The way the Forum works...

David and Cnymike !

Wait for upcoming skin, I hope it will be fit to the tastes of "oldies" and "newees"

Thanks for throwing light on this topic, much appreciated

best regards,

zi

Hi cnymike,

For me, Simplicity is a lifesaver in time and energy in working with the forums. If I were to not have it, it would slow down my participation and ability to keep a pulse on the community. This is very important – critical almost – to me as a founder of the project!

However, given that, the community is in hyper-growth mode and I’m going to acquiesce to a traditional forum structure as most folks don’t literally "live" MODx at this moment like I do.

Kinda have to throw my opinion as well.

To be honest it’s hard when you first started with MODx forum structure. Fortunately, I’m used to it by now, you can see it from the amount of time that I spent in this forum. But a clearly look, which maybe a lot easier to look, just like to oldies style, it will serve the purpose much better.

Whichever it is, I’m ok. I thik we can find the middle way, where both the old-style folks and the new-style folks can be satisfied together

Just my two cents

Ryan,

Thanks for responding. I like the responsiveness of everyone here and it’s great to be able to discuss things without getting flamed.


I don’t want to devote more time than is necessary on this topic so I’ll just explain my views a bit more completely and then let it rest.

I’ve really spent a lot of time trying to understand why it’s so hard for me to make sense out of the way the forums operate.

Just this morning and right after reading your post, I looked at the forums, stared and stared and stared, then mused on them, visited a couple other forums, came back and and looked some more at MODx forums.

Here is what I came up with...

When you first enter the Forumss, the discussion boards are summarized in the left most column. The information that can be gleaned from this list is the Board name, the Sub-Board name and the number of topics in each sub-board. (I hope my nomenclature is accurate) It would help me to also know at this level either whether there were "new" messages since my last visit in each sub-board, or maybe the date/time of the last message in each sub-board.

So instead of just "Announcements > Important News > 28 Topics"
maybe it would show "Announcements > Important News > 28 Topics > New"
or perhaps "Announcements > Important News > 28 Topics > Today at 07:47:27 AM"

I know I can use Forum Tools to view all unread messages since my last visit, but still, this view is sorted by date/time and it’s a jumble. If it were first sorted by Forum, then by Topic, then by date, it would be more sensible to me.

In the center column is the Recent Topics and Recent Posts. This too is jumbled because it’s being sorted by date/time. If this were to be sorted alphabetically by topic and sub-sorted by date/time, that would make it much easier to comprehend and also give a better indicator of the "hot" Topics because they’d all be grouped together instead of being scattered amongst other Topics.

I guess to me it’s more important to first know what sub-board I’m viewing than to know the "subject" of the message. So for me, I’d rather see more emphasis visually on the sub-topic, rather than seeing a bold-typed subject.

Once you get into each Thread, things are fine and my scrambled brain can now feel at east knowing where I am and that everything is sorted by date/time.

I know that everyone has their own preferences of how they like to work and view things and one size doesn’t always fit all. Sometimes prefs can accommodate some of these differences, sometimes not. I just wanted to give one last stab at trying to more clearly express my view of the forums.

I love MODx no matter what the forums end up looking like.

Michael

Michael,

Great post, and very well thought out with actionable (I think) positive suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to analyse it!

Kewl. Thanks for sharing.

I also want to add one more thing though, while posting a reply, I always have a habit to re-read the last post that was made to that topic. While in this mode, I’m having a hard time to find the author and the date for the specific post. It seems that there is no line separation between each post, on reply post view. So it will be better if we have color background alternation on the post list or maybe a line or break to make it clearer to the eye.

Just my two cents, while we are revamping the current forum design as well