Should this thread maybe be moved to the IMHO forum, or even the Marketplace? I don’t know, it just seems little tacky here in ATMB, somehow. But maybe that’s just me.
It’ll probably get better visibility in IMHO, too, I presume.
Not sure if this exists on that software or others, but something that seems like it could be useful would be to have user-created groups of users (basically “friends” or “enemies”, or “techies” or whatever).
Then I could see which threads they are participating in and whether they are online now, etc.
Which works fine the first time you’re reading through a thread.
But if you’re logging in to see the latest post in Bakers Dozen after being gone from it for a month (14,180 replies and counting), or you want to research what’s going on in your latest Mafia game and need to see Day 4, when you’re currently on Day 7…good luck! Scroll, scroll, scroll…load…scroll scroll scroll…load…
Yes, we have all have occasional problems with the moderator decisions. But I’d much rather have 15 moderators who I know, rather than wading through the gauntlet of 1,500 individuals who get the right to censor me just because they’ve been on the message board longer than I have.
Other than that…it looks interesting. I haven’t seen it in action, though.
I believe their advanced content filtering heuristics take care of this problem by automatically deleting the account of anyone who participates in a thread like that one.
Theoretically, it remembers your place so that the next time you go back, it should just jump right back where you left off. Not sure how well that actually works.
LOL. Fair enough. OK, how about a different long one? Um…
It’s time to officially Pit Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program. (6,272 replies). No…that’s crap too.
Um…
Martin/Zimmerman: humble opinions and speculation thread (9,285 replies). OK, still a bad example.
Order of the Stick - Book 5 Discussion Thread (4,848 replies) Hey! I think we have a winner!
I saw that. But imagine you’ve taken a break from the thread for a month, there’s 1,000 new replies, and you just want to catch up on the last 50-100 or so before commenting? Now you’re scrolling and loading through 900 replies to get to the “new” ones.
I know the post to which I am responding is old, but:
I really, really liked the “Player Notes” feature in City of Heroes, which worked pretty much like this. It used a star rating system instead of colors, but the important point was I could make notes about individuals, and whenever I encountered them again, re-read my notes with a mouseclick. Not only was it useful for knowing how to respond to people (“this guy is a spammer,” “don’t mention Lions vs Tigers to this guy,”), and tracking ongoing issues (“ask about her daughter’s health,”) it also helped create the illusion that I had an eidetic memory. 
It helped me to interact with people at a sensitivity level appropriate to the level of effort involved – casual knowledge of casual acquaintances (“lost a dog in December,”) without having to obsess over remembering…or important details about people important to me, without the chance of an embarrassing error (“Oh, you’re NOT into whips and chains? That’s the poster with the similar name?”).
K, then, could you show us a screen cap of that bb where you’ve customized it to look like the Straight Dope?
I actually agree that the auto-page-extending-dynamic-load thing is an annoying trend in web user interfaces, but it should be noted that this specific complaint has been addressed: there is a little floating widget in the lower right corner that shows you e.g. “1323 of 2355” (also with a little visual indicator of this progress) and has “jump to top” and “jump to bottom” buttons. I’m not sure if it loads the entire thread all the way to the bottom or if it fills in “sparsely” so that you’d need to wait for loading if you scroll up a ways from there, but it does take you all the way to the bottom.
I think you’re misunderstanding codinghorror’s goal here. I get the impression he isn’t particularly invested in convincing you guys that the SDMB needs to switch to this, just that he is trying to build the next generation of forum packages, for when the next site like the SDMB is set up, and he came here for input on how it should behave because people around here have strong opinions on it. I’m sure he’s interested in building it so that it theoretically could make the people here happy if they chose to switch to it, and once he’s done I’m sure he’d be happy if TPTB here switched, but that’s it. He’s trying to make a viable competitor to vBulletin, not steal this specific vBulletin customer.
To that end, his job is simply to make a system that is flexible enough that it could be customized to look and feel like the SDMB, not to actually customize it that way. The former is part of making a viable product, and the latter is a bunch of tedious busy work he’d be doing to woo one single site.
I wonder if he could make it compatible with the Tapatalk API so his forum could interwork with existing ones.
If that happens, hell, I’d skin it myself to look like the SDMB but with some of the new features (floating AJAX replies would be so sweet). No, don’t worry, there still wouldn’t be avatars.
I don’t think this thread was intended for ATMB. I don’t think this was a thread “you guys need to replace your software”. Rather, it was looking for suggestions from board users for developing the next gen software. It got some crap in this thread from readers who seemed to think he was saying we should change rather than taking suggestions for what could be done differently.
Why would he spend the effort making one config look exactly like the SD looks now? The important point is to improve functionality with his improved features. Skins could be done to make the appearance cleaner or whatever without forcing the layout to fit what we currently have.
Both functionality and look are important.
The examples shown have a horrid look.
Show us the look can be good and then we’ll evaluate the functionality.
I suggest subscribing to the blog RSS feed at http://blog.discourse.org
That’s odd, what version? We always test in the latest version of Firefox but not very old ones.
There is a small explanation on our demo site at What do the avatars in the topic list mean? - #3 by codinghorror - discourse - Discourse Demo
Both are important, but I find overwhelmingly that the eye is very good at parsing out images, even small ones. In a list of Dave, Tom, Jerry, Sam, Edward, and Richard, you can visually process"guy with giant red x avatar" much faster than you can get to Sam. But as I said, both – however the avatar images are extremely fast to read, and in constrained spaces offer a more compact display that can be read very quickly.
Who is selling anything? It’s 100% open source free software. And as I’ve mentioned before, I know there are huge social and technological barriers to change in any forum community. We aren’t even bothering to write converters and so forth, our primary audience is new forums and those who are so angry with the terrible status quo that they demand a change at any cost.
There are several entry points to the bottom of the topic: click the last post date in the topic list, click the last date in the topic map under the first post, or click move to end on the topic progress indicator (visible at all times in the topic).
OK, but the shag carpet hopefully isn’t preventing you from taking a look at the underlying house itself, I hope
We try very, very hard to always remember your place in a topic. We even remember your place in the list of topics if you have scrolled down and then go back.
They have the right to raise flags (if enough people do it, and it reaches the threshold, which is of course configurable) that can contest your content, which generates a PM to you based on the flag type.. but editing your post restores it. And the flags can be counter-contested to a moderator.
yes, try searching Google for meta.discourse.org topics, for example.
Yeah, we need some way to take actions on lists of topics, for a variety of actions e.g. “I want to make these 3 topics tagged {foo}”.
I appreciate all the feedback, both now and then – and if you wish to engage on any of this in more detail I’d be happy to answer at http://meta.discourse.org
3.something. I’m not exactly an early adopter. I don’t generally ‘upgrade’ until I’m convinced the new thing is actually a) an improvement, and b) all the early adopters have already tripped over enough of the bugs that then get fixed before I get to it.
Also, when it comes to web browsers, it isn’t an ‘upgrade’ to me until a significant number of websites I use regularly start complaining about its obsolescence. The only reason I mentioned it was that I’m a firm believer in websites that make an effort to be as functional as possible for the largest variety of hardware and software, including old stuff that may be all poor people and people in third-world countries may have available. It’s just a pet peeve of mine.
At some point, “i refuse to upgrade my browser on principle” becomes indistinguishable from “i refuse to visit new websites.” An admin just has to stop worrying about people who intentionally exclude themselves. Aren’t you worried about security exploits?
Something I wouldn’t mind seeing: If a thread has been started by a new member their username would be a highlighted in the thread list. Maybe print the name in an accent color. Many times I’ve seen people post in a trollish thread that they knew the OP’s join date before they opened the thread. Sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you only suspect.
I like the preview feature, but sometimes it isn’t enough. There are threads that I only want to open if they were started by someone who knows the SDMB culture.
Apart from the thread list pages there would be no need to distinguish new users from veterans (although it might help people realize a zombie thread has been resurrected by a first time poster). The highlight on the newbie’s name could vanish after a week of membership.
As for myself, I’m on Firefox 3.6.8, and your site just plain Does Not Work for me. When I try to read a thread, all I get is a blank page that says “undefined”. And yes, that is a problem. I know that my browser version isn’t the latest, but it shouldn’t need to be: The content of a site should determine its requirements. If the content of a site is browser games, then it’s fine for that site to require the most up-to-date Java, Flash, etc., and if I don’t have the right browser for the site, that’s my problem. If the content of a site is a photo gallery, then it’s fine for it to require a browser that supports pictures (not all do, you know, not even all cutting-edge ones). But if the content of a site is text written in the Latin alphabet (as is the case for most message boards), it should be accessible on everything going back all the way to Lynx. Yeah, it’s OK if you use some fancy features to spruce it up a bit: Nobody’s going to complain if your site isn’t as pretty on an old browser as it is on a new one. But the core content should still be at least accessible, somehow or another.
I can’t see it on my Mosaic’s 1.1. Damn kids and their Chromefox or African Safari or Netzilda or whatever they use now for their Myfaces and Yoohoos.
There will never be another bandleader like Glenn Miller. He was a class act.
No, It isn’t ‘on principle’, because up until a few months ago, security updates arrived regularly. Because they stopped, I’m therefore thinking of ‘upgrading’ to a version they are still delivering those security updates for, simply because they are no longer doing it for this version. Somewhere in v10 or v12 should do it. I ain’t going for the newest. I’ll let you ‘early adopters’ trip over the bugs. Enjoy 'em, and have fun. Knock yourself out dealing with those bugs. Me? I wait for you to squish them for me. Then I adopt. After you’ve killed the bugs. Stomp away!
Missed the edit. Or what Chronos said, in post #137.