MajorFubar said:
kevinJ said:
The big pop up adds are VERY ANNOYING. But we don't pay for it, the adders do, so I doubt they're going to take them away.
But...like I said in the other recent thread about ads, it doesn't have to be that way. There's a million and one amateur forums out there run on PhP or vBulletin, they don't seem to need half as many pop-up ads as this to stay afloat, and they don't have the same technical issues. Someone presumably at Haymarket has consciously decided that the forum should runs the way it does, including deciding on the number and type of adverts needed to keep the thing financially afloat. Obviously they've not consciously decided to invent the technical issues! But what I'm saying is, it's not like there isn't a solution to either of the site's two main problems (the technical issues and too many ads), it's just, I suspect, there's far too much red tape in the way of adopting one.
I forgot about this, sorry.
We thought long and hard about the software to use for forums when we rebuilt the site a couple of years ago. As those who have paid any attention to my posts since, you may know that the site is build on
Drupal (v6 currently, FWIW), an open-source content management system (CMS) that has plug-in, community-provided modules to provide extra functionality, such as this forum.
There were times (usually at 4am when I was migrating half a million pieces of user generated content and a hundred thousand users) when I wish we had used an off-the-shelf product (which as you point out are available for a couple of hundred bucks, so cost wasn't the issue), but the advantages offered by the fact that this forum is actually part of the website - as opposed to a completely different one with a subdomain tacked on it to make it look as if it's the same as would have been the case if we chose a different product - are manifold;
- you get rid of the need for a subdomain, as was the case before (community.whathifi.com), which offers you some SEO juice (though not a huge amount tbh, and you could probably get round it);
- all the content is in one website (for example reviews, forum posts, blog posts, reviews comments and forum comments are all the same thing technically), so you can maintain one search index;
- content can be linked more easily (we could attach product tags to forum posts, for example, which if we so wished could give us some nice contextual advertising hints, though you'll notice we don't);
- user management is unified across the entire site
- theming of the site is global - if it wasn't, they'd have had to do the redesign work twice: once for the forum and once for the rest of the site
- it offers a single administration point for editors/admins
- there are no hoops to jump through to get the forum to 'integrate' with the rest of the site in terms of URLs, links, blah - it 'just works' (technical issues notwithstanding)
Is that clearer?
Any 'technical issues' the site might have are to me just defects that need to go on the list, because to my mind there isn't a while lot needs fixing - sporadic logging out appears to be some sort of cookie expiration problem, double posting I don't know, blank posting I don't know, the sh-tty 64 character thing would take about ten minutes to fix the javascript that auto-populates the title field of replies (or the title could be removed altogether, I'm not sure it serves much purpose), etc. Any more you can think of?
Note that the tech team aren't exactly huge, and they run about fifteen other websites as well, so it's usually a case of joining the queue...