Why do you need new software? Everyone knows vBulletin attained perfection in 2004. It’s a scientific fact.
Forget avatars and bunnies , the dope is running an old and insecure version of vbulletin and sooner or later that has to be addressed.
Just FYI, it’s not that the software is outdated. I ran vBulletin sites for a while, and vB 3.8.7 is totally capable of embedded images, avatars, sig banners, and the like. I kind of like that this board doesn’t have that, honestly.
That said, notifications would be really nice. I often lose track of discussions I’ve been participating in, and because the thread following is a little whack on this forum (it keeps on automatically marking everything as read after a certain time), I often lose track of people’s responses to me. Which makes conversation a little difficult at times.
That’s about my only complaint for this board (the marking as have read all vs what I have actually read) but I do check for responses to my posts by checking my profile and looking at where I posted last. Very helpful for Friday or Saturday late night posting. 
There’s an awesome animated gif for that.
We don’t cotton to zeitgeist arouind these parts.
Well, some of it is.
I wouldn’t say no to some better emoticons, the older ones were better:
Now looks like you’re being sarcastic.
:rolleyes: is lame.
They have had many offers but have rejected them all.
I see what you did there.
I would like to see expandable images and videos, which would be kind of like spoilers: you post a url in an img or media tag, the reader can then tap the little icon to view the content within the post – or choose not to. We like no embedded images or videos for the speed, but OTOH, following a link is too much extra effort, especially if it means we have to look at a page loaded with other crap.
Agreed.
I used to be able to piss people off with roll eyes, now my victims just giggle.
:rolleyes:
That’s just sticking your head in the stand. At the very least they should be keeping current with the latest vbulletin 3.8.9 release and upgrade to php5.5 . But that only buys you another year or two I can’t imagine they’ll keep patching vb3 for much longer. Yes it’s a pain but security should come before convenience.
I agree completely that being able to keep track of how far you’ve read (or at least loaded) would be a major boon. I do most of my browsing in filler time, and so I don’t often check every message board while I’m here, but just coming here means that the next time it’ll think I’ll have read all the new posts that were made before I previously visited. Other message boards have this functionality, only disrupted by inline pictures causing the jump down the page to be the wrong distance, but there’s no images here so that wouldn’t happen. I pretty much have to be sure that I check all the threads I’m interested in every single time I come here to make sure I don’t miss anything, when I’d rather sometimes look for new stuff and come back to the old threads whenever I want. Doing that now is somewhat more difficult than it needs to be.
I just figured out that to navigate to posts I’m active on I can click on my profile and click on a tab called ‘statistics’. Just discovering this hidden tab will resolve most of my issues with design navigation. To do the same thing on other forums I go to, there is a simple bar at the top that says ‘my replies’ ‘my threads’ and having a simple design change like that on this site is really just about all you need.
Really, I hope people get that I’m mostly just kidding about having things like pancake bunny, things that jump or move hurt my eyes.
And really I think you could do without avatars and photos etc… And I get that this is really a money/upgrade/server issue.
Some of the forums I go to have an obvious donate money bulletin at top that explains they need support— like the one on the top of Wikipedia, and it has actually moved me to donate.
So, how does this site make money to pay for the people who run things and for upgrades etc…?
Advertising and memberships.
Speaking of which If they need more resources to properly admin the site (technical backend I mean), they could start by making it obvious where you sign up.
Its really hidden away on the bottom of the user cp under “miscellaneous”. I think just putting some banner ads in rotation for “sign up on a membership here” would really increase the amount of paying members. I don’t care about removing ads, but I feel I should support the dope and a member ship is almost certainly more than what they earn from for serving ads to me personally over a year.
Here’s some advice for the folks that find it hard to keep track of the threads they’ve posted to:
The Board has a neat feature to make it easy to keep track of the threads you’ve posted to. I’ve been much happier since I found this. I don’t know whether it works for guests or not. For $1.25 a month you can solve that “guest” problem though.
Go to http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/profile.php?do=editoptions and about halfway down is a drop-down for “Default Thread Subscription Mode”. I bet yours is set to “Do Not Subscribe”. Change that to “No email notification” and click [Save changes] at the bottom.
Thereafter you can click “User CP” in the top menu bar and be shown a list of the threads you’ve posted to that anyone else has later posted to since you last logged on. They’re sorted by most recent posting date/time with newest on top. The header says “New Subscribed Threads” but it really means “Updated Subscribed Threads.”
In other words, it’s a list of everything you’ve already expressed interest in that has changed recently and hence deserves a new look-see.
At the bottom of that list is a link saying “View All Subscribed Threads”. If you click that you can see all the threads you’ve posted to, listed in order of most recent update by anyone. This makes it easy to find a thread you remember you posted to a month or two ago without needing to search for it. Or one that hasn’t changed since you last logged in, but has older changes you haven’t seen.
In addition to all that, in any of the forum table of contents pages (e.g. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=2) you’ll see a blue check-mark icon to the right of any thread you’ve posted to.
The only gotcha with all this is the settings change isn’t retroactive. So if you change it today, your personal history will start accumulating from today forward. Older threads you posted to won’t appear unless you post to them again.
It does. This is how I keep track of threads I’ve posted to. It’s very convenient.
When you are tracking subscribed threads as LSLGuy suggested (which I have done for years), keep in mind that you can also subscribe to a thread that interests you without actually needing to post anything to that thread - look under “Thread tools”.
LSLGuy provided the answer I was going to give. Yes, it works for guests. Turn on automatic subscribe with whatever email notification setting you like - I like no emails, but some people want emails.
You can manually subscribe to a thread: the second blue tool bar at the top of the thread, there is a menu option for “Thread Tools”. Click the arrow and select “Subscribe to this Thread”. Or you can just post to the thread.
The other problem with tracking your recent activity is an odd server glitch. There are several posts in ATMB about it.