Forum problems

[Mike]

Hi guys

I know what devs are like, want to control everything 🙂 But I’m not sure why you created your own forum system instead of using one of the thousand of pre-built ones out there.

I know you probably wanted integration into your licensing system etc, but you’ll spend more time than you want fixing forum issues instead of ECP/TEC issues!

Here’s a few off the top of my head:

1) Embedding code just doesn’t work well at all. Using the {code} tag only works for very basic text. If the text has any php open/closing tags in it, the text gets stripped and you have to re-edit your post, if you even notice it’s wrong.

2) The area where you write your text is too small, and has no scrollbar.

3) There’s no way to jump to the last post in a thread from the thread list. You have to open the thread, go to the last page, scroll down.

4) You can’t unsubscribe from a thread unless you re-post in it and un-tick the box.

5) You can’t find your own threads. There’s no way to see a list of threads you’ve created.

6) You can’t see who the thread author is in the thread list view. You can only see who made the last reply.

7) The most recent reply date on the thread list view needs to display the time as well.

That’s all for now. 🙂

[Rob]

Hey Mike. Thanks for the note here. We actually didn’t create this from scratch; we’re using a modded version of BBPress here, but the architecture is all BBPress. That being said we definitely realize there is room for improvement here and have a few of these fixes already done on dev and awaiting deployment when we next push to live.

To address your points:

#1. Yup, a few users have brought this up. Easy workaround is to just use < code > instead of { code }, as it’s the only one that works for the time being.
#2. This is browser-specific. In Chrome, for example (where I’m writing my response now), I see a scroll bar and a little drag-and-drop option in the lower right to make the box as large or small as I wish to.
#3. Solid suggestion. Not sure whether we’ll change this anytime soon (since some people want to see the full thread when selecting from the list, and there’d be no way for them to decide when clicking whether to go to the first or last)…but I can definitely see the value of this.
#4. This is done and awaiting deployment. There will just be a little “unsubscribe” box you hit. Probably will be live sometime next week.
#5. The easiest way to do this would be to just click on your name (ie https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/users/mike-salway/) and you can see all posts from a given user.
#6. Ha, funny you should mention that…we actually went back and forth when deciding on this and ended up taking the same route as our old forum, which showed the last response instead of the author. Given your note here we may re-evaluate this down the line though.
#7. I can see the value in this. No guarantees on when it’ll make it in but I suspect we’ll incorporate this at some point.

Awesome feedback so far. Keep it coming 🙂

[Mike]

Hi ROb thanks for the reply.

#1 – I am using - it still fails with php open/close tags. I just put {code} in this post so it didn't parse it :)

#2 - I am using Chrome also. And in the post-reply I see a scrollbar. In the new thread, there is no scrollbar.

#3 - other forums handle this by having a little icon next to the thread name which jumps to the last post. Click on the thread title to start from the beginning, click on the icon to jump to the latest new post.

#5 - Oh thanks. I tried going into the "Account" menu in the top right and couldn't find anything there. This works.

#6 - You really need to show both. There's plenty of space where it shows each thread title/meta, to show "Created by XXX. Most recent by YYY".

#7 - Thanks - the main reason is because you come back to the forum to check for new posts, and can't see the time they were updated.

Cheers

[Mike]

Ok some more to add to the list now:

#8 – There’s no way to edit my post. I can edit the original thread but I can’t edit a post. This is really frustrating 🙂

#9 – Formatting is not preserved. If I have multiple ‘blank lines’, they are stripped.

Hi Rob

#1 – Well, you can see what happened above. It’s just broke.

#2 – I am using Chrome also. And in the post-reply I see a scrollbar. In the new thread, there is no scrollbar.

#3 – other forums handle this by having a little icon next to the thread name which jumps to the last post. Click on the thread title to start from the beginning, click on the icon to jump to the latest new post.

#5 – Oh thanks. I tried going into the “Account” menu in the top right and couldn’t find anything there. This works.

#6 – You really need to show both. There’s plenty of space where it shows each thread title/meta, to show “Created by XXX. Most recent by YYY”.

#7 – Thanks – the main reason is because you come back to the forum to check for new posts, and can’t see the time they were updated.

[Rob]

Hey Mike. Thanks for the follow-ups. Great to hear you’ve been thinking about this stuff in-depth. We’ll certainly be able to make some improvements as a result.

For these:

#8 – Yup, this is on the radar to be addressed. Right now only admins have the power.
#9 – Not sure I understand this one. Can you elaborate?
#1 – Heh…see #9 response.
#2 – Ah, I understand now. This scrollbar is probably worth adding for new posts, yes. I’ll make a note.
#3 – I could see the value here. Right now we’re just having people link to the specific entry (https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/forum-problems/#post-14026) if they want to see the latest.
#4 – No response 🙂
#5 – Excellent to hear.
#6 – Good to know. I’ll run this by the team and see if anyone has any objections.
#7 – Ditto #6. Probably worth adding and can’t be too hard to do.

Let me know what else comes up! Thanks again for your thoughts.

[Mike]

By #9, I mean if I try to add multiple line breaks (pressing enter), then they are stripped and all the text is just squished together.

So this line should be 4 lines below the one above.

[Mike]

But you can see it’s not. I pressed enter 4 times in-between those two lines.

[Rob]

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense – good call. Going to get that one logged to resolve too, since it can’t be hard to fix and I always hate it when sites have that limitation. Thanks for the heads up.

[Author]

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