http://wiki.phoenyx.net/wiki/bin/view/Wirebird/ForumMockups

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

http://wiki.phoenyx.net/wiki/bin/view/Wirebird/ForumMockups

Hmmm. I think I like the Gameropolis mock-up best.

Andrew

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Andrew Janssen wrote:

Hmmm. I think I like the Gameropolis mock-up best.

My biggest complaint about that one (aside from it looking like the punchline to a "black and white and red all over" joke) is the fairly limited real estate actually dedicated to content (640 x ~320). But that seems to be the way of things with vBulletin (and phpBB, for that matter). I just measured vBulletin's own forum, and their front page goes 288 vertical pixels before starting on the actual content table - 350 before starting on the first actual group. Bah.

I've now added a vBulletin-emulation version of the index page, and then a revised "semi-emulation" version, which gives more real estate to content but loses the familiar-to-vBulletin/phpBB-users locations of menu bar things (though now that I look at it, not quite so much as in that mockup... there's a bar missing above the first red "Discussion" bar. And of course the second "Discussion" bar should really say "Games." But you get the idea.)

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Andrew Janssen wrote:

Hmmm. I think I like the Gameropolis mock-up best.

My biggest complaint about that one (aside from it looking like the punchline to a "black and white and red all over" joke) is the fairly limited real estate actually dedicated to content (640 x ~320). But that seems to be the way of things with vBulletin (and phpBB, for that matter). I just measured vBulletin's own forum, and their front page goes 288 vertical pixels before starting on the actual content table - 350 before starting on the first actual group. Bah.

I guess that's a "Your mileage may vary" thing. The second of the original mock-ups was too small for me to see it clearly, and I've never been really fond of the look of version three.

I've now added a vBulletin-emulation version of the index page, and then a revised "semi-emulation" version, which gives more real estate to content but loses the familiar-to-vBulletin/phpBB-users locations of menu bar things (though now that I look at it, not quite so much as in that mockup... there's a bar missing above the first red "Discussion" bar. And of course the second "Discussion" bar should really say "Games." But you get the idea.)

The second of the original mock-ups was too small for me to see it

clearly,

Yeah, I don't know what happened to the original. At the time, that was deliberately half-size because I didn't want to get into the minutiae of the actual text.

And the current version is really an easy-to-debug proto-template; it's very functional, but it also sprawls all over the screen. And it's seriously broken, I noticed when I was working on the mockup; there are unclosed DIVs and other evilness (at one point it validated, but I've dinked with it too much since then).

At this point, I'll probably go with something like the (recently-added) "semi-emulation" mockup, just because it gives us more real estate. Graphics and colors are, of course, just a matter of theme, and the Phoenyx' will be somewhat different... likely still white/black/red (ugh), but less of the shiny-red.

What I *really* want is the server logs off an actively-used phpBB and/or vBulletin installation, just so I can analyze them for the typical usage patterns.

If we had a server running PHP, I'd actually consider starting a phpBB site just to get that information...

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

The second of the original mock-ups was too small for me to see it

clearly,

Yeah, I don't know what happened to the original. At the time, that was deliberately half-size because I didn't want to get into the minutiae of the actual text.

And the current version is really an easy-to-debug proto-template; it's very functional, but it also sprawls all over the screen. And it's seriously broken, I noticed when I was working on the mockup; there are unclosed DIVs and other evilness (at one point it validated, but I've dinked with it too much since then).

At this point, I'll probably go with something like the (recently-added) "semi-emulation" mockup, just because it gives us more real estate. Graphics and colors are, of course, just a matter of theme, and the Phoenyx' will be somewhat different... likely still white/black/red (ugh), but less of the shiny-red.

What I *really* want is the server logs off an actively-used phpBB and/or vBulletin installation, just so I can analyze them for the typical usage patterns.

Karen, have you contacted Hunter Gordon at http://www.travellerrpg.com/? He is running a VBulletin wiki/forum/gallery setup there that works really well, and being a "game" person might be willing to let you see some of the logs.

If we had a server running PHP, I'd actually consider starting a phpBB site just to get that information...

To be honest, I *really* like the way VBulletin *can* be made to look, especially with an add on like VBAdvanced. Too bad it costs $160 to buy, but I suspect we, Phoenyx users, could raise that money for you if you wanted to go the VBulletin route.

Eris

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

Karen, have you contacted Hunter Gordon at http://www.travellerrpg.com/? He is running a VBulletin wiki/forum/gallery setup there that works really well, and being a "game" person might be willing to let you see some of the logs.

That seems unlikely... I just had a poke at the site, and it's pretty well locked down for non-registered members. If he's that reluctant to let strangers look at even the outward-facing side of things, I can't see him sharing internals with one.

To be honest, I *really* like the way VBulletin *can* be made to look, especially with an add on like VBAdvanced. Too bad it costs $160 to buy, but I suspect we, Phoenyx users, could raise that money for you if you wanted to go the VBulletin route.

I'm not willing to open up to the security issues of a PHP-based forum; especially not when it's even easier to slap a VB/phpBB emulation front end on Wirebird than it is to write an interface between Wirebird and a webforum.

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

I'm not willing to open up to the security issues of a PHP-based forum; especially not when it's even easier to slap a VB/phpBB emulation front end on Wirebird than it is to write an interface between Wirebird and a webforum.

That's fair, and yes, there *are* security issues with PHP-based forums.

Eris

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

That's fair, and yes, there *are* security issues with PHP-based forums.

Some of them are just due to the high installation rates with them; it's worth it for a lot of spammers to spend a lot of time hammering at them. We have security-through-obscurity on our side, but we also have the benefit of being able to design the thing from the ground up, instead of having to settle for tweaking a thing that's grown organically, and that dates from a time period when "forum/comment spam" wasn't even imagined.

The downside is that we *are* starting from more-or-less scratch, and that you're having to deal with a programmer who's having a really hard time living by the proverbs "release early, release often," and "the best is the enemy of the good," and "get it done, *then* get it done right," and "overanalysis leads to paralysis."

Also, with a programmer who is remodeling a house (and the abnormally late US spring is my fault: I put in a vegetable garden), taking care of various relatives, and otherwise dealing with Too Much Real Life.

But not being PHP (heh), it has a clear separation between code and templates. So if anybody out there is an HTML/CSS designer, you could help with the coding without having to actually understand the Perl guts. It uses HTML::Template:

http://html-template.sourceforge.net/

It also uses SQL, so if anybody's an SQL optimization wizard (the Phoenyx happens to use PostgreSQL, though the point of breaking it out into a phrasebook is that you can write one for anything, and eventually we'll need translators... git, anyone?) they could tackle that.

And with this next release, I'll be publishing the git repository, so other people can look at, and install, the code.

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

Too bad it costs $160 to buy, but I suspect we, Phoenyx users, could raise that money for you if you wanted to go the VBulletin route.

Oh, and thanks. But if I really wanted to beg users to raise money for something (put your wallet away, Mike, you've done above and beyond already), it'd probably be to send me to YAPC::NA again (last year, Carl's company paid for him to go, and I rode along and stayed in his hotel room, so pretty much it only cost us $100 for my conference admission).

$85 early-bird admission (through Wednesday), so it's a cheap conference, but then I'd have to get there. Amtrak is $225 round-trip to Chicago (which is about the cost of gas these days, and less of a civil-liberties issue than flying these days), and the housing prices haven't been posted yet, but if it's like last year it should run $40/night if I can get a roommate. (Considering that all of about five women attend the conference, this might actually be a problem.) So... a bit more than buying vb+VBA, somewhere between $500 and $600. Of course, since I'm bordering on going *without* being funded, obviously the Phoenyx membership wouldn't have to come up with all of that.

On the plus side, though, it'd be *great* incentive to get a 1.0 release done by June...

In practice, though, having looked at the recently-published conference lineup, I'd *only* be going for the recruiting (there's a good Moose track, but I'm already sold there), which I could do almost as well by having a 1.0 release ready and just hanging out in the #perl IRC channels during the conference (and especially the hackathon afterward). So I'm not entirely sure it's worthwhile, even if someone else is paying.

What I *really* want is the server logs off an actively-used phpBB

and/or vBulletin installation, just so I can analyze them for the typical usage patterns.

Wonder what the server logs for http://www.rmweb.co.uk/forum look like? That's the highest traffic phpBB forum I've ever seen - last time I looked there were 166 registered users online, and there are typically hundreds of postings per day. Quite possibly the usage patterns are quite unlike the probable patterns of The Phoenyx.

I have no idea whether the forum admin Andy York would be cooperative - But I have met him IRL a couple of times, and he seems a decent guy.

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Tim Hall wrote:

hundreds of postings per day. Quite possibly the usage patterns are quite unlike the probable patterns of The Phoenyx.

Possibly, since the game participants are more likely to read their games separately and things like that, but I'm curious to see whether most people use recent-posts pages or unread-posts pages, or just read scattershot... and what percentage of people go back and re-read threads on later visits. Stuff like that.

Webforums are not conducive to reading every post. This is good, in that you can passively ignore threads you're not interested in, and bad, in that if you're trying to keep up with a game, you probably do want to read every post. So Wirebird needs to serve both approaches. It's actually pretty good at the latter already (other than WHERE DID THE CATCH-UP BUTTON GO? I have 700+ unread posts in Celandra), but I'd like to make sure it can happen in a way familiar to users of vB/phpBB.

Just how high a volume does Celandra get, compared to some of the other lists? I know we sometimes go dark for weeks, but when we're active, we can be *really* active.

Andrew

"The cake is a lie!"

----- Original Message ----

From: Karen Cravens (Mod) To: stakeholders+main@phoenyx.net Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 3:00:07 PM Subject: Re: PHXS: Things to make you go

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Tim Hall wrote:

hundreds of postings per day. Quite possibly the usage patterns are quite unlike the probable patterns of The Phoenyx.

Possibly, since the game participants are more likely to read their games separately and things like that, but I'm curious to see whether most people use recent-posts pages or unread-posts pages, or just read scattershot... and what percentage of people go back and re-read threads on later visits. Stuff like that.

Webforums are not conducive to reading every post. This is good, in that you can passively ignore threads you're not interested in, and bad, in that if you're trying to keep up with a game, you probably do want to read every post. So Wirebird needs to serve both approaches. It's actually pretty good at the latter already (other than WHERE DID THE CATCH-UP BUTTON GO? I have 700+ unread posts in Celandra), but I'd like to make sure it can happen in a way familiar to users of phpBB.

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Andrew Janssen wrote:

Just how high a volume does Celandra get, compared to some of the other lists? I know we sometimes go dark for weeks, but when we're active, we can be *really* active.

Those numbers on the mockup were accurate as of, uh, a day or two ago. Both Celandra and Fudge have archives going back to July '99 (when we switched to what eventually became Wirebird/Firehawk).

If you go here:

http://forum.phoenyx.net/group/celandra

you can see the breakdown of number of posts per month.

Karen Cravens (Mod) writes:

hundreds of postings per day. Quite possibly the usage patterns are quite unlike the probable patterns of The Phoenyx.

Possibly, since the game participants are more likely to read their games separately and things like that, but I'm curious to see whether most people use recent-posts pages or unread-posts pages, or just read scattershot... and what percentage of people go back and re-read threads on later visits. Stuff like that.

I can only comment on my own usage patterns.

I'm a member of six different webforums (seven if you count The Phoenyx), all using different software, and my usage pattern is different from each one. For several different low-traffic music-related forums I either rely on the 'show posts since your last visit' (where there is one), or the new posts flag at section and thread level (where there isn't). On those forums I read pretty much everything. On the aformentioned RMWeb, I only read a small percentage of posts, and my normal method is to hit "View new posts" to show those thread subjects with new postings, followed by "View your posts" to see if there are any followups in threads I've been posting to.

On Dreamlyrics.com (which is the most relevant), I go straight to the individual game sections and scan the the most recent post and poster for each thread. If the most recent poster isn't "Tim", I know at least one player has responded.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

Andrew Janssen wrote:

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

http://wiki.phoenyx.net/wiki/bin/view/Wirebird/ForumMockups

Hmmm. I think I like the Gameropolis mock-up best.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I prefer the VBulletin look and layout better than the Wirebird look and layout, too.

Eris

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I prefer the VBulletin look and layout better than the Wirebird look and layout, too.

The "Wirebird" look and layout is just a template, and like I said, it's really a low-level debug one. You're seeing a lot more of the "guts" of the thing than I expect to eventually present.

See, one of the critical differences between Wirebird and the descendents of Matt's WWWBoard is that the latter sort of evolved, and pre-webservice. This isn't obvious to a regular user, but it's painfully so to anyone who's tried to automate anything to do with one: you're stuck with screen-scraping, and it's horrendously primitive (and subject to the whims of version/template changes).

Wirebird is built to serve HTML, but also XML (Atom/RSS), JSON, and other machine-readable formats. And Wirebirds' basic group/topic/thread/page layout is really designed more for machines to parse, and to give Google et al. some permalinks to reference. It's navigable by humans (obviously), but it's a bit clunky for us.

It's relatively easy to tack a vBulletin-style front end on it (and I will, with the next release), but the real idea is that Joe Programmer comes along, goes "I hate webforum interfaces... oh, wait, that has an API!" and writes a third-party client. And suddenly you're not at the whim of the forum template writer, or the forum's bizarro web-based editor, or whatever. Nor are you limited to Wirebird-specific clients - there's a fairly young standard called Atompub, built on the Atom feed, that we'll be supporting as clients start to appear.

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Andrew Janssen wrote:

Hmmm. I think I like the Gameropolis mock-up best.

My biggest complaint about that one (aside from it looking like the punchline to a "black and white and red all over" joke) is the fairly limited real estate actually dedicated to content (640 x ~320). But that seems to be the way of things with vBulletin (and phpBB, for that matter).

I don't think it *has* to be that way. Look at the forums at http://www.travellerrpg.com/. Hunter has removed the sidebar from the VBulletin forums and has, pretty much, the entire screen's width for display of content. Hum, I looked at the content areas in the VBulletin Community Forums and there's no sidebar there either. Me, scratches head about real estate problem...I'm not seeing it.

I just measured vBulletin's own forum, and their front page goes 288 vertical pixels before starting on the actual content table - 350 before starting on the first actual group. Bah.

I've now added a vBulletin-emulation version of the index page, and then a revised "semi-emulation" version, which gives more real estate to content but loses the familiar-to-vBulletin/phpBB-users locations of menu bar things (though now that I look at it, not quite so much as in that mockup... there's a bar missing above the first red "Discussion" bar. And of course the second "Discussion" bar should really say "Games." But you get the idea.)

Oh! It's the stuff at the top of the page that you don't like. The menu bars up there, right? Well, I *do* like the Thread Tools and hope that Wirebird has them, eventually, and if you do include them *some* method to get at them is going to be required. So, a menu will have to be *somewhere* on the screen.

I really prefer the VBulletin look, personally.

Eris

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Eris Reddoch wrote:

Oh! It's the stuff at the top of the page that you don't like. The menu

Right. When it comes to the tending-toward-the-brief posts that webforums engender, spreading out to the horizontal doesn't really help (shorter lines are easier to read). In fact, I'll probably go with more of a phpBB-style post block, where the member info is on the side instead of above the post.

And as the current template has (albeit kind of tacked on as an afterthought), there'll be a way to minimize the sidebar, so horizontal space is plentiful.

bars up there, right? Well, I *do* like the Thread Tools and hope that Wirebird has them, eventually, and if you do include them *some* method to get at them is going to be required. So, a menu will have to be *somewhere* on the screen.

Yes, in addition to the critter across the page-top (that will be equivalent to vB's "register/faq/memberlist/etc" bar), there will be a menu across the top of most of the main tables. The index doesn't happen to have one in the mockup (and vB doesn't have one on its index page, though phpBB does), but it's supposed to ("unread" needs to come down from the top bar, for one thing):

http://wiki.phoenyx.net/wiki/pub/Wirebird/ForumMockups/gopmock3.png