Posted on 02/22/2015 11:38:22 AM PST by Wage Slave
When I click on a thread why does it jump to the last comment or page? I want to start reading it from the beginning. It happens almost every time but once in a blue moon it stays at the beginning. I am not drinking.
When you say long in the tooth what do you mean exactly? Are there particular things about the way FR looks or functions that you see as in need of upgrading? Just wondering what the next leap forward might look like.
I still think FR is the best forum software by leaps and bounds. It’s amazing how it’s still on top after almost two decades with no major changes to the fundamentals, at least from a user perspective. It’s sort of the Porsche 911 of forum software.
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Modern HTML and CSS practices, one of my hold ups has always been the fact that user comments support a rich version of HTML with plenty of deprecated tags, it is something of a war with the browser as the most appropriate doctype attribute (HTML 4 Transitional) is also deprecated and triggers intentional quirky browser behavior. One solution is to translate the tags such as FONT to CSS-style attributes but this is a bit complex when you dig into it (the CENTER tag is a thicket of complexity.) I’d love to support a minimal set of user CSS in postings, but this is also rife with complexity.
Rewriting the database to support edittable comments in a sane way is also very high on the list. In fact I have completely redesigned the database schema. This change alone is so massive that it warrants a ground-up rewrite of the software.
Some optional enhancement to the user interface, a bit more fluid when browser features are available. I’m a fan of something called progressive enhancement, meaning the site is designed without JavaScript, but when present, the user experience is far more rich. So many sites get JavaScript wrong IMHO. I hate JS (though it has come a long way I admit.) I don’t mean as a language, was even toying around with rewriting a great deal of the page generation code in server-side JS. I just hate executable code in an untrustworthy environment, people would be safer without it (and browser Java and Flash and ...)
I have a long list of things. NLP for keyword population and name recognition within articles, using meta tags from external sites to better index articles, some wiki-like features for long-lived topics, blogging, a way to reward well written user contributions, enhancement to our abilitity to affect activism (event coordination and other such campaigns), possibly a distributed database if ever the SHTF, possibly a browser add-on for FR comments in a sidebar on external sites, a bit of optimization for search engines, lots of little things.
The codebase itself is very old, was written before the age of the web framework, so I wrote my own, then when I realized how limited it was I wrote another, and another, and another, and all these live within the software still. It is frightening. Lots of things like that beg for a total rewrite.
I agree. I dislike websites that 'change' their format just because "it's the next cool thing". Mostly the changes are just based on superficial 'looks' and never improve anything. Many times it just becomes harder to use and occupies more memory.
The really important part of the 'design' of FR is that it makes having a DEBATE possible. You can FOLLOW a line of conversation.
Other websites are mainly EGO HIT websites. People post their 'opinions' or 'rants' and really aren't talking TO another poster on the website. Even if they were, there is no way to IDENTIFY WHOM they were addressing their comment TO.
On FR, the TO: field shows you WHO and what POST NUMBER they were replying to, as well as allowing you to include more than one screenname in the TO: field.
Other websites don't have that feature. They are nothing more than glorified twitters.
The MOST IMPORTANT part of FR is not even the software, but the design of the owner. That is that the OWNER doesn't decide what 'articles' to discuss. WE DO.
That is what makes it a great discussion forum.
These are great points, thank you. It reminds me that, yes this is a discussion site, it would be nice to have an informal chat message interface for those times a lively discussion would be more appropriate, to enhance ease of interaction while maintaning the ability to “go deep” with more expansive messages. A hybrid thread-chatroom experience, I only have a vague idea of how this would look and function, it is more of an interface design issue than structural. We already do this in especially live threads. The idea is to keep the banter clustered underneath the content with any message being able to become the next insightful piece of content.
Roger that and thanks for explaining. Sounds like some good updates in store for FR when the time comes.
I read threads from the bottom up all the time.
Yep, that’s it exactly. FR is perfect for online debates and discussions. It’s like a tool that “just works”. It makes it so natural to follow the twists and turns of a complex conversation with multiple people involved and things branching off. And it does it without clunky outlines or forcing you to block quote.
Thanks for the response. I am sure there are things that could be updated and improved. You are the best one to do that. All of the past changes have been for the better.
I still think FR is one of the best ‘formats’ for a discussion forum I have ever used.
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