I'm somewhat handicapped in my simulation of web forums by the fact that I almost never use them, and when I do it's generally not in the manner that the authors intended. While I tend to think that's because the authors have no grasp of decent UI and so on, I'm willing to allow that a broken UI that people have gotten used to is going to be more usable to them at first than a completely unfamiliar but superior setup. Um, which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What features can't you live without? -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
Karen J. Cravens wrote: > which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use > them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only > the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What > features can't you live without? > I run a forum for roleplayers here in the Dallas, TX area, and the features that seem to be critical for my members are "Recent Posts", "New Posts", and "Unread Posts". Having all of these displayed in summary on the forum start page keeps them readers happy. Email notifications for Reply and New Post topics is very popular feature. I like these features too. Our forum is utilized to get players together to game, organize groups, and schedule events. We also post game sessions, want ads, news, and have a calendar of events with RSVP features. Easy sign-up appears to be a requirement. Many gamers have told me that they tried to sign up but couldn't make it work. Sometimes they create several logins or lock themselves out by forgetting passwords, user names, and even emails they've used to sign up with. Gamers are not necessarily tech savvy. In fact, many are lucky to have email at all, but I still get them on the forum attempting to sign up and unable to get past the front page. That said I'm switching to a community portal with a blog, wiki, and a host of other features to go along with the forum. This is will undoubtedly cause trouble for a few of my current members. Some of my members have told me that they don't like to be "controlled", and to that there are some very strong opinions from amongst them about how invasive a website needs to be. Like one of my members says "No email means NO email." For him there must be an option to receive no emails, ever. - Ron
On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, ron wrote: r>I run a forum for roleplayers here in the Dallas, TX area, and the r>features that seem to be critical for my members are "Recent Posts", r>"New Posts", and "Unread Posts". Having all of these displayed in r>summary on the forum start page keeps them readers happy. Okay. The thing that usually annoys me about this (MikeF hits this later in the thread) is that it just shows me the *threads* with new posts. It's both the good and the bad of web forums... you can see the whole thread, but you're also usually STUCK with the whole thread. I'm trying to avoid this, so the default will likely be to show just the new part of the thread, with the full thread a click away (and preloaded, if you've got JavaDOMScript enabled). r>Email notifications for Reply and New Post topics is very popular feature. r>I like these features too. The Phoenyx is pretty good about sending emails... r>Easy sign-up appears to be a requirement. Many gamers have told me that r>they tried to sign up but couldn't make it work. Sometimes they create r>several logins or lock themselves out by forgetting passwords, user r>names, and even emails they've used to sign up with. Gamers are not r>necessarily tech savvy. In fact, many are lucky to have email at all, r>but I still get them on the forum attempting to sign up and unable to r>get past the front page. I'm shooting for the ability to participate without actually signing up. It'll be a moderator's choice, but I'm hoping you'll at least be able to reply/comment anonymously. It'll likely go to moderation (no other way to get around the spam issue, unfortunately) but you don't have to remember who you are. If you have cookies enabled, the Phoenyx will even remember which guest you are, and remember what you've read already. r>That said I'm switching to a community portal with a blog, wiki, and a r>host of other features to go along with the forum. This is will r>undoubtedly cause trouble for a few of my current members. Some of my r>members have told me that they don't like to be "controlled", and to r>that there are some very strong opinions from amongst them about how r>invasive a website needs to be. Like one of my members says "No email r>means NO email." For him there must be an option to receive no emails, ever. At the moment, to be a fully registered user, you're going to have to get at least one email. Otherwise you don't have a password. This isn't a particular crisis, unless you're participating in a group where the moderator insists you're fully registered. That might change, someday, but it'll do for now. It's not a technological restriction, it's a social one; one step at a time. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 01:56:52PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: > Okay. The thing that usually annoys me about this (MikeF hits this later > in the thread) is that it just shows me the *threads* with new posts. > It's both the good and the bad of web forums... you can see the whole > thread, but you're also usually STUCK with the whole thread. I'm trying > to avoid this, so the default will likely be to show just the new part of > the thread, with the full thread a click away (and preloaded, if you've > got JavaDOMScript enabled). The thing I hate about these is when they somehow timeout (RPG.net, I'm looking at you!) For example, maybe I'm reading a forum, I view a few new threads and have six or eight more left to view, but one of my kids smashes her lip open on someone else's tooth, so it's 45 minutes or so before I get back. When I get back, there are now no new threads, or maybe one or two and when I check them, there's one post at the end after ten or twelve which are "new" (as in, I haven't read them yet) but not "new" (as in, the software seems to think I have read them). So if we could have no timeouts on the newness of threads, that'd be good. -- Chuk Goodin cgoodin@sfu.ca Alien Light GM http://www.phoenyx.net/alienlight
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: CG>So if we could have no timeouts on the newness of threads, that'd be good. I've had similar problems with Bloglines. My cat (or dog!) types on the keyboard, Bloglines reloads, everything goes away. "Last session" is the last session for all 200+ feeds, so that doesn't work very well. They do have "new in last X hours/days," which is sometimes useful (assuming my time since I last checked Bloglines comes close to one of their pre-selected timespans, anyhow) and something I'll definitely have. The way I've got that working right now, it marks messages (not threads, messages) read as it builds each page of messages (not the search results page)... WYSIWYG-marked-read, hopefully. I'm thinking of also having a saved session as well (a mini-newsrc), in case the cat reloads the page or something. (The safest alternative is to only mark messages as read manually: "Yes, I really did get to see this page, and I managed to read all the posts before the power failed, etc." with an "Are You Sure" for extra insurance, but I think that's a little excessive.) IOW, I don't think there's going to be a "view new messages" page. "View unread messages," sure, and until you've read them vs. just viewing the search results, they'll remain unread. Well, I suppose you could have "since last visit" along with "in last x hours/ days" since you might want to keep checking that page but not actually go read them (in case you're at work but you'll wait to read everything until you get home unless something really cool comes up, or something, I dunno). But I don't think it's going to be the usual method for checking for "new" posts. "View unread" is much more logical. Also, if you've done a view unread, and you click the "mark all read" button, it's not going to go mark all messages read. It's going to go mark all the messages that just came up in the search results, so you don't miss that post that was made between you running the search and actually clicking the button. How stupid is that? I don't really comprehend why web boards have such a difficult time figuring all this out. I mean, I've looked at the code for some and I know it's generally because they're taking a naive (or lazy or sometimes outright braindead) approach most times, but I can't figure out why no one's ever gone "Hey, if you use method X instead of Y it will work better" and gotten it FIXED. I mean, if InfoEx-80 managed to do it on a TRS-80 Model I, it's not like it's newly invented logic. (Okay, sorry, less ranting, more coding...) -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 02:05:58PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: > The way I've got that working right now, it marks messages (not threads, > messages) read as it builds each page of messages (not the search results > page)... WYSIWYG-marked-read, hopefully. I'm thinking of also having a > saved session as well (a mini-newsrc), in case the cat reloads the page or > something. (The safest alternative is to only mark messages as read > manually: "Yes, I really did get to see this page, and I managed to read > all the posts before the power failed, etc." with an "Are You Sure" for > extra insurance, but I think that's a little excessive.) Actually, you better put a captcha or authorized email reply in there, too -- my (hypothetical) cat or (actual) five year old might happen to click the Yes buttons. Twice. :-) -- Chuk Goodin cgoodin@sfu.ca Alien Light GM http://www.phoenyx.net/alienlight
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 02:05:58PM -0600, Karen J. Cravens wrote: > On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: > > CG>So if we could have no timeouts on the newness of threads, that'd be good. > > I've had similar problems with Bloglines. Not totally on topic, but I put an RSS reader on my PDA on the weekend. Default sort order? Alphabetical. I wonder if there is anyone, anywhere, who ever wants to read their RSS items in alphabetical order. Please Do Not Do This in the forum software. (My preference is for oldest first, sorted by date.) -- Chuk Goodin cgoodin@sfu.ca Alien Light GM http://www.phoenyx.net/alienlight
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: CG>Not totally on topic, but I put an RSS reader on my PDA on the weekend. CG>Default sort order? Alphabetical. I wonder if there is anyone, anywhere, CG>who ever wants to read their RSS items in alphabetical order. Please Do CG>Not Do This in the forum software. (My preference is for oldest first, CG>sorted by date.) Actually, I accidentally told Bloglines to alphasort my feeds and I haven't bothered to getting around to fixing it... it's not *that* bad. Of course, that's sorting the categories and then the feeds within the categories, not the items within each feed. Nor jumbling categories all up, either (other than if I didn't have a usenettish naming scheme computer categories might get interleaved with roleplaying or with fabric arts. Which, I suppose, would make the sudden but inevitable crossover less confusing. But I digress). Basically, you'll be able to define your own order. You also get to "subscribe" to groups on the web side just like on the mail side (though I think I'll call it "favorites" or something), so you don't have to go "View Unread" for a bunch of individual groups to avoid getting the ones you don't want. Though I'm sure I'll have a "View sitewide posts since my last visit" button on there if you should want to check the whole site now and then. (Okay, that right there is one of my previously-unexamined pet peeves about web forums. You can read individual forums (Topic, for us, which some software uses to mean what we call Threads) or you can read the whole site. Does *anybody* offer an in-between?) -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: > Not Do This in the forum software. (My preference is for oldest first, > sorted by date.) Karen and I were discussing this last night... why do forums show you messages in newest-first order? Considering how broken most of them are about marking messages as read, I suppose a lot of forum readers just look at the thread to see if there's anything new, which means they want the threads with new messages at the top. But the logical order to read things in is oldest-first. Problem is, the default sort order may have to be what the forum users are used to, and not necessarily what is logical. I believe sort order is going to be user-selectable. What's always surprised me is how no forum has every really managed the most logical method of reading, which most BBSi in the '80's did. View unread messages Next Next Next ... Until there aren't any new messages. It's the way email works, it's the way NNTP works, and it's the way ancient BBSi worked. But for some reason, that simple model has escaped every web forum development I'm aware of. vBulletin comes close, but I it's a tad too thread oriented. phpBB is so backward that when you click on the thread at the top of the list, then click "next thread," it tells you there aren't any more... because the first thread was the _newest_ thread, and it's looking for threads that have been updated since you started reading. I think my biggest peeve with web forums is simply not knowing if I've read all the new messages, or if the server has properly figured out which messages I've read. No, that's the second peeve... the first peeve is that I need to be able to walk away from a session and not have the server mark as read any messages I haven't actually read. Bloglines has a nice model here, with "mark all visible as unread" and checkboxes to mark individual messages as unread. Oh, yeah... you need a "subscribe" list, so you don't have to tell it which forums you want to read every time you visit the site. If I want to read only two forums, I don't want to scroll through the forum list and manually click on each forum to read it every time I visit. Ideally, I could open a window on a page and leave it open all day long, periodically hitting "view unread messages" and see exactly what I expect to see... no more, no less. When I run out of stuff to read, I should get returned to that page with the "view unread messages" button on it, where I can start the cycle over. Oh, and I need a Bloglines-like "notifier" tool that pops up and tells me when there are new messages, so I don't forget to read the forum. :) -- Carl D Cravens (raven@phoenyx.net) It's only a hobby ... only a hobby ... only a
Carl D Cravens wrote: > On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: > > >>Not Do This in the forum software. (My preference is for oldest first, >>sorted by date.) > > > Karen and I were discussing this last night... why do forums show you > messages in newest-first order? Considering how broken most of them > are about marking messages as read, I suppose a lot of forum readers > just look at the thread to see if there's anything new, which means > they want the threads with new messages at the top. But the logical > order to read things in is oldest-first. > > Problem is, the default sort order may have to be what the forum users > are used to, and not necessarily what is logical. I believe sort > order is going to be user-selectable. > > What's always surprised me is how no forum has every really managed > the most logical method of reading, which most BBSi in the '80's did. > > View unread messages > Next > Next > Next > ... > Until there aren't any new messages. > I suspect that you're right about the reasoning behind the newest-first order. That's also the reading order that most blogs are formatted in, which makes a lot of sense for the main page, but drives me nuts when archive-trawling. (I'm embarrassed to admit it took me a very long time to realize that that reading order in blogs was a feature, not a bug.) Andrew
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Andrew Janssen wrote: AJ>(I'm embarrassed to admit it took me a very long time to realize that AJ>that reading order in blogs was a feature, not a bug.) If you use Bloglines, you can set the order to oldest-first. (In fact, if RSS wasn't such a one-way protocol, Bloglines would make an *excellent* webforum replacement. Some of Gamehawk's features are modeled on Bloglines.) -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 03:52:59PM -0600, Carl D Cravens wrote: > Karen and I were discussing this last night... why do forums show you > messages in newest-first order? Considering how broken most of them > are about marking messages as read, I suppose a lot of forum readers > just look at the thread to see if there's anything new, which means > they want the threads with new messages at the top. But the logical > order to read things in is oldest-first. What I would love is if it would show me oldest first, but only the ones I haven't read, so that I don't have to scroll to the bottom. > Oh, yeah... you need a "subscribe" list, so you don't have to tell it > which forums you want to read every time you visit the site. If I > want to read only two forums, I don't want to scroll through the forum > list and manually click on each forum to read it every time I visit. Yes. For example, at the Herogames forum, I can tell it to show me all the new messages, and it will, but even for the forums I don't like. If I could do that only for a set list of forums, I'd be quite impressed. -- Chuk Goodin cgoodin@sfu.ca Alien Light GM http://www.phoenyx.net/alienlight
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Chuk Goodin wrote: CG>What I would love is if it would show me oldest first, but only the ones I CG>haven't read, so that I don't have to scroll to the bottom. That'll be quite possible. It'll also have at least an option to show *all* the unread posts regardless of forum (though doubtless sorted by forum, and subject to pagination if there's lots). Definitely old-school BBS, that. I'm not sure how many people will use it besides me, but it'll be available. You'd have to click off to another page to see the full threads, but you don't necessarily need to. The biggest problem I see is culture clash between the mail users (who are accustomed to quoting, and to seeing quotes for context) and web users (who will get tired of seeing requoted stuff). The web side will have hide-quotes available (subject to Javascript being turned on, for static pages), and the mail users will have links available (subject to either subscribing to the HTML version or being savvy enough to check headers), so hopefully it'll work out. CG>Yes. For example, at the Herogames forum, I can tell it to show me all the CG>new messages, and it will, but even for the forums I don't like. If I CG>could do that only for a set list of forums, I'd be quite impressed. And see, it's not like that's rocket science. It's just a matter of maintaining a list of forums. If you can't cope with letting people define a sort order, *surely* a simple y/n isn't too difficult. And then you just have a choice between displaying the only ones on the list, the ones on the list before the ones not on the list, or all forums in whatever the "natural" order of the forum is. Ta da! Okay, I'm gonna rant more: Why do web forums waste time with cute but pointless cruft like dancing smileys or whole ranks of buttons for profile/private message/email/www/AIM/YIM (just to quote the phpBB I happened to have open...) instead of making stuff that's more usable? Okay, so Vanilla has the right philosophy with their "We wanted to stop using MSN or AIM to send secret messages to other forum members", etc.: http://getvanilla.com/ but they're still leaning toward "get rid of pointless cruft" before "add in usability that other software has had for years." (I'd have looked at collaborating with them, except they're PHP *and* they came along too late for me.) -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
Karen J. Cravens wrote: > Okay, I'm gonna rant more: Why do web forums waste time with cute but > pointless cruft like dancing smileys or whole ranks of buttons for > profile/private message/email/www/AIM/YIM (just to quote the phpBB I > happened to have open...) instead of making stuff that's more usable? It's not just web forums, it's *everything* Style always trumps content. Think of MS Word's stupid paperclip man. Think of the commercial end of the music industry, where far more effort goes into the promotional videos that the actual songs. I've heard it said that the younger generation are more 'visually literate', and don't find all that cruft as distracting as us oldsters do. Perhaps they find all that plain text boring.
I find www.rpol.net 's approach to be very intuitive, attractive to the eye, and easy to use. In terms of features, what I need/want is: 1) Ability to easily change aliases so that I can post "in character" with NPCs 2) A way to roll dice directly from the forum (or from a pop-up) - the ability to hide die rolls from players would be very handy. 3) A way to send PMs to players (even if it's just a way to send a post from the forum to their email account). 4) Simple formating capabilities - bold, italics, colors 5) The ability to delete posts from the forum 6) The ability to edit any post (player or mine) as the GM What I really don't want (which is a feature of most forums) is signature lines. MJ Karen J. Cravens wrote: >I'm somewhat handicapped in my simulation of web forums by the fact that I >almost never use them, and when I do it's generally not in the manner that >the authors intended. While I tend to think that's because the authors >have no grasp of decent UI and so on, I'm willing to allow that a broken >UI that people have gotten used to is going to be more usable to them at >first than a completely unfamiliar but superior setup. > >Um, which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use >them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only >the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What >features can't you live without? > > >
Karen J. Cravens wrote: > Um, which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use > them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only > the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What > features can't you live without? I'm probably not your target audience here - I'm one of the minority that uses the nntp interface to access Dreamlyrics. But there are one or two features I make use of using the web forum there, the most important being the ability of both the poster and the forum moderator (usually the GM) to edit or delete posts. I find this useful both to fix typos or formatting screwups, and to retrospectively clean up archives to remove cruft like duplicated posts, reminders and ephemeral OOC stuff. I'd also like to see the web formatting of email posts not get uglified by word-wrapping. That seems to be a problem with the current beta format, in which you often get a the last word on each line wrapped on to the next, like this paragraph ;) I noticed earlier pre-alpha versions seemed to re-wrap stuff by nuking line breaks and only keeping paragraph breaks. (Or maybe I'm imagining things)
On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Tim Hall wrote: TH>I'm probably not your target audience here - I'm one of the minority TH>that uses the nntp interface to access Dreamlyrics. Roger's supposed to be working on that... TH>But there are one or two features I make use of using the web forum TH>there, the most important being the ability of both the poster and the TH>forum moderator (usually the GM) to edit or delete posts. I find this TH>useful both to fix typos or formatting screwups, and to retrospectively TH>clean up archives to remove cruft like duplicated posts, reminders and TH>ephemeral OOC stuff. We'll have that, though I don't think I'll enable it right away. There are social ramifications to editing that we'll need to work through. But by Gamehawk's nature, messages and wiki pages are pretty interchangeable, with all that that implies as far as revisions and diffs and rollbacks. Social ramifications are things like folks going back and rewriting a post to make a later reply mean something completely different. I mean, what happens if Joe-Bob says "D20 is way better than Fudge!" and Jim-Earl replies with "I agree! I use it in all my games and I'd never switch!" and Joe-Bob then edits his post to say "Fudge is way better than D20!" Or "Satanic ritual magic adds a wonderful new dimension to roleplaying!" Some forum softwares merely note that a post has been edited... and some don't even say that. TH>I'd also like to see the web formatting of email posts not get uglified by TH>word-wrapping. That seems to be a problem with the current beta format, in TH>which you often get a the last word on each line wrapped on to the next, TH>like TH>this paragraph ;) Can you point to some examples? I was pretty sure the latest iteration of the html renderer was line-for-line (which does mean if someone has badly wrapped quotes, that will be faithfully preserved in the HTML version). There may be some stuff that hasn't been re-rendered recently, though. When everything is over on the new server (there are presently three servers involved in building the stuff, one of which is the weak little test server, so I've been holding off) I'll re-render. And if nobody else has done it by then (if anybody's got people with HTML/CSS fu on their mailing lists, please recruit them...) I'll rebuild the template before we go "live" with the web-based stuff. TH>I noticed earlier pre-alpha versions seemed to re-wrap stuff by nuking TH>line breaks and only keeping paragraph breaks. (Or maybe I'm imagining TH>things) Yes, sometimes badly. I've played with umpteen different rendering engines. The archives are also worse examples... they're all ancient plaintext messages, which are then being re-rendered into HTML. Once we start directly rendering current posts, we'll be HTML-rendering them directly from the original format... so if they came in in HTML, they'll just be sanitized and not chopped and re-formed twice. Hopefully that will result in cleaner text. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
> Social ramifications are things like folks going back and rewriting a post > to make a later reply mean something completely different. I mean, what > happens if Joe-Bob says "D20 is way better than Fudge!" and Jim-Earl > replies with "I agree! I use it in all my games and I'd never switch!" > and Joe-Bob then edits his post to say "Fudge is way better than D20!" > Or "Satanic ritual magic adds a wonderful new dimension to roleplaying!" > > Some forum softwares merely note that a post has been edited... and some > don't even say that. I think editing is necessary, but it should say 1) who edited it (either the original poster or a moderator) and when and why and 2) show the list of all edits (who, when, why) at the bottom of the post. So you might see a list at the bottom like: Edited: Poster: 12:34pm, 2/26/2006 -- Fixed minor typo Moderator1: 2:59pm, 2/26/2006 -- Corrected minor continuity error Poster: 5:47pm, 2/26/2006 -- Removed alternative dialog, not relevant Moderator2: 11:15am, 3/15/2006 -- Rmvd OOC comment in prep. for arch. This means that when someone edits a post, they have to give a reason for the edit. -- Michael Feldhusen mike_f@io.com caulay@gmail.com
On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Michael Feldhusen wrote: MF>This means that when someone edits a post, they have to give a reason for MF>the edit. We'll definitely have the "minor correction" flag, to keep trivial edits from triggering reloads everywhere. Some of it's unavoidable, but if we decide major edits should re-send to the mailing list. This is a major reason for *not* allowing edits - re-sending mail is never trivial, and yet we don't really want to leave mailing-list subscribers in the dark when changes are made. Overall, I'd *way* rather see corrections made downthread, so that the thread reflects the flow of time. Way too many paradoxes and loops otherwise, you understand: http://users.cis.net/sammy/grandpa.htm -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
Karen J. Cravens wrote: > Social ramifications are things like folks going back and rewriting a post > to make a later reply mean something completely different. I mean, what > happens if Joe-Bob says "D20 is way better than Fudge!" and Jim-Earl > replies with "I agree! I use it in all my games and I'd never switch!" > and Joe-Bob then edits his post to say "Fudge is way better than D20!" > Or "Satanic ritual magic adds a wonderful new dimension to roleplaying!" > > Some forum softwares merely note that a post has been edited... and some don't > even say that. Dreamlyrics does state posts have been edited, and also restricts editing to the original poster or the forum moderator (which is the GM in game forums) Seems to work, without any social ramifications. But we don't tend to go into game advocacy or pol-sci flamewars. > Can you point to some examples? I was pretty sure the latest iteration of > the html renderer was line-for-line (which does mean if someone has badly > wrapped quotes, that will be faithfully preserved in the HTML version). See the second post in http://www.phoenyx.net/kalyr/main/00001671/threads.html (I'm viewing it in Mozilla Firefox, 800x600) I think the problem is the column width isn't quite wide enough to accomodate the right number of columns.
Tim Hall wrote: > I think the problem is the column width isn't quite wide enough to > accomodate the right number of columns. Make that "I think the problem is the column width isn't quite wide enough to accomodate the right number of characters"
On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Tim Hall wrote: TH>Seems to work, without any social ramifications. But we don't tend to TH>go into game advocacy or pol-sci flamewars. Yeah, I don't expect it to be a problem in games... unless you get a munchkin who wants to edit his post around a bad die roll. Speaking of die rolls, how do those get handled in web forums? Having them happen on the fly (ie mid-edit) seems a little strange, unless they somehow lock the text before them. Mostly I will do low-level debugging off-list, but since I want the above to be public, I'll just tack this on here: TH>See the second post in TH>http://www.phoenyx.net/kalyr/main/00001671/threads.html TH>(I'm viewing it in Mozilla Firefox, 800x600) kalyr/main/00001675? Looks fine from here (or rather, looks like the original message, whose lines begin: Without, where, blank line, "Roy?" alktay." Same like Chuk quoted it in the next post. And then a stupid requoted "Original Message" that I have a terrible time with, because there's no indication whether any of the text is new, and some people requote and then interleave, and others... don't. Bah. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
> Um, which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use > them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only > the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What > features can't you live without? Both of the forums that I read regularity (one for the sword group and the other for my WoW guild) have a "Show Messages Since Last Login" button, which should show me all the messages posted since the last time I logged in. (This means that if I posted any messages during my last session, I'll see those at this point as well.) The problem with both of them is that they actually show is all the treads that have been updated since my last login, requiring me to scroll to the end to actually find the new messages. Since the thread discussing where the sword group is going to meet has been going on since before the new year, there's a lot scrolling there. And since that's about all I use web forums for, that's the limit of my comments. For now at least. -- Michael Feldhusen mike_f@io.com caulay@gmail.com
Karen J. Cravens wrote: > > Um, which means I'd like to know how people who like webforums usually use > them, so I can make sure we support that behavior. How do you read only > the subforums you want to, how do you find the new messages, etc.? What > features can't you live without? > Hm, I don't use them that much. A lot of what MJ Harnish said I agree with in principle, especially allowing GMs to edit & delete posts, built-in die-roller, and disallowing sigs. Keeping a clear thread structure is very important, and GMs should be able to lock threads that get out of hand. But, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of webfora. Given the nature of the Celandra game and the (as previously mentioned) the abysmal formatting netiquette of most of us there, I don't see us using the web fora style interface much. In part, for me, I'd be concerned about hitting the character limit in postings.
On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Andrew Janssen wrote: AJ>Hm, I don't use them that much. A lot of what MJ Harnish said I agree AJ>with in principle, especially allowing GMs to edit & delete posts, AJ>built-in die-roller, and disallowing sigs. Keeping a clear thread AJ>structure is very important, and GMs should be able to lock threads that AJ>get out of hand. But, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of webfora. That's all pretty much in the works. And yeah, I'm not a big fan of webforums either, but as Carl and I discussed last night, we're heading toward a webforum email users wouldn't mind using, which is deeply ironic considering it's going to be the only one email users wouldn't HAVE to use. (Me, I'll probably end up using the NNTP access most of all, though for quite some time I plan to dogfood the web forum. I hope y'all appreciate the sacrifices I'm making...) AJ>Given the nature of the Celandra game and the (as previously mentioned) AJ>the abysmal formatting netiquette of most of us there, I don't see us AJ>using the web fora style interface much. In part, for me, I'd be AJ>concerned about hitting the character limit in postings. The character limit won't really be an issue... the limit will still be per-group. If we end up with too many complaints, we can implement a separate web-based limit, thus: 500-line posting limit (which is still overridden by moderation), with a 200-line display limit after which the web forum (and full-text feed, likely) has a click-for-full-post link. Or a 50-line display limit, or whatever it takes to keep it relatively sane. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
