Requesting Input on Upcoming Forum Changes

Legacy Forum Archive welcome-mat
1

Hi all, I’ve been doing some work for Clay & team, on the website and forum, and wanted to introduce myself.

I’m a tech consultant helping Clay evaluate the best way to migrate the forum away from its current technology (Joomla / Kunena) and into a new one (WordPress / BBPress).

Before getting into why make the move, I wanted to let you know that our overriding goal is to make the move in a way that minimizes the impact on forum users, and that sets the stage for a better technology platform for the future.

And just to be clear, all of the current and past forum topics, posts, replies, etc. will be there in the new forum, and it’ll look very similar to the new forum.

As we go through the planning process for the move, I wanted to let you know that I’d really appreciate your input, both general and specific. I wish I could promise that you won’t notice any difference once we make the move, but of course that’s just not the case. Things will be a bit different, although we’re working to make it as similar as possible to the current forum. For example, I don’t think we’ll be able to exactly replicate the Karma system, but we’ll try to replace it with something very similar.

As much as possible, we’ll retain the great aspects of your user profiles that you’ve built up and earned by participating in the forums. We won’t make everyone restart at the level of Fresh Boarder, for example. And your profiles will definitely reflect your numbers of Posts, carried over from the current forum.

That’s probably enough detail for now, to acknowledge that things won’t look exactly the same, but also assure you that we’ll get it as close as we can in appearance and usability.

As for ‘Why?’ make the move… In short, we really couldn’t keep the forum on its current Joomla version and instance (end-of-life in 2014), and there were going to be changes required, either to adjust to a newer Joomla version, or as a better option, to a current WordPress version. Updating the forum to a current technology stack will improve its performance (faster) and let us integrate some of the great web innovations that have come along in the past couple of years. Also, things will just work better with both the website and forum on Wordpress.

I’d love to hear your input on the items that are your highest priorities, and any concerns you have about the move. And I’ll post updates here along the way, to let you know about details and timing.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to being part of the great discussions here on knife.wickededgeusa.com.

2

Hey Chris, thanks for taking the time to post up! I will be thinking about this with the others to see if we can offer valuable input =)

3

Thanks Josh! I’m on the lookout for the highest priority items, so I look forward to getting some input.

4

Hey Chris, this sounds great! I wish you a lot of success in improving the forum.

About a year ago Geocyclist (another member here) and me talked about creating a smartphone app for the site. By now I’ve managed to teach myself Java and I’m ready to create an Android app. So if you ask me my main wish, that would be an API that allows access to the forum.

I’m a bit in a hurry now, but I’d love to exchange ideas with you about improving the forum!

5

One thing is that it would be nice to have the pm’s notification actually work… right now you can get a pm and even if you have the setting set properly you will never get an email/get notified.

6

Josh, the great thing about this (I hope) is that we’re getting completely new forum software. So things like pm’s should work out of the box.

Chris/Clay: I appreciate that you want to make the impact on current users as minimal as possible. So migrating all posts, for example, is a must, I think. And many users, including me, would also appreciate their status/post count/etc. to be retained.

However, if you need to make modifications to the stock bbPress software, for example to implement a karma system, I’d be careful with this. The reason is that you have to make those modifications over and over again when you want to upgrade to a new version of the forum software. And practice shows that’s expensive, introduces bugs, etc. So I’d stay with the stock software as much as possible.

And if I may add one wish: in the current implementation of Kunena the moderator buttons for deleting a thread are dangerously close to those for replying to a thread (bottom left corner). And if you press “delete”, you are not even asked for a confirmation. This has caused me to delete two threads already by accident. It would be nice if the bbPress software handled this better.

Again: great news!! Also because I love Wordpress. (Both of my blogs are running on it.)

7

KHowdy!

THanks for asking input!
One thing I really “used” a lot was looking at post counts vs karma vs thank your points. It seemed to help weed out posts that were from knowledgeable people that really cared to help and were aknowledged bi others which helped to put weight on their responses for me. These type of folks vs people weigh simply high post counts was more important to me. Anyone can post just to post to get that number up. Does that make sense? And some of the people do not necessarily have bey high post counts but very high karma and very high thank yous. It seemed to add weight to what they said in my opinion. My 2 cents. Thanks!
Eric

8

If the e-mail to advise of a pm in your inbox isn’t workable, I’d like to see a flashing light at the top of the page, advising you of a PM in your inbox.

I’d also like to see the time stamp for each comment to be “real time” - example: 23:55 29 August 2015. Maybe the user’s browser could adjust for time zones? Maybe relative time as well as real time. Example: 23:55, 29 August 2015 (8 days, 4.6 hrs)

Reason: Occasionally, I’ll want to search for an e-mail related to a particular post. The current format requires that you do some fancy footwork in converting six weeks, 4 days and 43 minutes to a real date and time.

And while we’re on the subject, what the hell is Karma in the forum context?

9

Can you make it a bit more phone friendly. I’m always checking this and all forums on my phone and this is the only one I have to turn my phone sideways to read. Otherwise it cuts half the screen off.

10

Wow, that’s impressive, to learn java! I am an android fan as well, although I have to be ambidextrous and also work in iOS. (Adding a note… I’m not a developer, just mean I use both Android and iOS devices).

I really don’t foresee a public API for the forum, but I’d like to know the kind of info you’d like to work with through the API.

Looking forward to more detail once you have the time.

11

Wanting to hit on a few of the points I’ve heard so far.

As an overall note, we’re approaching the move as being an incremental project. We want the new forum to have as many key features as possible at launch, but we also want to get moved sooner than later. So, the feature list that will be available vs others that will come later, is subjective, and will be heavily influenced by the discussions here. About the only thing I can promise is that none of us will get everything we want, on day one!

Mobile-friendly design. Huge priority, but it just won’t be part of the launch of the new forum, unfortunately. To get there, we’ll need to get our wordpress theme upgraded to ‘responsive’ design, and that’s not going to be ready in time for the initial move.

Timestamps. I expect us to have timestamps rather than descriptive text. In other words, each reply will show the date/time, rather than text like “3 months and 1 day ago.”

Karma. I agree with the need to distinguish users subjectively, based on other users’ imput, rather than just on number of posts/replies. I’m expecting there to be a ‘stars’ system where users can rate other users. I’m also expecting to implement a badge system, where earned badges appear on a user’s profile / avatar, and we can set the criterion to earn each badge. This gives us flexibility in dynamically assigning badges, say as a combination of posts and user rating.

PM (private messaging). Looking for more feedback here, to gauge its priority. Is it something you use often, or occasionally?

12

Chris, the idea about the API was that users could make simple posts from an app. Not a Tapatalk implementation of course, but simply for example take a picture and directly have it uploaded.

I use PM-ing quite a lot. (Although not as much as I used to, since its current implementation is not so good.) It’s the only way to privately exchange information without publicly giving away your email address.

13

knifeit’d also be nice if ‘abnormal’ url images would work… for example, I tried to post this image up in the super polished edges thread but it just shows as text, whereas on other forums it would show up fine.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3lDnhs4nym8/VfoIjoLF6uI/AAAAAAAACDQ/EpvEQLxummA/w1125-h835-no/15%2B-%2B1

14

Just a general update. We’ve made some good progress this week already (didn’t make much progress last week) and I’m pretty happy with things. We were struggling to get the migrated posts to show images and formatting (bulleted lists, etc.) instead of showing the HTML in text. But it looks like we’re now showing the images, at least most of the time.

[ul]
[li]I’m pretty happy with private messaging. So… I’m hopeful it’ll meet everyone’s needs; but we’ll certainly take your feedback.[/li]
[li]For hosted images (a URL, like the one from razoredgeknives) you can insert those through an image tag, and they’ll display embedded in the post. It’s pretty easy, just click a button for the ‘img’ insert, give it a description, and it’ll show.[/li]
[li]For ‘styling’ to make it look like the current forum, we’re kind of leaving this for last. But I think we’ll get fairly close.[/li]
[/ul]

I’m expecting to extend ‘beta’ invites in the next 7-10 days, for users to try out our ‘sandbox’ forum and provide feedback. I’ll send invites to everyone on this thread.

15

[quote quote=“chrisjb” post=24233]Just a general update. We’ve made some good progress this week already (didn’t make much progress last week) and I’m pretty happy with things. We were struggling to get the migrated posts to show images and formatting (bulleted lists, etc.) instead of showing the HTML in text. But it looks like we’re now showing the images, at least most of the time.

[ul]
[li]I’m pretty happy with private messaging. So… I’m hopeful it’ll meet everyone’s needs; but we’ll certainly take your feedback.[/li]
[li]For hosted images (a URL, like the one from razoredgeknives) you can insert those through an image tag, and they’ll display embedded in the post. It’s pretty easy, just click a button for the ‘img’ insert, give it a description, and it’ll show.[/li]
[li]For ‘styling’ to make it look like the current forum, we’re kind of leaving this for last. But I think we’ll get fairly close.[/li]
[/ul]

I’m expecting to extend ‘beta’ invites in the next 7-10 days, for users to try out our ‘sandbox’ forum and provide feedback. I’ll send invites to everyone on this thread.[/quote]

Sounds good. Thanks for the update Chris.

16

That’s great, Chris! Looking forward!

17

A way to Mark Forums Read.

18

I think we’re ready to invite a few people in to the new forum. It’s still at ‘beta’ level but I’d like to get some early feedback.

Please send me a private message if you want to check it out.

19

I’ve added the ability to mark as read, and also a shortcut on each post (orange > symbol) to ‘jump’ to the first unread post within a topic.

We’ll have to test these and make sure they’re stable features, as they’re based on 3rd party add-ins.

Thanks for the input!

20

[quote quote=“chrisjb” post=24392]I think we’re ready to invite a few people in to the new forum. It’s still at ‘beta’ level but I’d like to get some early feedback.

Please send me a private message if you want to check it out.[/quote]

Josh and Mark - Thanks for volunteering. Wanted to make sure you got my PM, so you can check it out.