Design the new Forums!!

i wouldnt be surprised to see a 'RA refugee' show up over there. the 'zomg' forum was initially such a section for second citizen refugees to acclimate, seek eachother out etc.
that being said, i really hope the RA community doesnt do the predictable thing and flood over there to serve the slu overlords.

I am a bit confused - are you promoting SLU or hating it?

Post Counts are overrated.

Yep.

I have no energy to deal with the forum change, since they are going to do what they want anyway. We've already given them substantive feedback on what we would like to see in forums, they can search and dig that out.

We gave it to them a few days ago.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddhpv2fg_2f4cqj9g7&hl=en

but it shows the activity inside the forum community - never mind the quality.

The new functions and options, the improved ways to let the community rate "threats" and give away some presents to show a person is really helpful inside the community should be given.

I am not talking about those Forum-boosters which are made only to increase the forum postings and the forum activity to boost the Google, Yahoo or MSN indexes.

What does "rate threats" mean?

It means the rodents are back.

what do you reckon?

dunno

Her signature says a lot.

LOL and you really think that LL will even look at it let alone use it based on their history? I think a snowball in hell stands a better chance than this being instigated.

LL said many moons ago that the forums in this format would eventually go, I think we are getting to that time very soon indeed, now they got their shiny new software, these forums will soon become a historical archive like the ones that went before

checking my forum preferences so the signatures show up

That does look remarkably more promising than the SL Answers page.

I'm not a huge fan of the "one vendor to rule us all" approach to tooling. I mean, forums are a pretty simple functionality *conceptually*, but there are lots of design decisions that make good ones work much better than bad ones; there's a lot of experience in running forums that is now implicit in the vBulletin implementation. Who can know how much of that made it into Jive's stuff (so far)?

But anyway, it would seem that's the hand we're dealt, so...

One thing that's crucial is Search, and not just that this will all be exposed for external indexing (hence Google-searchable--which is a very good thing), but also the kind of per-thread, per forum, and field-specific searching that's supported here; I use it all the time to track down earlier answers. (God only knows how the SL Answers thing is supposed to work; if anything ever needed a good search facility, it would be that.)

One thing it does *not* need is any integration with the in-world environment, other than name and login credentials. My in-world profile and picture really do not need to be my forums profile and picture. In fact some people may very much prefer that they be distinct, but I doubt if anybody would place a very high value on those being integrated. Same with forums Private Messaging and in-world IMs: no real value in integrating these.

One strange thing is that Clearspace has a really good search facility but LL has hidden a lot of the functionality. It is possible to choose where to search, and there is a complete boolean and fuzzy syntax. It ought to be possible to make little custom HTML forms to fill in the functionality LL ripped out, but it strikes me as goofy to even bother with it when all they have to do is enable it.

This was discussed at Blue's office hours and he took a vote... opinions seemed pretty evenly split, with some saying that "I am inworld who I am in the Forums" and others saying "My Forum persona has its own merit and is quite separate from my inworld persona." I think the fact that the vote was evenly split might even benefit us, as maybe it could be an option rather than a requirement at this point.

Turning off signatures and avatars is one of the first things I do when joining a new forum.

I'm not even going to try. LL won't read this thread, and they won't listen to us no matter where we submit our suggestions.

They're determined to screw it up.

When they do (not "if", I'll see you all over at SLU. I don't like that software all that much...it's prettier, but harder to navigate, IMO. But it's way better than anything LL will do.

Well we have been allowed to have these running for nearly 3 years after they shut the last lot, I am surprised that they haven't shut the forums down earlier TBH, but now they have the new Q&A section and the nice (LOL) new blog, I think they will be happy to shut this forum and archive it as they promised to do.

No amount of requests, ideas or suggestions will keep them open methinks, I could be wrong but I doubt it

I never turn of any signatures or pictures -- they help present the full image of a person.

eta - ok, once I did cuz I was in a position where I needed to ensure that no non-PG pics might display.

I would lay all my money on your line of thinking.

Now if I was a guy, I would probably respond that you could just lay on me

Well the thought crossed my mind ;P

I know a few girls that might respond that way.