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Forum 2.0 Suggestion
alivingspirit:
I just thought of another really good one. How about the ability for a moderator to mark really good posts on a long thread so if somone is looking at an archive he/she can just go strait to the good stuff.
Lutz_:
Nothing fancy:
a simple, elegant and space-saving design. In contrast to the standard boxy approach which is overloaded with features. Nothing against all the features and new features, but they have to be designed , hidden, properly to make them tolerable to the eye.
The by far best design in this regard is still the one from dpreview and this is 5 years old or even older.
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/
-Lutz_ (September 08, 2008, 11:00 AM)
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No offense Lutz_ but that made my eyes hurt but dark backgrounds are just a no no for me.
-Paul Keith (September 08, 2008, 10:18 PM)
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Well, the color would be easy enough to change, although it is really not a problem.
The dpreview board is the most visited photography site on the web - I believe the elegance of their forum script, and the quick overview it allows over the entire thread, is the biggest reason for this success. The other site content is absolute average.
The overview over the forum is so good that it does not need most of the features that clutter other systems.
Paul Keith:
Well, the color would be easy enough to change, although it is really not a problem.
The dpreview board is the most visited photography site on the web - I believe the elegance of their forum script, and the quick overview it allows over the entire thread, is the biggest reason for this success. The other site content is absolute average.
The overview over the forum is so good that it does not need most of the features that clutter other systems.
-Lutz_ (September 10, 2008, 11:02 PM)
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Could you point out where the overview excels? I'm not disagreeing with you but I just can't see it. At best what I can see different from it from a quick skim is that it looks like Google Groups tweaked to look like a forum.
By chat do you mean a one-on-one private chat? Because there's always the IRQ channel, don't ya know!
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This is one of the sample link but it can be slow to load.
The general idea is like IRC except recorded which is achieved through intense amounts of use with AJAX (biggest reason why the site can be slow) so it needs to be optimized but the end result would be like getting twitter results within your forum post if you replace the twitter users with the chat visitors that converse in DC.
app103:
In the name of clutter reduction, I vote for moving some of the icons underneath our avatars to the profile page, and keeping them there. (starting to get crowded and unsightly)
Lutz_:
Could you point out where the overview excels? I'm not disagreeing with you but I just can't see it. ......
-Paul Keith (September 11, 2008, 12:49 AM)
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Please have a look at the comparison screenshot (click on the thumbnail). On a much thinner slice of my screen (room for expansion?) I immediately get an overview over twice as many threads and immediately recognize which threads I have visited before, which posts have not been answered - all I need to know, while enjoying a much cleaner interface.
One advantage is that I do not have to stare at all the useless boxes and frames that are meant to seperate the posts but are superfluous optical ballast (OK, the frames are actually still there on the dpreview site. But they are so low key that they do not have any optical impact).
In my eyes bulletin boards scripts have plenty of room for improvements, less so in features, but predominantly in "humane" design.
The clutter usually seems to contradict all web design recommendations???
There are hundreds of photography forums on the web using the standard bulletin boards scripts - dpreview with its propietary script is the by far most frequented one (no hard data - this an estimate based on links to photography boards I come across) . Could be just by accident, but I do not think so. Photography audiences and Coder audiences have vastly different geek factors obviously - my discussion was meant in regard to forums for a wider audience.
Forum 2.0 Suggestion
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