Forum OpenACS Q&A: Forum appearance distracting

Posted by Shambhunath Borah on 12/06/04 07:48 PM

Hi, I think I've only posted once before so you can take what follows from the perspective of a "lurker". I find the new forum format very distracting. It may be that it's been designed to help those who subscribe via email, keep track of a discussion, but it distracts in the forum setting. For example, having the number of the post may be useful but having it appear first makes it look like the minutes of a board meeting rather than a forum. I also find the re-appearances of the title of the post disconcerting. Once I click on a topic I assume that the posts are on topic unless someone changes it. (I guess the previous version also had it, but it didn't seem to interfere with reading the posts before) Is it possible when viewed in the forum setting for information like the number of the post and which post it is in response to be either moved to the end of the message or be turned off? I also wonder if tracking threads within threads winnow the general audience interest. I know some stuff on the new forums is discussed in that long upgrade thread, but I thought I'd get this in a new topic. Still, many thanks to all those who upgraded the site. -- Shambhu

2: Re: Forum appearance distracting (response to 1)

Posted by Shambhunath Borah on 12/06/04 07:51 PM

Hmm. My paragraph breaks (plain text) were removed. Sorry for everything being bunched together.

3: Re: Forum appearance distracting (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 12/06/04 09:07 PM

I agree, we should remove the post number unless we're presenting the forum threaded ... even then indention's better IMO. The formatting stuff's messed up at the moment due to some issue with using TABLE tags mixed with preformatted text. Dave's looking at doing the color banding/boxing in CSS ... Bear with us for the next few days as we fine-tune the forums appearance and functionality, continuing to speed performance.

4: (response to 1)

Posted by xx xx on 12/07/04 07:27 AM

I'll wait for this fine-tuning before posting my requests to bug-tracker as Malte asked. Although, if it doesn't happen now it will probably never. In addition, a problem of leaving subject blank or changing the subject of a thread is that forum user history becomes confusing and leaving subject blank makes it impossible to jump to this message.

5: New Forums Package (response to 4)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 12/07/04 08:56 AM

One note. There is a new forum package that works very well on oacs-5-1 which we have in use in all our websites that run .LRN. It is based on the forum code currently in HEAD and was rewritten by Aristoi to be useable in .LRN 2.1. Before we do too much work on the current forums package, keep this in mind.

6: Re: Forum appearance distracting (response to 1)

Posted by Shambhunath Borah on 12/07/04 04:57 PM

Hi Albert, You're right, of course, that the forum user history should always show the subjects of posts. In terms of otherwise linking to a particular message, would showing the hyperlinked message number at the end of the message provide a way to link directly to it? I guess either Dave, Malte, or Don is currently experimenting with the appearance. As of what I see, right now, I like it that the subject shows up only in the first post, and then when Malte changes the subject line, that gets displayed, and my eye gets drawn to that as a change in the discussion.

7: Re: Forum appearance distracting (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 12/08/04 06:14 PM

Dave Bauer's doing the appearance hacking (just FYI)