Chile Forum

UPDATE:


I have posted a demo or beta forum here: http://www.allchile.net/chileforum2/ .

It is a database copy of the current forum, that is about 2 days old. You can log in using your user name just like this one. There are instructions and answers to how things work at the link below and at the top right side of the demo forum on all pages:
faq.php

WARNING: ALL POSTS OR DATA POSTED ON THAT FORUM WILL BE LOST WHEN THE FINAL VERSION GOES LIVE. IT IS ONLY A TEST FORUM.

For now this forum, the old forum, is the real forum. The link above is only for testing and play.

I thought since all the members helped build the Chile Forum, including the spammers, it might help to get everyone in on building the next generation.

Please posts all comments back to this thread.

I would like some feedback on the template, the look (still working on the look) and feel. Mostly I want to know how users interact with the new forum layout, and the features. Do you have trouble finding things? Does something bug you? Is something confusing. Are the colors wrong?

Tell me what you like and don't like. I want to try and incorporate users feedback as I go along with tweaking it. The overall template is still a work in progress, but it will get there too.






OLD POST:Well it finally happened. The next generation of our basic forum system was released, and I have been putting off a lot of upgrades, reorganization, and adding new features until it was complete. It would have just made the conversion a lot more difficult.

I am looking for a few of the more hard core members willing to give it a spin. You don't have to be a super computer person, but it also helps to have some members that can articulate in tech terms for me what they think is going wrong. Feedback as just a normal users who say does not like a button is perhaps almost more valuable.

Changes to Expect:
These changes should be an upgrade for the most part, that if all goes well most users will not know anything really happened other than the addition of certain features.

Our current forum system is a fairly nice system that has served us well, but it is showing its age in a lot of ways.

For the most part the big improvements should be administrative. Most important being related to spam and security. In fact my hardcore spam squashing policies are in many ways a direct result of failures in the design of the current forum. It seems most of the big problems have been addressed in the new version, and I can quit chasing spammers by hand and also be able to give members a lot more freedom to go crazy on the forum.

I do not have a set date for the full conversion, but the general plan is as follows:

1. I will setup a beta version of the new forum in a private directory, do a bunch of testing and tweaking myself. I will likely use a snapshot of the live database to play with.

2. I would like to get the forum testers to come in and just play with it a bit. Sometimes there are nooks and crannies, buttons, and so on that I don't get in to myself. No concerns about breaking it, as when we go live I will be adding the latest live forum database to the new forum system. It will just be a systems test.

3. Feedback and reviews from the testers, and conduct some furtherer tweaking if needed. I am also considering taking this opportunity to add a bunch of new features and do a reorganization of parts of the forum. This is still up in the air. I want to make the forum more usable, but still not freak everyone out with a bunch of new changes. We can test the waters with this one.

4. If needed, I will also consider opening up a round of testing and play time by general members and that can give them a chance to give feedback about it. This is also still up in the air. Might not be needed.

5. Go live. I will schedule a down time on the live forum, and flip the switch. If everything goes well, we should be on the new system in a few mins.

So, anyone up for testing please post here. I will PM you back when we are ready to start the testings. It might be a week or two.

I'm neither an old-timer nor computer-savvy, so I'm not volunteering. But I am eagerly looking forward to improvement of an already satisfying forum.

I am just mostly looking for some users with say over 50 posts. Nothing special. I just do not want to find out I have some gapping security holes in the new forum while testing and some spammers or hackers with 1 or 2 posts is able to exploit it before it is found or fixed.

If you want to test, I will put you on the list.

As far as technical capability, you do not need much other than to let me know something is not right, or something is confusing. We have plenty of more computer savvy people around that can help with the nuts and bolts.

One of the biggest problems with these sorts of conversions are that a button I consider rather unimportant gets moved, and regular users get badly confused or frustrated with it.

Ooookay, do put me down. I could at least see how an ordinary, computer-ignorant user might respond!

seeing i dont do much else other than play on the internet.. u can put my name down.. like RWS i am not computer savvy.. but i do have "la voluntad"

will do. Just waiting a few days for some dust to settle. If all goes well, I should have it operational sometime over the holidays.

Here are my current thoughts:

I really really like the overall new code base. Much cleaner than our current forum, and the moderator features on the back end are very nice. Most users will never see that however.

On the front end:
The search and organization features are really nice.

At the bottom of the page inside each subforum there is a pull down menu, you can organize posts by how many weeks old they are. So, say you come back to the forum after not reading for a month, you can select all the posts for the last month inside the lobby forum, or the real estate forum.

There is also a button at the top to allow you to see all the active topics, and all the recent topics. The Chile forum has gotten so big, that it is getting hard to get around the forum and find stuff. This will really really help. Here is what it looks like:
search.php?search_id=active_topics

the new advanced search feature is also really nice:
search.php

User bookmarks:
I have not tried this out yet, but you can add bookmarks to your favorite pages and posts and save them in your "user control panel" for later viewing. You can also subscribe to different threads and do a lot of other stuff I have not even tried yet.

I think you will need to log in to use it, but it is here:
ucp.php

Spam:
there is a feature to report spam posts, or bad posts, and so on. One of the more requested features.

I am still experimenting with a bunch of spam control modifications, but this one feature alone should make my job easier and I can layoff the new kids a bit. Still I will have to test this one (thus my invitation to spammers). I want to be able to relax the linking policy and such, but still keep this a spam free forum.

Images:
Image uploads should work now in a sane manner, with a lot less hassle. They should also be resized automatically to fit in the forum. I am playing with the posting movies and such. I do believe I will leave that enabled, as people sometimes have some very cool stuff to post as far as movies. We have moved to a new dedicated server, and I now have the luxury of bandwidth and no neighbors to worry about (e.g. blowing out the processors with a runaway script ). Will have to watch this one for

chat:
I have many options available to allow live chat. I am still testing this, and it will be coming. I just need to find the safest way to do this, but the upgrades make this possible now.

Well I am sure there will be more. Let me know what you think.

Why?

Another reason I did this was to not shock everyone when the forum does go live. I know I have been the member of forums, or visited web sites for months or years and then they do some radical redesign that just somehow scares me away from using it.

It is kind of like coming home and finding out your wife bought all new furniture, rather than replacing it one piece at a time. It might be better, but it just does not really feel strange until you get use to it. I thought perhaps this way people might be more accepting of the changes.

I do have another template to try. If people are not really hot on this one. I will perhaps in a few days change the default template now to one that is a little more like the current template, or perhaps I will provide both templates and just let users decide which one they want to use.

It is the same data, just different layout, colors, fonts, icons. Still thinking about this one and how to handle it.

I have opened a test thread in the lobby of the new beta forum for everyone to have a live test discussion. It will be deleted when the forum goes live with the rest of the test forum posts, but you can have a go at what it will be like.

topic1285.html

bump

so, how we doing? everyone like it, problems, errors. I am working on getting the photo upload feature turned on and such.


If all is good, I will get some of the remaining work under way, and we can move to the new forum hopefully fairly soon. I might do another round of testing.

Yeah. Just do it. As long as the data preservation functions are robust, there should be no problem taking the plunge. The users will figure it all out if they have to.

yea, I was fairly impressed by the conversion functions. They really did a good job of getting everything from the old database, including the icon packs. I did not really see anything missing after words.

i would like to spam on your test forum a bit, but either i'm computer non literate or probably i need you to allow it.

in gratitude i would like to try to make relevant opinions about how new forum looks to me.

it's also that i don't really like to learn new computer tricks and would rather learn your future version and not that one which is obviously going to die eventually.

enjoy chile.