Suggested features and changes to the forums
List your suggestions in the comments.
Mine are:
- Reverse the order that comments are listed, with new comments at the bottom. Seems far more intuitive to me.
- Add more wiki markup style editing, when it's possible. I don't think there's any way to do bold or italics now. An edit box like in MediaWiki would be great - don't know if it's possible though.
- Add clear notices 1) at the top saying this is a Beta forum (EDIT: actually the title is fine) 2) at registration (EDIT: I wrote login at first, but mean registration), asking people to use the same ID as for the wiki, and 3) at the bottom of the page (EDIT: actually this is done) and next to edit boxes, explaining all contributions are GFDL.
- Email notifications, with options. I'd like all responses to my posts and comments to result in an email notification, and I'd also like to be able to subscribe to a thread with one click. But these preferences should be able to be set by the individual user. (EDIT: we're partway there - we have notifications at least, which is a big plus).
Some of these are already planned, and just need to be figured out. Now since I'm supposed to be helping with this forum, I should try to figure some of this out rather than just putting more work on Curt's shoulders :)
suppress comment subjects
I'd also like to suppress comment subjects (headings), especially the automated ones we have by default. See Down with comment subjects!
for the reasons, and a couple of comments on for a solution. Further on at Comment subject field
for another solution.
That whole article and discussion is rather interesting - I disagree with some of the suggestions, and Jeff, the original poster, seems not to have a wiki-like philosophy (i.e. he wants to keep control rather than giving it). But a good discussion.
Chris
There is a setting in the
There is a setting in the Comment settings field that disables comment subjects. I shall go toggle that setting and you tell me what you think :-)
CurtB, Appropedia guy
Okay, so I disabled the
Okay, so I disabled the subject option for comments. As I entered this comment, I did not have the option of adding a subject.
CurtB, Appropedia guy
Okay, thanks, but that
Okay, thanks, but that wasn't what I was hoping for.
Three options would be okay in my mind:
1. display no heading, or
2. have an option for a heading, but no heading by default
3. have an option for a heading, but "Re:foo " by default, where foo is the heading of the post you're replying to.
What I don't like is the way it takes the first words of the comment and uses them for a heading, when none is entered in the box (or when no box is offered). All those sentence fragments are annoying.
- - - -
Chriswaterguy
I've searched in vain for a
I've searched in vain for a way to change comment order, but I did find these interesting options at Wikitravel Extra
- scroll to the bottom and there's various display options for comment order, threaded/flat...
Chris
What order do you want for
What order do you want for comment order? Do you want the user to set the order? Are the available options okay, but not available to the user?
We can probably find a way to do it using Views, if you can define the approach/algorithm that you want.
CurtB, Appropedia guy
I turned on the option that
I turned on the option that displays "comment control panel", so that now you can choose the order of the comment postings that you want. If you are a registered user, you have the option of saving the selection as a preference.
CurtB, Appropedia guy
Great, thanks Curt! I think
Great, thanks Curt!
I think the default should be chronological (oldest first) and threaded. That's my inclination.
I also like the idea of a reply box at the bottom. More inviting for comments, and reduces the likelihood of someone replying to the original post by clicking "reply" on the bottom comment.
- - - -
Chriswaterguy
Another feature I've seen on
Another feature I've seen on flat displayed comments is something saying at the beginning of a comment saying Replying to... - mentioning at least the name of the person being replied to, and possibly the title of their comment. That give the flat list part of the advantage of threaded comments, in following conversations more easily.
Btw, I just changed the default forum setting to the more standard "Date - newest first". This will change how a page like the News
forum displays.
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Easy posting
A single direct link from any page to create a new forum topic.
Chris
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
–Goethe
Hey, Chris, if you just
Hey, Chris, if you just maintain the list accurately, that will be a huge help! I can chunk away at them as I figure them out. I actually like learning this stuff :-) Think I got a couple already. You're welcome to fix some yourself, though! I just may ask how you did it.
CurtB, Appropedia guy
I was going to suggest we
I was going to suggest we change the default view at http://forums.appropedia.org/. Currently it shows just user1's posts, but now I realize it's because it's the blog view, which is just test stuff at the moment.
Not quite sure of the best way to provide a gateway to both forums and blogs, and minimizing the navigating that people have to do to find content. But for a start, should we hide the "test" blogs and start putting some actual blogs up, even if only brief? There's a challenge...
- - - -
Chriswaterguy
I added bold, italic, and
I added bold, italic, and boldital (3, 2 and 5 apostrophes).
I am looking into the other suggestions from Chris. Probably next will be more configurable main-page, where we can provide a bit more direction, instruction, donation, etc.
Curt Beckmann
Appropedia
This is working well.
This is working well.
Indent would also be good - e.g. I want to indent the "Bahasa Indonesia" forum under Other languages, on the
page. Personally I like strikethrough (< s> without the space) as well.
Nowiki (< nowiki> without the space would occasionally be usefulin, e.g. when posting/answering something about how to format on the forum or wiki.
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
quoting
...and some sort of quote or blockquote thing. Ideally a button, which takes selected text (from the previous post or the current draft post) and adds code to make it show as a quote. This seems to be fairly standard in forums.
Some formts ar e-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
We want a better, clearer
We want a better, clearer layout. The comments are distinguishable, but you almost have to work a little to see it. they don't have clear borders, so you can't instantly tell which bits of info belong with which comments. They also eat up too much space. Livejournal does those things nicely. Mel's diagnosis is that it it could use a little CSS update.
I got these ideas from Mel, a.k.a. Mchua, via chat:
"CSS is usually used for all the styling of Drupal's webpages - fonts, colors, and also positioning of elements (this menu is in the upper right, this one is blue and at the bottom, etc.)
"I'd probably grab some comment css from one of the oswd.net designs and stuff it in the default css file for the forums."
Mel says she can probably tinker with it in the next couple of weeks - I'm posting it here in case someone else knows CSS and wants to tinker in the meantime. We have a diagnosis and suggested cure - looking good!
It turns out that the
It turns out that the placement of blocks on a page (and who sees them) is managed through the admin pages. My guess is that it leverages some stuff in the CSS somehow. Colors are also at least partly managed through the admin pages, but not very much. I'll peek at the theming and see what can be handled through admin pages. In the past, each time I've tweaked the theme, there has been a new theme directory created which does not have the Appropedia-style background texture/color.
We're making good progress on things, except for theming/style/css. I look forward to that!
CurtB as user1
Appropedia
Quick thought, in response
Quick thought, in response to Cat Laine's concerns (via email) about readability - she's right of course, and so I'd suggest that we make sure the immediate background of any text is very light (white is best), and the text very dark (black is best), and we be careful about having the text too small.
I'd say we have getting the blocks sorted of medium priority, and these other thoughts below (which I'd already written down) as a low priority. Once we've got the blocks, we'll see how it looks before doing more.
The very wide spacing on Drupal that has bothered me more than font size, in terms of using up a lot of space - I wonder what spacing is ideal for readability?
A bit of research on fonts and readability wouldn't hurt - not top priority (anyone know about this?).
Re the font size issue, I'd guess many users aren't aware of the ability to zoom in and out (via View menu on their browser, or ctrl+ scroll-with-mouse-wheel). We should assume most people don't know, so have the default easy for the vast majority of people to read; but also check out what it looks like when we zoom in and out. -- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Chris, you keep mentioning
Chris, you keep mentioning the spacing, and I keep wondering exactly what you're thinking of with respect to spacing. I have some guess, but just not sure. Perhaps you could take a screen capture, and then put some circles and arrows, then describe what you might like better? I have hesitated to do any heavy lifting because I don't have confidence that I'd be solving what bugs you.
By the way, I've been thinking of merging two of the menus on the left hand side. "Primary links" (which I have never liked) and what they call "navigation", but which is labeled with your user name. The nav menu seems unavoidable. I think I would put Search at the top if I did that...
What do you think? I could also work on adding the links to the top of the page, but I hate the way that looks with our current CSS... Probably a bit of work there could unclutter some stuff. CurtB as user1
We want: Forums topics (e.g.
We want:
) listed newest first. But we want comments listed oldest first. This makes sense, and is standard practice in the forums I know.
Forums topics (e.g. at
Is it possible to have different order settings for comments and for topics?
Several changes made, plus
Several changes made, plus some stuff was already there:
- Comments are now oldest-first (easy to do, just took me a while to get to it).
- I also removed the comment ordering selection from the normal display. It seemed distracting to me.
- Made a change so that the comment form is at the bottom of the list.
- Single click subscription has been there. At the bottom of the comments is a "Notify me" checkbox.
- You can set the default status of this checkbox on your User Account page.
CurtB as user1
Also re-enabled "new subject" edit box
I forgot to mention that I turned on the ability to enter a new subject. In the past, Chris has mentioned the desire to NOT display a subject if there isn't one. This seems obvious, no? But the implementation currently displays the first few words of the post as subject if you do not create one (which you could not do for a while!)
CurtB as user1
This comment is (sorry for
This comment is (sorry for the spams!) just to check my signature...
- CurtB as user1 (wiki user page)
Formatting toolbar
A formatting tool bar, like in the wiki, would be very handy. Might be hard...
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Or some help/formatting guides
If that's not coming soon, can we have clearer formatting guidance, perhaps some text near the text input box? Even a list of things that work would be helpful (e.g. blogger.com's "You can use some HTML tags, such as < b>, < i>, < a>*" e.g. here,
is helpful.)
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Couple of thoughts: - I have
Couple of thoughts:
- I have no idea how to do the tool bar thing. I'll check to see if there's some module for it, but if not, it's probably a ways off.
- I'll look into finding ways to add some text hints, but 1) I have found where I can do that for other things (each separately), but not for comments, and 2) I actually disagree slightly with the idea of the text hints, because for me the forums about fairly basic text, and adding html hints sends the wrong signal IMO. Tool bar would work, if I can figure out how to do it, and I would probably cave a little bit on the text hints, except that I haven't figured that out either!
- As it happens, there are ALREADY some hints about what HTML tags work, but unfortunately they're kind of hidden. You don't see them unless you click on "Input format" (at least, I can see them logged in as user1). Then there's the "more info" link, which is handled wrong because instead of opening a new window, it takes you away and you lose your edits (arg!).
- CurtB as user1 (wiki user page)
tool bar is first choice, of course
If there's a tool bar thing available, problem solved.
If we need hints... It might just be making the stuff that's hidden more plain (copying it to a different part of the page), together with a line about the wiki markup options. Or "Click Input format to see more info on formatting'' but I don't know that works as well.
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Well, this is
Well, this is interesting!
Logged in NOT as user1 (in which case I have no choice of input formats), the hints are plainly visible! Now, as it happens, I think I can figure out how to alter those hints a little. Chris, if you know what you want those hints to say, let me know. I'll go search for some tool bar plug-ins.
CurtB, Appropedia guy
we've chatted about having a
we've chatted about having a better error message, preferably that shows the left nav bar. But for now,
Forum home
Contributions are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License. View the privacy policy here. Appropedia is supported by The Appropedia Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about Appropedia here
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
We've chatted about having a
We've chatted about having a better error message, preferably that shows the left nav bar. But for now, I went into the admin section ( Site building section -> Blocks, for admins' future reference) and added Forum home
to the footer.
(Note: I tried using the format, "[?:main-forums Forum home]" but it didn't work, so I used the external url format. Andmain-page didn't work either.)
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Page not found stuff
Chris, I still don' t understand why the menus disappear when page-not-found or access-denied errors occur. However, we have the option of building our own pages to be posted for those errors, and we can insert links there if we wish. (Interestingly, there is a "bread-crumb" Home link at the upper left, but unfortunately it clashes with our logo.)
I altered the footer to be a forum reference to Forum home instead of external link. But we could also remove this from the footer and put it on the dedicated page-not-found and access-denied pages. I only created the page-not-found page as a test to see if it would fix the missing menu issue, but unfortunately it did not. Again, I don' t know why. There is code that controls the visibility of menus and other blocks, but does not mention that they will not be displayed in the event of an error...
- CurtB as user1 (wiki user page)
A dedicated "page-not-found"
A dedicated "page-not-found" pagesounds great!
\-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
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