ideas for our Forum's future

[justdrew]

While I think we have a fairly good platform here, I'm interested in possibly adding some "features" but I want to get an idea of what others think about the potential features before spending much time on them. So I'd like some feedback on an Idea (with more to come no doubt) and for you to post here if you think of anything new that would be good for the forum.

Idea #1:
Should we have thumbs-up buttons (aka like buttons) on posts?
It would let people register their approval of a post generally, without having to actually post to the thread. A way of saying a little thank you, etc. I don't think we need to have dislike/thumbs-down buttons, but maybe. What do you think?

(also, could a mod 'sticky' this thread for a little while)

[semper occultus]

[Canadian_watcher]

no.

[DrVolin]

I'm trying to sticky it, but I can't find the option. Hang on.

[justdrew]

I'm trying to sticky it, but I can't find the option. Hang on.

no worries, I'm not sure where it is either

we can just keep it bumped as needed

[KUAN]

Thumbs up buttons seem somehow trivial to me, I mean, aren't we here for a free and frank exchange of ideas. As for thumbs down... Lord of the flies.

P.S. I had a tough time at school

[DrEvil]

- Some kind of functionality to sticky threads.
- Metadata.
- A site-specific wiki.
- More search tools.
- Let us upload (directly) pics, videos and data-sets. Better to have an onsite version instead of just a link that can break at any time.
- Smarter search tools. Simple functionality for finding connections between people, places and dates for instance.
- Data visualization tools, to make simple graphs, timelines and pie-charts and stuff.

[justdrew]

no.

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

how it would evolve in our culture I can't be sure, but what I've generally seen is people don't all "like" every goodish post, but use it more selectively. Many likes tends to indicate a post of some "importance" while just 1 to a few just show some appreciation, without requiring 'empty' me-too or "good point" posts.

[Mask]

no.

[justdrew]

- Some kind of functionality to sticky threads.
- Metadata.
- A site-specific wiki.
- More search tools.
- Let us upload (directly) pics, videos and data-sets. Better to have an onsite version instead of just a link that can break at any time.
- Smarter search tools. Simple functionality for finding connections between people, places and dates for instance.
- Data visualization tools, to make simple graphs, timelines and pie-charts and stuff.

good ideas all

we have a metadata tag system on the blogs, it could be expanded to forum posts I suppose, it's been talked about before.

free text search is a Hard Problem. Google scours the site regularly, they have a great index of the site. We could have an on-forum google-search box for the forum easily. Will look into it.

more onsite hosted pics will require more storage space and increase bandwidth usage, and require some trick to prevent other sites hot-linking in to our images. the image hosting sites offer a strong services, I just yesterday logged into my imageshack account, which I stopped using a couple years ago, and was surprised to see all my images still there, and their size limits for free accounts increased. between imageshack.us imgur.com tinypic etc I think we should continue to utilize their services, keeps our costs down, and they really are good services that don't delete pictures with likely only a handful of hits over years.

Now if people hotlink into a pic on some blog or news site, that link is likely to die much sooner, so they should just cross load those images into one of the hosting services.

Data vis tools? You mean like kinda a fancy BBcode that takes a text description and makes a graph when posted? That may be do-able.
like:

Code: Select all

[graph="bar"]y_label="whatever";x_label="whoever";data="12123213123watever"[/graph]

that would be do-able, but the syntax would get a little rich.

You can actually make a quick graph on a site like this:
http://www.chartgo.com/

and post the resulting image.

[Sepka]

I think a 'like' button is an ill-advised idea. The forum is supposed to be for the discussion of ideas on their merits, without regard to the likeability (or lack thereof) of the ideas or posters. Admittedly, that's honoured more in theory than in practice, but still...

[Perelandra]

There were some interesting ideas here, few of which were implemented:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=30449
Like limiting posts, simplifying the subforums, etc. Individual blogs were a nice idea, but I find them a little confusing.

I think in terms of conservation of bandwidth, which equals time and money. For instance, there are twenty pages of unanswered posts, why not automatically delete them after a time limit. Asking for some common-sense practices, such as not quoting whole posts in replies coming directly after said posts, couldn't hurt. Merging more threads, etc. etc.

[Project Willow]

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.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Yeah, I've been clicking through options for about 20 minutes and just have no idea how to stick something.

[Project Willow]

Perhaps it's a Jeff (super admin) only feature?