Discussion area

[Meramarina]

What discussion areas should we set up to use while we work on a long-terms solution to our forum problems? I just made a general area and a log area.

[rdearman]

Maybe just the most popular ones: Logs, Advice, General Discussion were the three which I used most.

[emk]

Yeah, better to keep it simple and add more as needed, especially since this is the emergency backup forum for now.

[Chung]

If you decide to set up the Collaborative Profiles sub-forum, I'll gladly add the profiles that I made (with some modifications if necessary to deal with potential claims of copyright infringement because of the old forum's policy on ownership of posts).

[Serpent]

Any guidelines for what's supposed to be HLAL discussion vs Technical support? Everything but "HTLAL might be gone" and the thank you thread is really more suitable there...

[Meramarina]

I was thinking that we could use it for questions and discussions about technical matters at this forum specifically here, while the technical troubles of HTLAL can be included in the HTLAL discussion thread.

It doesn't have to be organized this way; I just was trying to create the spaces we need. Nothing's final and I'm sure we'll do more reorganization as we need it.

[Bluepaint]

What about a Multilingual room? I liked all the multilingual games people played.

[CarlyD]

I really liked the Resources section that had Marketplace, Bookstores and Internet Resources. I know it didn't get used as much as the other areas, but I always looked there first for new posts.

[Iversen]

In the old forum there were areas for books and bookstores and courseware, but not an area reserved for internet resources. That would be nice to have. Besides experience has shown that it will be necessary to have an area for topics referring to one specific language. In the old forum there were two, one for 'general' specific topics and one reserved for advice. But the first one was the one that took all the traffic.

As for the multilingual area we had in the old forum I'm somewhat hesitant. I was there when it was established and had high hopes for it, but most threads dried up fairly quickly after a couple of messages of the type "Anybody theeere??". It turned out that the urge to write in your target language was better satisfied by the individual logs, where you didn't have to wait for others to write something.

Quite generally I think that it is a good idea to start out with just a few sections. If it then turns out that some rooms get exceedingly popular then it is always possible to split it up later. As an example take the multilingual room - if all messages in thisroom are clearly marked with language in the title then there isn't any reason to make separate French, German, Russian etc. rooms from the beginning.

As for the voting system.. well, I have got my share of votes on the old forum, but I wouldn't see it as a priority. However it has not escaped me that the possibility to put thumbs up or down has become ubiquitous one the internet, and you probably can't avoid having something like that.

Btw Thank you to those who have put up this forum and to rdearman in particular.

[lone wolf]

As for the voting system.. well, I have got my share of votes on the old forum, but I wouldn't see it as a priority. However it has not escaped me that the possibility to put thumbs up or down has become ubiquitous one the internet, and you probably can't avoid having something like that.

PhpBB doesn't have a built-in voting system. There are extensions available that add this functionality, but I haven't seen any that I really liked. Last time I looked was one year ago, so maybe something has changed since then. What I've seen is that these voting systems most of the time are implemented in JavaScript, which unfortunately is the default these days for everyone who hasn't got a clue what he is doing, i.e. 95% of "web developers".

The voting system on the old forum was quite unique and the best feature of the package, because it displayed the link for casting a vote and the response message in an iframe. I've never seen anything like this in any other forum software. Technically this is the best solution, because it even works when everything is locked down in the browser for safety and speed reasons.