Forum OpenACS Q&A: New Forum Issues: Link, Style, Last Post etc...

FIRST, I love the new OpenACS site and particularly the top with Alex! Now my Nits!

The NEW OpenACS FORUMS

  • UNNECESSARY SUBJECT LINK
    The subject line is displayed as a LINK in when viewing the thread (/message-view?message_id=12345) This is a link for the page you are on and clicking the link only REFRESHES the page you are already on.... Seems redundant to me... Why not just make it BOLD without the Link?

  • READABLE STYLE
    People who have large monitors end up reading very long lines from one edge of the monitor to the other. This is hard to read and sometimes when reading a long forum thread, I'll resize the browser from full size to a narrow column so I can read it like a newspaper column. I think 500 pixels width is ideal. It would probably mean putting the body in a table. Heck, the Poster, Date and Subject are already IN a table, why not another table row to include the body and a width=500 tag in the <table... line.

  • LAST POST
    And I see it has been mentioned in two other threads currently fading into the swamp at the bottom of my monitor, The Last Post date needs to be fixed SOON. I can see how this feature will negate the need for the old bboard system of clicking on the "Recent Posts" link once it is working correctly...

  • FORMAT PLAIN or CHOCOLATE
    When posting, there is the dropdown choice of TEXT or HTML for FORMAT. This is really UNnecessary.... Can we not have the computer look and see if there is a <p> <br> <b> etc and just set the flag to HTML otherwize it is TEXT and not bother the user?

Thanks!

-Bob

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Posted by Ben Adida on
Bob: thanks for the feedback on forums. I'm collecting all this great feedback on forums and notifications to put together a plan of action within the next couple of weeks. All of these packages are fairly new, and I was expecting these growing pains.

Quick comments on your comments: subject link - sure, we should fix that. readable style - there's probably better than table. Some people might be really annoyed to have no more width than 500 pixels if that's what they want. Last post: yep, we need to work on that. Format: we can't auto-detect, because sometimes people will add HTML to describe the HTML they're using, not to have it actually interpreted as HTML. We pretty much have to make it explicit.

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Bob, the look and see if there is a <p> or <br> or such
to decide if a post was html was the way it worked on the old openacs.org and it sucked.
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Posted by Matthew Geddert on
I just wanted to chime in a bit, and say i would REALLY annoyed (Ben did point out some would be) with a 500pixel width table... try looking at that kind of thing on a laptop 15inch monitor as 1600x1200 with bumped up fonts... I realize that my monitor situation is extreme, but well designed websites should take these extermes into account.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
I added some margins to the posting text so it doesn't bump up against the edges.

The posting text can't be in a table because sometimes there is a very wide prefotmatted piece of code in a post, and it screws up the formatting for all the posts in a thread if they are in a big table. I added a <div> around the post text and created a style to adjust the margins.

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Posted by Ben Koot on
Readble style,

I agree with Bob, allthough that's irelivant. I don't think it's the reponsibilty of the developer to determine these settings. Why not ad an admin function to the /pvt/home where users can set their personal preference for collumn width
Just a thought

Ben

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Posted by Branimir Dolicki on
> Why not ad an admin function to the /pvt/home where users
> can set their personal preference for collumn width

As Bob already mentioned, users already can control column width 
- by resizing their browser window.  Doing it that way has advantage
that people actually know it's possible even if they are new to    
the site.

Also, IMHO, anything you try to do with fixed table widths, character  
sizes etc.  is more likely to reduce than to increase usability    
and accessibility.

 -- Branimir
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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Branimir, I love how you have used pre tags to make your
point.  Very ironic.
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Posted by Rafael Calvo on
Discussing the new forums package with some users, they said that a neat feature for them would be to be able to reply to postings without going to the website, just by replying to the  alert coming from the subscription system.

How difficult would it be to implement such a feature.

This is very usefull to get people to use it extensively, as it happens in a knowledge management system.
Lars (and others working on dotWRK), what do you think?

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Posted by Stan Kaufman on
Da ve, I hope you're committing all the changes you make here to the 4.6 branch in cvs!
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Posted by Vadim Makarov on
I've heard the argument about text width many times and have an impression that it's blindly translated from the printed world without considering the reality of computer screen.

One counter-argument is that the screen is small compared to the size of document. You are peeking at the text by sliding a small hole up and down. This is why many users maximize the browser window. Seeing a bigger chunk of the text at the time helps them to read and scan it faster more than having optimal line width.

Another counter-argument is that you can't control the width well and will probably screw the user. If it's left uncontrolled, one can always resize his rowser window and read at the width one prefers, and this is indeed default behaviour of the Web.

Now making some small margins is good. The old forum used <blockquote> around posts.

Auto guess of format won't work in all cases, as Ben said. Let's leave it implicit.

To say in another words, these two improvements you propose would probably be "too smart" features. I agree with your other two points.

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Posted by Jonathan Ellis on
yes, the margins are a definite improvement.  thanks!
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Posted by Tom Jackson on

Why not add a user_preference for an external style sheet? Mark up the forum pages with a number of classes and let users hack away at their own version of Nirvana? I know that you can do some of this with your browser setup, but it doesn't move from computer to computer or browser to browser so easily. Maybe store them in file-storage or somewhere easy to access. Trade and borrow style sheets with your friends!

The only issue with usability I noticed that hasn't been mentioned so far is the Forums Section in the banner. When you are reading a message or are in a specific forum, the "Forums" text is not a link, so the only way to get to "Forums" is to use the breadcrumb/context link. It seems like you could change the text color, but still preserve the link when you are below the index page.

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Posted by MaineBob OConnor on

Branimir wrote:

    As Bob already mentioned, users already can control column width - by resizing their browser window. Doing it that way has advantage that people actually know it's possible even if they are new to the site. ..Also, IMHO, anything you try to do with fixed table widths, character sizes etc. is more likely to reduce than to increase usability and accessibility.

Yes, and that is why we don't use fixed (locked) font widths... I like the default 0 size font which the user can adjust with the browser text size (smaller / larger)

I dislike having to resize my browser for specific sites and even more so now with Netscape's TAB feature which I now use extensively rather than having multiple windows open for different web sites.

Vadim wrote:

    One counter-argument.... Seeing a bigger chunk of the text at the time helps them to read and scan it faster more than having optimal line width.

I don't buy this argument! Optimal line width is important onscreen or in print. I do NOT believe you can read/scan faster with long lines.

    If it's left uncontrolled, one can always resize his browser window and read at the width one prefers, and this is indeed default behaviour of the Web.

Again, I don't want to resize my browser window! The default behavior should be the ability (In netscape) to hit the Ctrl+ or Ctrl- to adjust font size. I hate sites the look "beautiful" but have locked the fonts and on a big screen are almost unreadable to me!

    Auto guess of format won't work in all cases, as Ben said. Let's leave it implicit. To say in another words, these two improvements you propose would probably be "too smart" features. I agree with your other two points.

Ok, I agree that on THIS technical forum, Auto Guess of format won't work for some technical posts. But for newbee users on sites designed with OpenACS, I think doing the "auto guess" is valuable. In our experience, people who use HTML tags often forget to switch to HTML and while it renders ok online, the alert emails have HTML tags strewn in the text.

How about a third DEFAULT choice in the Format dropdown called "Auto" or "Normal"... Now we've solved this for all users.

Oh, I was gonna post this in a <table... to demonstrate my better readability point, but get this error message:

    For security reasons we only accept the submission of HTML containing the following tags:
    
    B I P A LI OL UL EM BR TT STRONG BLOCKQUOTE CODE PRE FIRST_NAMES LAST_NAME EMAIL GROUP_NAME
    
    You have a <table> tag in there.
    

How Do TABLE or FONT tags make submissions insecure? Heck, now I can't make any text RED with a font tag like I can with the old bboard!

THANK YOU all!

-Bob

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Bob,

Optimal line width is nice, but because this site does not dictate font size or browser window width, or screen resolution, there is no way we can tell how the site will render in any situation. So we cannot design a solution that will work nicely.

I agress that too long lines are harder to read, I just do not know of a solution that would not create another problem.

Possibly a <div> with a width of so many ems would work, but support for dimensions specified in ems is not very reliable in current browsers.

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Posted by Vadim Makarov on
Bob, if you don't buy my counter-argumet, take a newspaper. Cut it in columns and glue the end of each column to the beginning of the next one. Try to read the obtained scroll :))). You'd instantly wish the columns were a bit wider.

The argument holds until somebody makes a multi-column display in a browser to utilize the screen area better (somewhat like two-page print preview in Netscape), which is not going happen soon.

The list of allowed tags is evil. It is not security, it is harassment! Have you ever had a problem on this forum? Then turn it off please!

There are many small communities where such abuse by insiders is of question and abuse by outsiders won't be a danger too because of little public interest to the community. I think, photo.net grew larger than most of existing (Open)ACS communities before they ever had an accident with tag abuse. It's good to have this security tool in place, but it need not be switched on by default and need not be so restrictive. It prevents useful content from being posted (e.g. images, tables, and whatever else you inevitably forget to specify in the list of allowed tags).

If you make a filter, there should be also an option to specify tags which are NOT allowed, passing everything else.

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Posted by Robert Locke on
Also, carriage returns in multi-line "text" posts

do not seem to appear in

email

alerts...

...or atleast they don't for me.

(ie, This multi-line post appears as a single line in my email.  Is anyone else experiencing this?)

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Posted by Tilmann Singer on
It's been reported in sdm here: http://sdm.openacs.org/sdm/one-baf.tcl?baf_id=1893 and there's a patch for it.
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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Hopefully I fixed the plain text formatting in notifications.

If not I will try try again.