Forum Technical Suggestions Thread.

Premier_2

caffeineaddict wrote: »

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.

Go to the appropriate board
e.g. if it's site feedback http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=50

There's a 'New Thread' button at the top and bottom left of the board.

soop2

Ok, this is a bit of a high-level view, but I think the Forums* are quite cluttered, and I've been having a think about it.

A few suggestions (probably impossible to implement with VBulletin) would be to tag the individual forums you see after clicking on the forum link, into the following categories:

Debt
Saving
Spending
Earning
Freebies
other
All

Obviously everything goes into "all" but some would fit into more than one other category. When you click the link, I see a dynamic dropdown to display the links to the forum.

And I know it would be a massive job, but as with everything that grows organically, I can see it useful to have some re-organisation of the sub-forums "debt" would probably be fine as it is, but I think anything falling mainly under "spending" could be reorganised.

And another thing that would probably be very hard to organise, would be to have a mysql database storing the price, location, name and date of any bargains posted up on the boards, Which could then be referenced using regular expressions as with Stack Overflow http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/20473/how-are-related-questions-selected

The way I see this working is perhaps in specific forums having a "new thread" link, and a "new bargain" thread.

The "new bargain" would be like posting a thread, but with 3 fields for price, location and product, which would then be searched on the fly to produce previous results. This means you could see whether it was a bargain, or whether someone else has posted it recently.

If a post has been thanked a certain number of times, perhaps it could be posted onto an automated leaderboard to update according to a metric of time/thanks.

*Last but not least, to be honest, I think the entire site is a bit busy and disorganised and could do with a redesign. I don't mean to offend anyone by that, but I'll be here for ideas/opinions. Probably best to IM me if you want me as I'm not a regular on this part of the forum.

Oh I said that was the last thing, but I also think it would be handy to have an "ignore" feature for specific users, and perhaps an email alert for monitored threads.

TurkishDelight

soop2 wrote: »

Oh I said that was the last thing, but I also think it would be handy to have an "ignore" feature for specific users, and perhaps an email alert for monitored threads.

There are already both.

reallyjammyjam

Hi

Don't know if I am being a bit stupid here but spent quite a long time looking, there doesn't seem to be a way to search for my threads/posts? When I put something on the only way I can find it is by going through and searching the latest posts, so if it's a few days old then I have to go through pages to find it which takes a while sometimes....

tartantipster

Please could you remove the minimum number of characters required for a GIOL post (currently 10) to 1, as a lot of the time a YES / NO / Smiley is all that is required.:)

EDIT: perhaps you could make this the same for every Forum/Post moneysavingexpert wide?

Thank you.:)

tartantipster

alfred64 wrote: »

yes - my answer is too short. must lengthen it. yeeeeeeeeeees.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1632855

tartantipster wrote: »

Please could you remove the minimum number of characters required for a GIOL post (currently 10) to 1, as a lot of the time a YES / NO / Smiley is all that is required.:)

EDIT: perhaps you could make this the same for every Forum/Post moneysavingexpert wide?

Thank you.:)

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/37017618#Comment_37017618

buteman

How can I print out coupons? I do not use Windows I use Linux and the system keeps wanting me to install a printer driver to print the barcode. Also for some it says i do not have flash installed yet others happily run flash, which, of course, I do have installed.

Ubuntu 10.04 Firefox 3.6.10 Shockwave Flash 9.0r124

12bdebt3

Being frivolous you could always update coding to XHTML v1.1 or even HTML5 as I think the powers that be are trying to eventually phase out the use of frames.

I have no problems with this site other than accessibility (regarding OS/browsers), when I load this website on a Windows based computer it takes twice as long than it does on my Mac, maybe it's to do with the fact I run it on IE when using Windows? This site might run on Safari a lot better; either way there is a difference depending what computer I use. Maybe it's your servers not being able to handle the traffic?

tartantipster

daaave wrote: »

Football.

The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.

tartantipster wrote: »

Please could you remove the minimum number of characters required for a GIOL post (currently 10) to 1, as a lot of the time a YES / NO / Smiley is all that is required.:)

EDIT: perhaps you could make this the same for every Forum/Post moneysavingexpert wide?

Thank you.:)

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1632855

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/38783670#Comment_38783670

daaave

2 Suggestions:

1. Please reduce the minimum number of characters for posts. On GIOL, one word answers are often far more helpful than a diatribe!

2. Stop banning the word S C U N T H O R P E! Whenever someone mentions their football team, all we see is "S!!!!horpe." It's a bit embarrassing for them.