New Forum Ideas

Since buying their cameras!

Well put bretti.................................


Tony

So Dave - As you see I am a recent Member, but a Pentax User for life. So what did change the last time? One would not like to suggest the same (mistakes if they were), again

ISO

The old site was fairly simple and had a nice friendly feel. There were no adverts. The adverts are getting worse, flashing and quite distratcing at the moment. The advertising also seemed to reduce the space availble for text and photos on the screen.

The colour for the text boxes and the layout took a while to settle in and I think were adjusted quite a bit eventualy.

The competitions were upfront and not buried away as they are now. When you looked for new posts all the competetion entires came up in that search.

Strange as it may seem there were a great deal of disgruntled people at the change over and many people never returned.

This site is far more professional now and has a future as the advertising pays for it. We have excellent volunteer mods whom I think we should say a big thanks to.

I think that any make over should be done gently and carry us with it. Lat time it was lauched as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The new software then promptly locked many of us out of the forum

Dave

Thank you for that Dave. Yep evolution rather than revolution. There have been several good ideas floated and at some point these will need summarising.

I don't see that me raising the question is destructive, and acknowledge that the final decisions can only be in the remit of TPTB:

But I do feel that sometimes a) Members shout other Members down, when that's not the point of the exercise, and b) TPTB give the impression that the status quo is sacrosanct

yeah well... where's the "alert mod" button? there's a "comment" - which it isn't, it's a post, not a comment, and it's a thread, not a topic - and yes, it does make a difference - and if it's spam, I can't do anything.
I don't know who mods where (are there any delineations), I don't know who is a mod and I don't know how I should contact them. The "Alert moderator" button solves all of these...

Oh yes, while we're at it: can I have WYSIWYG editor please? Or at least strikethrough, different colours and sizes of text (don't need multiple fonts), bullets and numbered lists?

Now to light the blue touchpaper: is there an iphone-capable version of the site? You know, like IPBoard offers or Tapatalk addins are capable of?

Bret

That's a great idea Bret.
a report abuse button

And stop single out the iPhone okay, just make a mobile version of the site then

There is no iphone or any other mobile version. I among others have asked about it before but no response unfortunately. The problem for the mods is that mobile versions will usually have no adverts, or at least a terrible click-through rate, so it will be difficult to justify to the bean counters.

It's not clear what software drives this forum, but if it was one of the popular ones there would probably be a iphone/mobile skin for it. Unfortunately I get the feeling this is either a custom job or heavily modified vbulletin.

I'm 99% sure it's *not* vB. I administer a vB site.

I have users screaming for iPhone functionality and our PHP guy has essentially said "get me a client and I will do it"; the members refused at the AGM to authorize the expenditure.

Looking at it, the smilies are from phpBB (or they use the same ones) and the rest of the code is positively ancient, with parts of it being around since 2006.

Bret

oh, I take it back, the last major change was in 2007. it also doesn't look very much like it uses php at all, but runs on javascript. Which is strange in itself. I'll hunt some more when / if I have time.

Bret

Yeah, I recognised the smilies, and the layout is quite similar to phpBB's subsilver theme, but I was under the impression that the phpBB licence requires attribution which is why I guessed it was something else.

... vB also requires attribution unless you pay them. The layout is also nothing like I would expect and index.html redirects as expected to index.php.
Some things - like thread titles as links - are only just coming up with add-ins to vB, so I'm wondering then why the "comment" boxes are still in the dark ages.

Bret

Oh, I didn't even realise VB had a free version now. I've always heard it referred to as the best non-free forum software. Nice to hear they are trying to compete with the open source forums, I might give it a try. Dangit, I set up a forum recently and used phpBB because I wasn't aware of any mature alternatives.

This forum was created by the folks at PU/ePhotozine. It may look like standard forums, but it isn't.
The smilies you can just fish off the net any time you want. They happen to have chosen the basic set which is most used in PhpBB.

If there is spam or you want to complain then use the report problem button at the bottom - the mods respond pretty fast to that on the whole.

The problem with an abuse button is that it gets abused. Someone feels offended and instead of sorting it out by PMs or even on the forum they press the abuse button. It happens all the time on another forum I am a member of. Usually resulting in the thread being pulled, or someone gets a temporary (or even permanent) ban and it is never clear why.

vB is not free, and I have heard very very bad things about vB 4, which is one of the reasons at least one big forum I know of recently moved to ipBoard. IPBoard has all the CMS and mobile and RSS stuff added in already and appears to have taken on a *lot* of the vB3 addins, so it's pretty damned good.

Now I can run a 64-bit debian on my VMWare, I'll probably install it or something similar to test. We use a lot of hacks and plugins and need a similar level of functionality or our users will be unhappy.

Bret