to have the forum search - thanks a lot! There is an issue with rendering rich text in the results, see e.g. the last result when searching for "upgrade". Still pretty cool though.
The main improvement to the forum for me would be for newest posts to be on top and for more organization in the reply system, going through and foraging through for replies to messages which are indented under the main post, but for some reason not in order of date has just been giving me a headache and making it difficult to come back on and answer replies.
The search feature would be wonderful.
Also, if I could go back onto my own personal page in 泡泡中文 and see every post in my post history would be invaluable.
Xiao Hu and pefferie,Just a note to say we've implemented a couple of the suggestions here and added support for editing comments too. Currently working on search.I'll see if we can figure out a way to highlight newer comments/posts. Right now we're bumping stuff to the top of the community page and ordering comments by number of upvotes. If there's a new comment that's been made further down I can see it being hard to find unless one clicks through from the front page. As we grow we'll probably want to tweak all this, but the goal now is at least keeping the active discussions up at the top. Keep the suggestions coming if you have them. Echo's response to your posts is basically, "I agree. Now do what they say!"Cheers,--david
I just posed a comment on this topic (replying to the first post) and my post ended up in the middle of the page. This does not make sense - it should go to the bottom. OTOH, when someone replies to a a comment that is already in the middle of the page, the reply should stick with it. This breaks the chronological order, but this is the price to pay for threaded view.
@pefferie,The display order for the way comments are handled should be a lot clearer now. If someone upvotes a comment we're still bumping it up the page, but the strange display order issues are otherwise solved.Also worth noting -- we've also introduced a new link at the top ("threads") which makes it easy to keep track of who has replied to comments. Clicking on someone's username in the forum will also jump to a list of their recent discussions. Cheers,--david
@trevelyan,clicking on "threads" has the same effect as clicking on my username, not sure why there are two ways to access the same info. How recent is recent as in "list of their recent discussions"? Clicking on a username used to bring a user's profile page - how can I access it now?