ideas for our Forum's future

[Iamwhomiam]

I once thought a "Like" button would have been a good idea, but no longer do.
If you were to implement such buttons, I would hope the poster would not be permitted to "like" their own posts and that other posters would be limited to only one vote.

But such buttons can minimize or eliminate discussion. Sure, you can save quite a few words by giving a post a thumbs up or down, but what makes RI interesting to me is the discussions, especially those that don't flame out where people of opposing viewpoints actually explain their reasons for their position.=p

I once before mentioned, back when we explored the wonderful world of advertising, as Pereladra has, that quoting lengthy posts serves no useful purpose, especially when the commentator is quoting the very last post in the thread immediately before their entry.

A better way, certainly a thriftier way, is to provide a direct link to the other poster's comment you're referring to in your remarks.

[justdrew]

no like button? no dislike button? no to both?

feel free to elaborate folks

if done it would look/work something like this:


prolly put it to the left of the report button or anyway, at the bottom of each post

I request that you work with me on adding any features, so that I may incorporate them nicely into the design, in regards to both usability and aesthetics. Thank you.

but of course

[justdrew]

^^

yeah, I'm leaning against 'likes' now, good points folks!

here's another idea:
What about a sub-forum that is closed to non-registered users?

wouldn't want it to become a replacement for General Discussion, but it might be handy to have when you don't want some tidbit see-able by the search engines and the like out there.

[DrEvil]

Another headache with pictures:

An "export this thread as.." function to get the whole thread as a raw .txt or a .csv file or similar.
Or just a weekly or monthly dump of the public forum.

[82_28]

Yeah, fuck "likes". I think it's fine the way it is. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. Maybe make it look a little less "internet formatty". I don't know how you'd go about that though.

[Iamwhomiam]

"here's another idea:
What about a sub-forum that is closed to non-registered users?"

I think that's a good idea, at least as a place for flame wars. There one could air publicly (for registered users) their complaints or arguments with another and not litter the more public GD board. But for this to be effective we need our mods to be quick to redirect the conversation. "Dysfunction Junction" ? Surely someone could find an appropriate title for such a useful service.

[Freitag]

vBulletin has a feature, not sure if it's available in phpBB, where you can hover over thread titles and a tooltip appears with a preview of the OP. It's useful.

[JackRiddler]

Likes, here? No way, please. Then we'll all be looking at whether our latest thread was liked. On some level it will encourage pandering. Truth is not found in popular appeal.

I like most of Elvis's ideas.

We already have attachment uploads, but maybe it could be made easier to add media into post via a button on the post form (like in WordPress). This would really help a lot.

One thing I like on FB is its ability to take almost any URL and make a nice looking link out of it with title, a chosen graphic, key text, a box, etc. That would be nice, if it's not too difficult. When I think of all the times I've done the labor for this:

Bolded/large font/colored headline of article
http://URL
Graphic from article with img tags around it
Text excerpt or full text
Put all above as quotes.

It would be wild to have the ability to do something like that with just one move using the URL.

[stickdog99]

+DU

+Daily Kos

[Project Willow]

Yeah, fuck "likes". I think it's fine the way it is. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. Maybe make it look a little less "internet formatty". I don't know how you'd go about that though.

Hey, if you think of anything let me know, I'm all ears.

....................

JD, didn't mean that to sound snippy.

..................

One thing I like on FB is its ability to take almost any URL and make a nice looking link out of it with title, a chosen graphic, key text, a box, etc. That would be nice, if it's not too difficult. When I think of all the times I've done the labor for this:

Bolded/large font/colored headline of article
http://URL
Graphic from article with img tags around it
Text excerpt or full text
Put all above as quotes.

It would be wild to have the ability to do something like that with just one move using the URL.

Interesting challenge.
On a related note, I thought about share buttons, for example, a button to tweet this thread. Hmmmm.

[vondardanelle]

i dont know how difficult this is, but it would be great if there could be a dedicated "mobile view" for the board. something easier to read without having zoom in on a smartphone. and maybe the option to switch to the full site if the viewer prefers that?

[justdrew]

Yeah, fuck "likes". I think it's fine the way it is. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. Maybe make it look a little less "internet formatty". I don't know how you'd go about that though.

Hey, if you think of anything let me know, I'm all ears.

....................

JD, didn't mean that to sound snippy.

..................

One thing I like on FB is its ability to take almost any URL and make a nice looking link out of it with title, a chosen graphic, key text, a box, etc. That would be nice, if it's not too difficult. When I think of all the times I've done the labor for this:

Bolded/large font/colored headline of article
http://URL
Graphic from article with img tags around it
Text excerpt or full text
Put all above as quotes.

It would be wild to have the ability to do something like that with just one move using the URL.

Interesting challenge.
On a related note, I thought about share buttons, for example, a button to tweet this thread. Hmmmm.

to do that with just a url, the trick would be to load the target url in php, pase the DOM and somehow find the 'body' of the story, and the 'headline' - pick the 'good' picture out of the 10s to 100s than could be in the document. Unfortunately there's no standard names guaranteed to have been given to the relevant divs/css-selectors. So there'd have to be a lot of guessing. Programs aren't good at guessing.

text in the 'body' of the article would then have to be scrubbed of any code and hyperlinks checked for sanity (buffer overflow risk).

If we got the code working it would be considered an "evil" way to slurp content from other sites, so it would have to be crippled to only excerpt and the picture is a grey area, ok they'd consider it evil to take that too.

If facebook has this feature that works like you suggest (I've not seen it)... wait, do you just mean using a facebook "like" button on some site to put it on your own facebook page?
In those cases, the sites with the buttons collaborate to some extent to work with facebook. Wouldn't be an option for us.

Now, what we could do would be to have a wide-open iframe BBcode that would encapsulate the target URL withing a post on RI. Some sites would have functionality broken, or detect and not accept their encapsulation. and if any iframe encapsulated site had any account login or other security considerations, it would be more vulnerable than we should make it. Also some spambot or otherwise could iframe link to a site that has malware of any form, and it might seem like it was RI's 'fault' or the encapsulated site could possibly steal your cookie/accountname/password, who knows. It would be too much of a risk to do that.

So anyway you look at it, autoloading off-site content into a post by any means is probably a no-go area. Goes back to why we can't let folks post flash objects or custom javascript, etc.

[justdrew]

i dont know how difficult this is, but it would be great if there could be a dedicated "mobile view" for the board. something easier to read without having zoom in on a smartphone. and maybe the option to switch to the full site if the viewer prefers that?

We could conceivably add some user-agent matching to switch you to a smartphone purpose built style, temporarily over-riding your normal style on that session. Since the board allows us to 'stay logged in' forever we'd have to modify the stored session table to include a 'use smartphone style' flag I'd guess.

[Project Willow]

i dont know how difficult this is, but it would be great if there could be a dedicated "mobile view" for the board. something easier to read without having zoom in on a smartphone. and maybe the option to switch to the full site if the viewer prefers that?

Yes, this is on my to-do list, along with a new home page/blog for Jeff.

[Project Willow]

We could conceivably add some user-agent matching to switch you to a smartphone purpose built style, temporarily over-riding your normal style on that session. Since the board allows us to 'stay logged in' forever we'd have to modify the stored session table to include a 'use smartphone style' flag I'd guess.

There are two way to do this, offer a button to choose mobile view, or I could just convert the templates to responsive, which means they change according to screen size. Neither option is no small amount of labor, but the flexibility is long overdue.