Suggestion for the forum

[bigboss]

I happened to stumble across this forum during my search for a fountain pen: http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?app=forums

I really like the little tab "Watch Forum" & "Watch Topic" which will alert you via email when someone posts in that forum/thread. There's also an option as to how would you like to be notified.

This is a very useful feature. Hope it gets incorporated on WHF in the future... ray:

 

[nopiano]

Seconded!

I still wonder why Haymarket uses this apparently home-made format with such limited functions, and annoying 'features' like too long thread names, and word verification. And when you say so, someone pops up to say why are users obsessed by the mechanism!

 

[Andrew Everard]

It's far from being a 'home-made format': it's an off-the-shelf solution. Yes, we're aware of the problems, and we are working through them, but these things take time with limited resources at our disposal.

Email alerts have been tried before, and everyone complained about the volume of emails they were getting, which is why we don't use them anymore.

Word verification is there because the success of this site means it's a well-lit target for spammers, most of whom we catch using that and various other strategies. Apologies to those this inconveniences when they first join, but it's much better for all than the site turning into a spamfest.

 

[Mooly]

A search for "thread notifier" brought me here... as I was going to ask this question.

Andrew Everard says,

"Email alerts have been tried before, and everyone complained about the volume of emails they were getting, which is why we don't use them anymore."

If that is so then imo that is purely a problem in implementation. Many forums send only a single email no matter how many responses there may have been to a thread. Only when you visit the thread again do any more (single) notifications arrive as more and more replies appear. And each notification has an "unsubscribe" button. Is something like that not possible to implement with this "off the shelf" solution ?

The lack of notifier is a major problem because unless you look through all the days postings on a daily basis you miss any replies you may be interested in or expecting on a particular thread. It just makes the whole forum seem a bit of a "casual" affair.

Edit... Is there no option to allow the user to subscribe or not to a thread (as on many sites) as they wish.

 

[The_Lhc]

Edit... Is there no option to allow the user to subscribe or not to a thread (as on many sites) as they wish.

Now, you see I think that's a weird idea, for one thing, how do you then know when a new thread you might be interested in appears? Also it's more or less unusable for very large forums (I don't consider this place to be particularly big incidentally). There's another forum that I've tried to use in the past but it's so massive, with so many threads, that just going through attempting to subscribe to everything I might be interested in is impossible. If you could subscribe to sub-fora that'd be fine (I've got no interest in computer games, so I don't need to see anything to do with them) but you can't or at least I couldn't see any way of doing it, so I've given up with it.

As far as this forum is concerned it's not so busy that you can't use the active topics button, it's rare that I come back to it and there's more than about a page and half of threads that have been updated since I last visited.

 

[Mooly]

Edit... Is there no option to allow the user to subscribe or not to a thread (as on many sites) as they wish.

Now, you see I think that's a weird idea, for one thing, how do you then know when a new thread you might be interested in appears?

On the site I post most frequently too I browse the forum and sub forums, any posting I make automatically subcribing me to that thread and future replies. I would never wish to post and at least not see any followup replies. The option to unscribe to any thread is easy. I very infrequently just subscribe to a thread just to watch it without contributing. That for me probably accounts for one in a couple of hundred.

When you have posted to many (perhaps thousands of threads) you can't be just browsing and hoping to remember the title of something you posted to ages ago.

In a week or two if anyone else posts here for example, how do I know... without keep looking up and down the sub forums and all the postings ?

 

[AlmaataKZ]

there is a lot of features that are standard and well-known for fora:

- personal messages

- thread subscripton and customisable notifications

- view posts by user

- direct pages navigation on top (as well as bottom)

- 'thanks' or other markings to users and posts

- etc

This forum software is very 'light' or 'basic' on features and I would welcome an improvement.

Classifieds..? ... Oh, forget it.

 

[Clare Newsome]

All feedback noted and passed on to digital dev team.

Believe me, much of it frustrates us too....