Forum upgrades

[AndyEd]

Hi all,

My name is Andrew Eadie and I'm charged with audience acquisition and SEO on the IM sport titles. We are going to be bringing some functionality and SEO upgrades to the forum so I wanted to let you guys know and ask you to feed in any ideas and bug bears you have. All upgrades will be made with the following aims in mind:

• moderator workload is reduced and made easier (spam, tools)
  people can see latest and hot threads (sidepanels)
  it's easier to register and interact (streamline UX)
  you are notified when you have received a reply (push notifications)
  less vocal members can interact (polls, quizzes and ratings)
  forum works on mobile
  various otherfixes

We want the best forum functionality to better serve our thriving inclusive community of cycling experts and fans. I know there have been lots of things lots of you have been asking for a while now. The good news is that we are in a place to be able to do many of them now. Please share your thoughts.

Thanks to all of you reading who make this forum possible.

Andy

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

Sounds good. Looking forward to some improvements to the forum, it certainly needs some.

However this thread is probably in the wrong section of the forum, it would seem to be better placed in the About the Forum section of Feedback not the About the Website section that is currently resides.

There is talk about the reporting of posts function on the new forum is terrible compared to the old one. This makes it a lot harder for the moderators and if you are serious about making things easier for them then it needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Ideally it would be before the Tour de France when the forum is apparently at its busiest and craziest. You will see this has lead to a call for new moderators to cope with this super busy period.

Also ensuring that the forum does not crash during the Tour like it did during the Giro would be a very good thing. Apparently some improvements were made during the Giro but making sure that they are enough for the Tour would be a very worthwhile task.

Users have found a work around polls not working properly but it would be good to get them working properly

I wish you all the best in your work with the forum and hope to see some results soon.

 

[Armchair cyclist]

Ability to post csv tables would be useful.

 

[AndyEd]

Re:

There is talk about the reporting of posts function on the new forum is terrible compared to the old one. This makes it a lot harder for the moderators and if you are serious about making things easier for them then it needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Ideally it would be before the Tour de France when the forum is apparently at its busiest and craziest. You will see this has lead to a call for new moderators to cope with this super busy period.

Green monkey can you expand on this please, what is wrong with the current reporting or what would you like to see in order for it to be improved?

Andy

 

[AndyEd]

Re:

Ability to post csv tables would be useful.

Armchair would it be sufficient if you were to take a screenshot of your CSV table and post it as an image?

Andy

 

[Armchair cyclist]

Re: Re:

Ability to post csv tables would be useful.

Armchair would it be sufficient if you were to take a screenshot of your CSV table and post it as an image?

Andy

That seems an odd request as other forums, provided voluntarily and cost-free, with far less advertising and no professional team behind them, have the function.

Yes, taking a screenshot, setting up an account at a picture hosting site, and then trimming and resizing and posting here would be possible, but it would be a lot easier to post the link to the better-featured forum.

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

Re: Re:

There is talk about the reporting of posts function on the new forum is terrible compared to the old one. This makes it a lot harder for the moderators and if you are serious about making things easier for them then it needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Ideally it would be before the Tour de France when the forum is apparently at its busiest and craziest. You will see this has lead to a call for new moderators to cope with this super busy period.

Green monkey can you expand on this please, what is wrong with the current reporting or what would you like to see in order for it to be improved?

Andy

I cannot go into details, I am not a moderator, I do not know exactly how the reporting function works or how it worked on the old forum. However I have picked up that has been comments about it and they have been negative, seeming to say that it is harder for moderators to deal with reported posts. Maybe I have got it wrong but perhaps it is worth following up with the moderators. Sorry I cannot be more helpful.

 

[AndyEd]

Re: Re:

other forums, provided voluntarily and cost-free, with far less advertising and no professional team behind them, have the function.

Thanks armchair, do you know of any examples where I can see CSV posting in action? If you give me a link to a thread where it is featured then I can look into it.

Andy

 

[Armchair cyclist]

Compare the way I was able to present game standings on Velorooms with the equivalent post here,

 

[murali]

Atleast, give us some rudimentary feature to post tables, if not exactly a csv.
we can always concatenate in excel and still post it here.

 

[murali]

Another desperate feature request:

Please allow multiple users to report a post.

abusive posters come to ruin the environment of us regulars just during the TdF.
we need to report abusive posts.(please make this as default option as well)

 

[krebs303]

The minute between posts is too long. Can we get it back down to 30 seconds again.

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

The minute between posts is too long. Can we get it back down to 30 seconds again.

That would be good.

 

[Susan Westemeyer]

As to the problem with the reporting of posts to mods: under the old system, a report resulted in an email to each mod. This made us aware of the problem, without going into the forum -- an advantage, as none of us is in the forum 24/7. Under the new system, there is no notification to the mods, only a marker on the name of the thread in the sub forum index. This means we are only aware of it when we are in the forum AND in the sub forum.

Notifications can be a PITA but are better than what we have now.

PS. Despite my title of senior member, I am the senior mod on this forum.

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

Re:

As to the problem with the reporting of posts to mods: under the old system, a report resulted in an email to each mod. This made us aware of the problem, without going into the forum -- an advantage, as none of us is in the forum 24/7. Under the new system, there is no notification to the mods, only a marker on the name of the thread in the sub forum index. This means we are only aware of it when we are in the forum AND in the sub forum.

Notifications can be a PITA but are better than what we have now.

PS. Despite my title of senior member, I am the senior mod on this forum.

Thank you for clarifying the situation in a way I was unable to do.

 

[Hugh Januss]

The way this new Forum downgrade handles quotes is probably the very worst part of a very bad new system. It really just sucks and makes me want to just give up posting here, ever.
Thank you for your time.

 

[krebs303]

Also deleting posts. How long are you able to delete your own posts? I found a couple posts of mine in the wrong thread with no way to remove them.

 

[Netserk]

An option to make polls public.

 

[BigMac]

Also deleting posts. How long are you able to delete your own posts? I found a couple posts of mine in the wrong thread with no way to remove them.

Hey krebs, you should be able to delete your posts using the fast menu right above them. Right next to the ''Edit post''. Maybe I don't know what you mean.

 

[Netserk]

Also deleting posts. How long are you able to delete your own posts? I found a couple posts of mine in the wrong thread with no way to remove them.

Hey krebs, you should be able to delete your posts using the fast menu right above them. Right next to the ''Edit post''. Maybe I don't know what you mean.

That is only possible if your post is the most recent one in the thread.

See here: http://i.imgur.com/I3elvb0.png

 

[BigMac]

Also deleting posts. How long are you able to delete your own posts? I found a couple posts of mine in the wrong thread with no way to remove them.

Hey krebs, you should be able to delete your posts using the fast menu right above them. Right next to the ''Edit post''. Maybe I don't know what you mean.

That is only possible if your post is the most recent one in the thread.

See here: http://i.imgur.com/I3elvb0.png

Didn't know that, it's very odd. Thanks. In any case you can tell me what posts of yours to delete, krebs, if you want, while someone sees if it's possible to change that.

 

[SeriousSam]

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Too many connections [1040]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

Is the forum going to be useable during key stages?

 

[Irondan]

Re:

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Too many connections [1040]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

Is the forum going to be useable during key stages?

The problem was reported to the dev team. I hope they fix it as much as you.

 

[King Boonen]

Hi Andrew,

Embedded quotes. Any chance you can change the quote function so it only includes the post the user quotes and not anything quoted in that post? Editing them is a massive pain and it seems many users really struggle with it.

Cheers,

KB.

 

[Armchair cyclist]

Re:

Hi Andrew,

Embedded quotes. Any chance you can change the quote function so it only includes the post the user quotes and not anything quoted in that post? Editing them is a massive pain and it seems many users really struggle with it.

Cheers,

KB.

I would vote against this: it is useful to have the context for a quote.

Frankly, hard to understand how people are unable to delete the inner envelopes of citation if they want to do so. Even if they don't, the reader can easily enough concentrate on the outer levels of the wrapper if they are confident that they don't need any more clarification of the previous discussion.