I'm torn on this one.

Here is a list of forum areas in the forums.
http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cIDa6221...

Now one could add a total post count to that and have the traditional BBS
landing page.
Does that do ANYTHING for anyone tho? I mean who doesn't just click into
the two forum areas you wanted and read...

The goal with the feed view we have now was to bring up activity from
across those topics. Given the age of Facebook it kinda makes sense. Where
it fell flat, of course, is over time with other changes and then caching
improvements. Its ganky now because I told Ryan to just turn off all its
"clever" that used to consolidate those frequent replies down because it
was a performance drain, the fix wasn't working right, and people were
frustrated the landing page wasn't getting every post every time.

I dunno. I'm certainly with you in the sense that a flat list of forums is
more traditional and isn't it nice to not give people one new thing to
learn? On the other hand its nice to get the activity view from time to
time, particularly when you're not subscribed to every forum area but you'd
like to get a sense of the tone of conversations going on.

Perhaps switch the position? Forums dumps you on a traditional page, but
there's a "make a feed" link or something that gives you a improved version
of what we have now?



best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - PortlandLabs Inc

I don't see much value in such an activity list. With facebook, you've got pictures, links, videos. With a forum you have the first few words which hardly tell you anything. The subject does enough, no need to display the first few words of several answers.

Even if you're not subscribed to every forum, you can still show an overall activity, just assemble a list of all topics but ignore the answers. That would certainly be nice, no doubt.

Yeah, I'd definitely switch the position! The link you've posted doesn't work though, cID=6221.. If you wanted to show me a page like thishttp://www.concrete5.org/developers/pro-accounts/community-leaders-... Yes, this is imho much easier to view, but it only shows one forum.

Nope, I meant this:
http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cID=616221...

(spose fixing broken cid links on email forwards would be good for our list too)

But a forum landing page is typically just a list of forum areas without much meaningful content..

I agree, this should probably stay a forum landing page. To me, I'd want these things:

- A forum landing page
- A traditional topic overview (across all forums)
- An activity stream*

*: If you really wanted to build an activity stream, I'd honestly expect something else or more. A concrete5 activity stream should include "new news", "new how-tos", "new forum messages", "new videos", "new showcases" etc. Each category toggleable with a checkbox. Not that this would be a 5min job, but this would be an activity stream to me..

I quite like the current main forum landing page. For me, it provides an overview of what has happened recently. On other forum systems I always go straight to the "what's new" summary. On the c5 forum I am already there :-)

Ways it could be improved:

- Once a thread has been listed, don't bother to list it again a few posts below. ie, just the last post in the thread. That gets more useful info onto the page (as @remo's suggestion)
- Add a count of the number of contributors to each topic in the listing
- Make the posting mechanism work reliably, so we don't get duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate posts etc..
- Actively seek out and filter duplicate posts (a backup for the above not working)
- Highlight in the listing that a thread has a 'best answer' already marked.
- Make the pagination longer and get rid of the infinite scroll. ie. More info in a single page download (that would probably also have a net overall reduction in server loading)
- Fully ajaxify filtering, sorting, searching.
- Make the searching work and be more useful than going to Google (at the moment, going to Google provides much better forum search results than c5 does)

One inside a particular topic, get rid of the threaded replies, just make it chronological. On big topics (many replies) where someone replies to more than one message the threaded replies just serve to confuse and lead to replies getting missed. If you must keep threaded replies, make the default view 'earliest first', or make 'earliest first' more globally sticky.

As for providing a more general activity stream, +1 to @Remo's suggestions on it, but not at the expense of or confused with the main forum landing page.

Since you're more active in the forums these days, let's keep it the way it is ;-) I've pretty much abandoned the public forums because it feels like one big mess to me, but John does a good job taking care of forum people (:

OK, seems like there's a wish list week going on, so I might also add some points here.

Opposed to the "traditional forum" style, I also like that there's no need to go into the specific "categories" to see what's happening. I like that I can quickly see the "what's hot" topics right after I click the "forums" link.

I'd also like if the main forum page would just update dynamically based on the selected "category", so that you would see what's happening in that category. And keep the layout similar always, i.e. get rid of the two "modes" that the forum currently has.

Same as both have said above, don't list the same discussion twice. Just show it once, i.e. list the threads so that the one with most recent activity gets to the very top.

And make it possible to quote people, quote showing the user who was quoted.

I would not get rid of the infinite scrolling though, I like it once I got used to it but sometimes it gets annoying if I want to get into the footer (e.g. jump into the documentation). And sometimes it's quite slow, currently I have to wait about 5s for it to load new posts and under heavy traffic, even more. Maybe increase the amount of posts loaded as John suggested above?

About infinite scrolling, yeah, I'd remove that as well. It happened quite often that I clicked on something in the marketplace and when I hit back, I was at the top of the list and had to scroll down again and always wait till the new items were reloaded..

Well, I think it's nicer to scroll that overall than switching constantly between pages.

But fortunately we've had the JS History API for quite some while.
http://blog.gesteves.com/2011/09/22/better-infinite-scrolling-with-...

yes, this would improve this problem nicely. @frz: Why don't you open source the code of concrete5.org? Features like that might be added by a community member out of boredom..

I agree, infinite scrolling was over used in the redesign of
concrete5.orgwe live with today.


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - PortlandLabs Inc

Yes, it does actually but what I meant actually was that it would only select one category at a time. I guess it would be less flexible that way but it would work more like a "traditional forum" (and IMO, better that way).

EDIT: Sorry, clicked "reply" from the wrong post, this is for the comment below (@frz).

"I'd also like if the main forum page would just update dynamically based
on the selected "category", so that you would see what's happening in that
category. "

Isn't that what clicking the check box next to the forum area on the right
of the forum landing page does today?


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - PortlandLabs Inc

I too would like both a standard forum page with an additional feed page. One major problem with the feed not mentioned is that Google, etc. results many times bring you to the feed but what you were searching for is no longer there. Permalinks and no-follow on the feed page would probably help.

I am also against the infinite scrolling here and several other places (blog/marketplace). Permalinks would certainly help. It would be nice to at least have a choice of paging at least.

Sick your browser on Totally Random and try scrolling down to the first one posted on Vimeo. With all those embeds you better have a boat-load of memory ;)