Forum Technical Suggestions Thread.

PatchTheLatch

I'd like to step in here having been a silent critic.

I have to admit, I think this forum has got too big for its boots.. I have to question the software's "fit for purpose" paragraphs in the documentation.

The biggest problem I have is that threads can be 10's to 100's of pages long.. quite often I am looking for advice, or specific bits of other users' experience, which brings me here, and I search for a topic that ends up having pages and pages of advice, other spinoff questions, advice re-iterated, occasional off topic talk. Its a 10 year old+ design and it takes me AGES to sift through various "junk" items (junk to me and my purpose, obviously not to the original poster). Puts me right off.

My suggestions are:

• Full/Abbreviated/Hidden posts (please see Slashdot's 'geek' news website) which is driven by users 'voting' for useful, outstanding or generally interesting posts. This suggestion is first because I would like it to have the biggest weight.
• The above example also includes a 'tree' structure of organisation, where users replies are organised in branches
• 'Accepted answers' organisation for specific questions, such as Yahoo! Answers
• Another user voting idea expands on another suggestion of expired messages. Perhaps users can vote a post as 'expired' so it takes smaller priority.
• Expanding on the post voting, the search facility could utilise this as well, in the most obvious way.

The crux of my suggestion is based around social networking, users promoting items of use and demoting items of irrelevance for the other user's benefit. Facebook and twitter also have some good ideas of information organisation. (e.g. 'Friend suggestion' - translates to topic suggestion)

There is a massive wealth of MSE and user experience here I'd really like to use.

Thats my pennys worth.. only a penny mind!

p.s. As a new user I cannot post links to my example. Frustrating but I see the logic. You'll have to google 'Slashdot' and 'Yahoo! Answers' and find an appropriate news/question item.

x3ja

Working in IT, I've been following the progress of the people who are developing StackExchange (which powers, stackoverflow.com, superuser.com and serverfault.com amongst others). It's a new take on Q&A on the Internet, rather than the traditional forum/newsgroups format. There are some key differences and advantages that I've noticed:

• Good / interesting questions and answers rise to the top - because users can vote on how good they think the Qs & As are. This of course means things don't appear in chronological order, but instead in order of relevance & quality.
• As people interact with the site, they gain reputation, which is of no real value, but you'd be amazed at what people will do for it! As they gain rep, they get more functionality, but not just for their own benefit - in ways that benefit the community - e.g. being able to vote things down, being able to suggest posts for deletion (if they're abusive / irrelevant), being able to edit posts etc. This means the community can become quite self-supporting and those who have invested the most in it can help keep it running well.
• It's fast! They work a lot on optimising it to load fast and it shows.
• It's free! They will be hosting all sites running on StackExchange themselves for free. Their interest is to generate internet communities that can make the world a better place and they haven't completely defined how they will make money from it, but they are committed to not doing evil things like charging to see answers.

Of course there are potential issues:

• All content on the site will be licensed under Creative Commons, meaning it's in the public domain. This is a clear advantage as it means they don't own the information, but does also mean that you don't!
• They host the site - meaning it might be somewhat harder to integrate into your site... but also means you can save on hosting costs!
• Migration - although I know some people have worked on getting stuff from PHPBB across to it, I don't know how far they have got

Basically it's a really good platform that I think makes forums more useful for finding answers to your questions - worth a look as an alternative? I don't know them personally and haven't played with the sites from the point of view of an admin, so this isn't a completely experienced view... sorry!

marleyboy

1. vBulletin Options -> Search Type (Drop Down Under vBulletin Options): If you have MySQL 4.0.x you can use this option to greatly reduce server load when a search query is used on your server.
2. vBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Use Forum Jump Menu: Have this setting turned off. As you have a large forum this will cause the server to work harder as it was to Generate the Forum Jump and then display it on the page. The Forum Jump consists of alot of html which makes the page larger which increases bandwidth usage and finally increases the code to content ratio (Search Engines may or may not take Code To Content ration into consideration when ranking a page. They do like smaller pages however). 95% of the users will not even realize it is gone.
3. vBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Disable AJAX Features: Make sure that this is set to allow all AJAX Features. Ajax helps reduce server load by not reloading a page where AJAX is used. (Quick Reply for instance)
4. vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options -> GZIP HTML Output: If you are not sure whether or not you have this enabled on your server you may test it using this website: GZIP Test It will tell you if you have it enabled or not and if you do it will show you how much the page was compressed. Make sure the Compression Level is never set higher than 1.
5. vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options -> Remove Redirection Message Pages: Have this set to Yes. Not only are they incredibly annoying but they cause an unneeded page load.
6. vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options -> Add No-Cache HTTP Headers: Make sure this is set to No.
7. vBulletin Options -> Server Settings and Optimization Options -> Cached Posts Lifespan: Once you turn this on I recommend rebuilding your Cache Posts via Maintenance -> Update Counters
8. vBulletin Options -> Server Settings and Optimization Options -> Update Thread Views Immediately: Set this to No. With this set at No the Thread Views will automatically update via Cron every 1 hour by default. If you wish to change this you can do so by editing the Scheduled Task for Thread Views to a different time. Say every 15 minutes.
9. vBulletin Options -> Server Settings and Optimization Options -> Update Attachment Views Immediately: Have this set to No as well, just use the default cron to update these.
10. vBulletin Options -> Style & Language Settings -> Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?: Set this to yes. Make sure that you change the permission of the /clientscript/vbulletin_css/ folder to 777. This greatly reduces the page size and the code to content ration as well as not requiring the web server to spit out all that code on every page load.
11. vBulletin Options -> User Listing & Profile Viewing -> Show Last Post on Profile Page: This is very server intensive. Set this to No.
12. vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Quick Reply: Not only does this make posting faster which leads to more posts being made this also uses ajax which means you do not have to load another page to make a post. To even further reduce the need to click the Post Newreply Button. If you have Quick Reply set to: Yes, Click Not Required.
13. vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Quick Edit: Turn this on to reduce the need for a new page reload when someone simply wants to edit a post.
14. vBulletin Options -> Message Searching Options -> Minimum Time Between Searches: I recommend setting some kind of small time limit to reduce any chance of abuse or attempt to use the search engine to bring your site to a crawl.
15. * vBulletin Options -> Forums Home Page Options -> Display Logged in Users?: Alphabetical listing to members only. What this does is show your members Alphabetically if you are logged in and random if logged out. This helps reduce server load by limiting the amount of people that use the Alphabetical sort since it causes additional server power to perform this sort.
16. * vBulletin Options -> Forum Display Options -> Show Users Browsing Forums: Have this option set to Yes, Random Listing to all visitors.
17. vBulletin Options -> Forum Display Options -> Maximum Displayed Threads Before Page Split: The higher you go the more resources it takes to generate those extra threads to show and the bigger your page gets. Note: Changing this will change the amount of Forumdisplay pages that are generate overall which will result in a reindex by search engines.
18. * vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options -> Show Users Browsing Threads: have this set to Yes, Random Listing to all visitors for the same reason for Forumdisplay pages.

jobbingmusician

Request from a regular GIOLer (with which I agree) -

Why the minimum post length? Sometimes posting a smilie in response is FAR more eloquent than any amount of verbiage.....

tartantipster

Please could you remove the minimum number of characters required for a GIOL post to 1, as a lot of the time a YES / NO / Smiley is all that is required.:)

Tamster150

not a techie but cant find anywhere else to post...

You need a FAQ bit mainly for newbies - with stuff like site etequitte (sorry about spelling) how to add photos, quotes, site rules (coz no one ever reads them before clicking "agree")
Why you cannot add links as a newbie & for how long, that kind of stuff.

I use a few parenting forums and they always seem to have a section where you can find all this info at a click.

and apoligies if you already have a section like this but in that case could you make it more noticable!

MacsReturns

A suggestion, but i don't know how you would implement it: please, please, please make the "Abuse" button a PM not an email - I'm on hotmail and I'm sure many other users have webmail of one form or another, so posting an 'Abuse' email is so much hassle I've stopped bothering. Make it PM and I'll pounce on spambots daily :beer:

Pembroke

Can't find it by using search but would it be possible to have the post numbering fixed to the posts once they are posted. The reason I ask is that we've recently had a Troll in the board I frequent and their posts have been removed by the mods, but the post numbering seems to be dynamic so the threads no longer make sense and there's no obvious reason for it.

An even better idea, but not sure if it's possible would be to default a moderators settings so that when a post is removed it is replaced by a simple one line that says 'Post Removed - Troll'. Or whatever the reason was. Not sure if that's technically possible ?

Kevin_Blackstone

I argree a lot of post's need to be deleted especially in the freebies board and special offers. Who needs to read about these from years ago if this was done this would also make the site a lot more tidier looking. You for instance state posts in these boards will stay on the site for say 6-12 months.

Other than that a great site keep up the hard work.

caffeineaddict

i cant find a way to start a thread , to ask for advice? am i missing something? please help, and unstruct me on how to start a new thread.