Feature request

[QT Luong]

James, the site you mention is based on the UltimateBB software. Photo sites
that use this sofware include robgabraith.com and luminous-landscape.com.
We have taken a look at it, and it appeared to be the only serviceable package
out there which was ready-made. However, there is nothing that it can do that
our current software doesn't, and on the other hand there is quite a bit of clutter with the interface. Another problem I have with UltimateBB is that you
cannot create categories, only sub-forums. So either you have too many sub-forums
and it is difficult to follow, or you don't have enough of them and then the
archives become difficult to browse.

I suppose it is fairly easy to set-up such a site since it's just a matter
of configurating the software.

[Henry Ambrose]

Sometimes its good to be happy with things just as they are given to you. I enjoy this forum as it is, straightforward and simple. Many thanks to everyone who worked on it.

[QT Luong]

Guy, you are raising two issues. On the first one,
note actually on photo.net "New answers" is cookie based. There was the
problem that if you click on new answers twice at a short interval, the second time you wouldn't see anything at all. So they introduced a second cookie, but
in some other circonstances, this would also lead to undesirable behavior.
Introducing thread-based cookies (instead of site-based ones) would be very complex. That's why we have chosen to have a time-stamp based approach.
The user knows at what time he last accessed a given thread.
I suppose it is a bit more work
but at least the information is presented in a repeatable way.

On the second, I agree there is a case for having the count, but I am sure
people who prefer it the other way have also valid arguments that'd like to hear.

[Peter Galea]

It's perfect the way it is.

[James Driscoll]

about my previous post....I was not implying that this forumn change, I was just curious about how that site worked.

I honestly see nothing wrong with the way this is setup...but since we were on the topic I figured I pop the question.

I am very grateful for all the work that was done, and if there is anyway I can help out please let me know.

[QT Luong]

James, I have not tried to install the UBB myself, but you can find information at http://www.infopop.com/ They say it's been used on 300000 sites, so it must not be too hard to install.

[Mike Sisk]

Actually, the V8buick.com site is running another popular PHP-based bulletin board called vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com).

The vBulletin and UBB (from infopop.com) are the two most popular bulletin board systems used on the web. And both are pretty easy to setup and scale well.

But I think they both suck.

Their table-based page layouts can take forever to load and it seems users of these systems take a lot of pride in bandwidth-wasting icons and signature lines that jiggle and make noise.

This forum layout doesn't do any of that and focuses on content rather than presentation. It's also readable on nearly any platform with any browser. Heck, I just checked this site with a text-only browser called Lynx and it's quite usable that way. I wish more sites would layoff table-based layouts and stick to the thing that matters: content.

But, FWIW, when the code behind the bboards at greenspun.com was redesigned by the OpenACS.org folks it was templated (to control the look) and they added a replies line that lists the number of replies in a given thread. I don't think that's such a bad idea as it enables you to quickly sort out which threads are popular or not.

[Bob Salomon]

Tom, I see:

Forum Home | New Responses | Unanswered Questions |

Which one would I click on to see newly posted questions?

Forum Home does not seem to describe newly posted questions and Unanswered Questions may be quite old.

Or am I missing something?

[Sal Santamaura]

Bob, "Forum Home" = "Recent Topics." They're two names for the same page, which displays newly posted questions. It's not called "Recent Questions" because some topics are not questions.

[Tom Westbrook]

Bob, I see what you mean--the menu should match the page description. I'll look into fixing that.

I did include any unanswered questions in the New Responses page, so maybe the Unanswered Questions page is redundant now. As for excluding old questions from Unanswered Questions, it's a matter of how old is too old. I included the date so readers can decide that for themselves.

Guy, I did try to do something like you descibe, but it was fairly lame and didn't work all that well. I may try again for the next version.

Thanks