robert Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 Hey everyone, I am seeking some feedback. One or two of you know that sometime in 2008 I'm planning on freezing this forum and starting a new one. There are many reasons for it, including because of the issues we have with spam, errors, and maintenance. We're actually writing our own software to make the forum exactly how we want it, and ensure things like absolutely no spam ever, because we can monitor that. It will also be innovative and like nothing else available on the internet, as far as I know. Engineers, programmers or whatever they are called are working on tailor-making a forum for www.veganbodybuilding.com It will not be php style, but a different style. So here is what I need from you: What are the most important aspects of this forum or any forum for that matter that you'd like to see available on the NEW forum? Anything from avatars to signatures, to smiley's to the layout, capabilities, polls, e-mail inbox/outbox, member-to-member chatting, pms, etc. Here are some examples I'll randomly make up: I would like to see the new forum..... - Allow avatars - Allow videos to be played inside the thread - Allow member-to-member e-mailing, pm-ing, and chatting - Allow emoticons - Allow member ranking based on activity - Allow individually-viewed homepage, like myspace, so your own view of the forum can be totally different than someone else's. - Allow hyperlinks to be displayed on the board - Allow polls and voting Get the idea? Thanks in advance for the feedback. As detailed as you can will be great to allow us to write the software to create our own forum. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 Private chat between members is cool - so as well as sending static PMs like e-mails, you should be able to open a dialogue with a member and have realtime chat like in MSN or AIM etc, within the forum. That would be very cool More obvious stuff: + Custom Avatar + Ability to post pictures on the forum + Would prefer not to have language filter, but that's understandable + Private Messaging + Polls + Ability to see who is online + Ability to see where the most recent unread posts are Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gyre Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 Everything you have listed sounds nice. A menu to navigate through the forum that is accessible from any page would be nice. Maybe some sort of online notification system for people to know who is logged in when they are. Video Chat? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kon Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 members could have their own diet, and training/workout journals and their entries could be visible on a small calendar (maybe just one week shows) in their profile under their name or something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dontxhide Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 A neat feature I found on the volkwagen forums at vwvortex.com is when someone posts a picture in the message, a little camera icon shows up on the topic page. I know when Im looking through cars there its always helpful knowing which has pictures or not. I dont know if thats very usefu with this webboard, but its a nice feature. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robert Posted December 22, 2007 Author Share Posted December 22, 2007 Cool. I like the ideas so far. The more input the better. I don't have a specific time-table for the change-over, possibly summer of 08 but we need as much info as we can to create the software. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kon Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 maybe some kind of reward system could be made to encourage discussion or etc.. competitions with points you can earn..ratings for threads/posts, etc.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robert Posted December 22, 2007 Author Share Posted December 22, 2007 Awesome! My programmer guy actually has that in place! You get rewarded for the quality of posts (ranked by others) not quantity. So if you leave a lame post or are mean or make fun of others, or whatever you get ranked down. If you leave insightful comments, suggestions, etc. you will most likely get higher ratings. You also get rewarded or ranked in other ways. It's not to show who's the best and worst, but to encourage people to leave insightful, encouraging, thought provoking posts and comments. So yeah, that will be part of it. Great suggestion and I'll be looking for more info as to what type of criteria to have for people to be ranked on. ---- I really want to have video files able to play right there in the screen, and want to have my own geographical page based on where I login or what I put on my settings, etc. It should be cool when it's done! We gotta keep supporting those little Google Ads so we can afford to be totally spam-free and have complete control over our own designed forum! It will be awesome when it launches! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Many web board posts get picked up by search engines, so the whole world sees your conversations. After getting picked up by search engines and webcrawlers you posts get archived in web archive sites where it is time consuming......if at all possible, to get those sites ( if you are aware of them ) to remove your posts. You can automatically put code into the HTML for forum posts to tell web crawlers and other robots not to pick up the posts. Many web boards are now doing this. This is something I would like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Stop taking the "edit" button away after a certain amount of time. I know the idea behind this is to prevent trollish types from saying one thing to inflame people and then editing their posts so they can claim they said something else. The thing is, if people do that kind of BS everyone else knows that and that person will/should be ejected anyway. In the meantime people who hurriedly write posts and are embarrassed by errors later....after the "edit" button is gone can't fix their poor writing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zack Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 If I'm not mistaken, you can always edit, but you can't delete after someone else makes a reply in the same topic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 If somebody posts a long URL it pushes the html forum wider out of shape. Some forums will shorten the label for the URL, which is better, but that sucks if you want to come back later to copy a URL out of the forum and paste it somewhere else. If you are having someone do custom programming it would be cool if they could make long URLs wrap within the message area. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Robert, all of the features you mentioned in the original post, plus giving individuals the ability to turn off any of those things that s/he doesn't want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Thankfully an "ignore this user" feature is not necessary here, but it might become necessary someday in the future. What I hate about this feature on other web boards is that it only blanks out their original message. You still see threads they start and quotes from their messages. My preference for "ignore this user" functions is to make everything from that person disappear, as if they weren't on the forum at all. Sort of like the old killfiles from usenet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 This also, thankfully, hasn't been necessary yet, but how about the ability to filter out messages from particular sub boards from the "new posts" links. For example, there is a sub board for "running", which a user is not interested in at all, but the user likes using the "new posts" link. Give the user the ability to set something so posts from the "running" sub board will not appear when s/he hits "new posts". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Have "mark all posts" command, where once you have perused all of the new posts, hitting this command will make all of the older posts disappear so you can't see them when you hit the "new posts" link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Personally I'm quite happy with how things are now outside of the spam. It would be cool to personalize our view though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beforewisdom Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 One of the reasons I am on this forum and that I like it is that there aren't any pissing contests about who is more AR/vegan than someone else. There are other boards and forums that allow that sort of thing. Indeed, I can think of a few that seem to be about nothing else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xveganjoshx Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 One of the reasons I am on this forum and that I like it is that there aren't any pissing contests about who is more AR/vegan than someone else. I'm more vegan than you. Therefore I'm better than you./sarcasm Of course, I'm just kidding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
veggieprincess Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 yeah, I pretty much like it the way it is. The only minor thing that comes to mind is a) Less Stickies - there are too many stickies on each topic and it feels a bit distracting. b) More streamlining of the stickies that do exist, especially on our highly debated topics such as protein. I think their should be 3 concise viewpoints on Protein in a sticky that we could refer people to. A viewpoint of protein for those of us who follow the 1 to 2 gram minimum per pound of bodyweight philosophy and eat similar to an an omnivore Bodybuilding diet but with Vegan protein sources. One Viewpoint of protein for those who believe in just consuming whole, unprocessed foods to get fit and healthy (endurance athletes, some power lifters, other sports and people looking for overall fitness) and 1 viewpoint for mainly raw crowd. I know many of us are just SO TIRED of the protein debate, but it is necessary that people get the correct info for their goals. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pazios2002 Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 yeah, I pretty much like it the way it is. The only minor thing that comes to mind is a) Less Stickies - there are too many stickies on each topic and it feels a bit distracting. b) More streamlining of the stickies that do exist, especially on our highly debated topics such as protein. I think their should be 3 concise viewpoints on Protein in a sticky that we could refer people to. A viewpoint of protein for those of us who follow the 1 to 2 gram minimum per pound of bodyweight philosophy and eat similar to an an omnivore Bodybuilding diet but with Vegan protein sources. One Viewpoint of protein for those who believe in just consuming whole, unprocessed foods to get fit and healthy (endurance athletes, some power lifters, other sports and people looking for overall fitness) and 1 viewpoint for mainly raw crowd. I know many of us are just SO TIRED of the protein debate, but it is necessary that people get the correct info for their goals. Yes I think that is a good idea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Veganism Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Why not use Vbulletin? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michelle Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Writing a new bulletin board software from scratch seems like an awful lot of work. phpBB and vBulletin seem to be the most popular and one or the other is used for all of the forums I participate in and they both seem to be decent packages. I think there's an ease-of-use advantage in using something standard and familiar. Spam can be minimized by (a) turning on option that requires new members to reply to an email sent to them at a real email address (if it's not already on) and (b) deleting/locking the accounts of spammers, rather than simply deleting their posts. Honestly, I'm mostly happy with the board as-is. I can't think of any current features I'd remove and I have very few suggestions for new features. Also, I can think of many more reasons to keep the older threads than I can think of reasons to start a new bulletin board from scratch. Some changes I'd suggest:(1) The vast majority of new topics created have already been discussed between one and one hundred times. A lot of time and effort has been spent by our members to answer these questions the first time(s), so it would be awesome if everyone, especially new members, were encouraged more to use the search function. I think it can be frustrating for some long-time members to answer the same questions again and again. (2) When threads & posts are deleted, they're gone - forever! I'd like to see a mods & admins only forum created that posts destined to be deleted for whatever reason to be MOVED to, instead of completely obliterated. (If it's not mods & admins only, then it should be clearly marked as potentially inflammatory and weird.) Threads that are just plain off-topic can then be removed and threads that have a few inappropriate (racist, off-topic, whatever) posts can be pruned and moved back. This system has worked well on other forums I've moderated (one had over 80k active members) and as we grow, I can see this system being useful. (3) Limit the number of "stickies" per forum. If you have too many, they no longer stand out as important... they get lost in the blur of stuff one has to scroll past to get to the current discussions. (4) Limit size of avatars. Most of the avatars here are fine, but once in a while some of them get out of control. Same with size of signature and size of photos posted, if there's a way to do that. (5) Customizable titles. These were a lot of fun on a board I participated on a couple years ago. (Do a search for "customize title phpBB" to see what I'm talking about.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michelle Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 Stop taking the "edit" button away after a certain amount of time. I know the idea behind this is to prevent trollish types from saying one thing to inflame people and then editing their posts so they can claim they said something else. The thing is, if people do that kind of BS everyone else knows that and that person will/should be ejected anyway. In the meantime people who hurriedly write posts and are embarrassed by errors later....after the "edit" button is gone can't fix their poor writing It's been my experience that having the "edit" button indefinitely becomes a problem eventually. People don't think twice before posting something inflammatory, because they think "well, I can always go back and edit it later." Well thought out discussions have more value, imho. Also, there are always those people who have a bad day on day and decide to "pick up all their toys and go home" by going through their history and deleting every post they've ever made... which leaves quite a disarray of discussions they've participated in. For the record, moderators and administrators are able to edit posts after the grace period to fix typos (or for whatever reason, really) and there's usually someone who fits that description logged in 24/7. Personally, I never mind making these fixes for anyone so don't hesitate to ask. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zack Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 I like the aspect that i'm a moderator. ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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