Australian Infront

The current forums are a great resource, but it is hard to find information unless it has been posted recently. I think a good forum is one that places the emphasis on search and resources, yet is easy to put up new posts and responses.

Take the main page of the WordPress.org forums for example -- whilst you have all you categories on the right like a traditional forum, the emphasis is first on informing the user, then providing resources so that the user does not dive head-first into the deep end, then allowing the user to search or select from a tag cloud and finally showing them the forum topics.

Personally I think most of the sections are great. Perhaps you could combine 'Programming' with 'Developers Discussion' and combine front-end stuff with the Flash Help as an 'Interactive' forum. The specialist forums like Motion Graphics and Print are great and the 'Design Discussion' and 'Classifieds' are a must.

I think the hardest thing for a user is knowing where to start. And let's face it, the current INfront boards are pretty intimidating. If you can make your interface as welcoming as your new home page re-design was, I'm sure it'll be great.

By the way, I posted here because I'm not sure what my login for the old forums is, so if you could integrate that with the site/blog accounts, that'd be great too :)

flat post forum
get rid of all categories - have post tagging and let the users build the taxonomoy

Do you have any good examples of this Dylan?

I think this might be something along what Dylan means,

http://qhub.com/ and http://getsatisfaction.com/

and I'd agree that for one part of the forum, bringing it down to raw questions and collective answers would be awesome.

We do have something like that planned for the Involved section of the site. Also the ability to vote on answers, I guess something like Yahoo's Answers is what we had in mind.

Perhaps something like QBN - is that what you meant Dylan?

But cool - this is great. Some good discussion happening here now also: http://forums.australianinfront.com.au/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=345893

I'm not sure I agree with Dylan, I like the categorisation of forums.

The current forums search feature is pretty poor. Needle in a haystack comes to mind. I'd like to see this element bettered, with more advanced options to bottle neck down to exactly what you are looking for.

something along the lines of the vanilla forums i think is the best of both worlds, its a flat forum but posts can have categories - http://vanillaforums.org/
its used on B3 boards and many others

also YH is another good board using similar flat approach

a better, more powerful search function would be nice

I'm quite late, but. I hear Dylan, I like the idea of being able to tag when starting a new thread.

Ok, would you like a set list of tags?

Suggestion & questions....

Can the "fancy" editing be listed somewhere near the Post a Reply text box because i'm going to forget how many * and :: does what.

Does the :: work for multiple paragraphs?

Can the posted date be made darker. The light grey is hard to read.

On the main page there needs to be a column for Last post by... to show the thread has been updated since you lost logged in or posted.

What happens if you want to post a link to an image rather than have it show up in the post? eg if the image was really large?

Is there a classifieds section?

How about a preview button?

Can I change my username?

@Dan

• We can move the instructions, that is fine.
• The :: is at the start of every paragraph.
• We will bold the post date.
• Last post by - we can look into this.
• Images get re-sized to fit.
• Classifieds will be moving into our Involved section very soon.
• Yeah preview isn't a bad idea, we will look into it.

@Adem

• No to changing user name sorry - we will be flooded for requests otherwise.

Yeah I understand - no problem.

Ok, looks like I need to fix the resize.

::• This at the start of every paragraph.

::• This at the start of every paragraph.

Ok got it. Would be good to have the quoted posters name in the quoted text so people know who's being quoted.

Do the forums show swf or is it only images and video files?

Also when you edit a post and click submit it sends you back to page one.

@Dan

Re quoting names, that will come in when we introduce @username. We didn't want to do a quote function as the @username was already mapped out.

We have locked down images to a few types. swf files should be linked externally - let is know if not.

We will look into the redirect right now.

Thanks for all your feedback Dan, appreciate it.

::Re quoting names, that will come in when we introduce @username. We didn't want to do a quote function as the @username was already mapped out.

I think a reply button/link that automatically fills out the user's name and their post would be simpler and quicker rather than copying & pasting.

OK - we can look into it.

:: I think a reply button/link that automatically fills out the user's name and their post would be simpler and quicker rather than copying & pasting.

for shaw. Quoting someones statement if you're replying gives your own reply the context it needs. I reckon a reply button under each comment is the way to go.

Would be nice if

*Posted: 19th May 2010 @ 2.49 PM*

is shown the following after the post was edited by the creator.

*Edited: 19th May 2010 @ 2.50 PM*

::On the main page there needs to be a column for Last post by... to show the thread has been updated since you lost logged in or posted.

I second this. Also, on the Post a Reply at the bottom of the screen, a 'preview post' just to make sure all the new tags are used correctly (I.e.: a URL to a youtube vid, using italics or bold, or the quote function) would be really handy.