Where's the meat, gang?

Am I the only one who thinks the new board is deteriorating into single-issue ax grinding and personal shilling? Seems like many wish to plug their own things, whether they be books or blogs, or whatever. Others seem obsessed with single issues, and will turn whatever the discussion is to their particular interest. Where are the intelligent discussions of the old boards? This is not a knock at the new board itself, just at the content of many of the posts.

Comments

Well, I don't know about the

Submitted by ahapxnct on February 15, 2006 - 9:15pm.

Well, I don't know about the old forums, since I wasn't on them... but this interface is certainly clunkier than most forums I'm used to. It's fine for commenting the staff-posted content, but for open discussion good old phpBB or similar would be nice.

I third this

Submitted by jupiter on February 12, 2006 - 11:29am.

As for myself, I don't have time any more to regularly check up on these forums, or much anything else in life either. It's terrible.

All of my hobbies have gone by the wayside, too, except for one of them, which I can sometimes sneak in just a bit of. (It is one in which I can easily pick up and put back down in a second, if needed.)

In fact I risk being severely negligent of my general duties as a human (to the other humans I am around and deal with), just stopping to write this in here right now.

I wish I had time for all of this. So much has gone by the wayside though just in the name of survival and being responsible for all of the things there are to take care of in life. Wish I could say I was relaxing on the Riviera right now, but I've got to keep the ship in good order (and keep it from getting any holes in it), and that seems to be the main priority for me right now in life.

(There's too much trouble in the world for anyone to relax too long on the Riviera, anyway.)

but I wonder if the new

Submitted by Maynard on February 10, 2006 - 6:57am.

but I wonder if the new layout isn't in part responsible. I'm still not as comfortable with this format as I was with the old boards, and even the older boards. But I'm still trying to get used to it here.

I Second That

Submitted by Umina boy on February 10, 2006 - 11:58pm.

I was just trying to reply that I agree with Maynard's comment that the new forum layout is a turn-off to interaction in this forum and that in itself was a problem: it took me a good ten minutes after logging in to figure out the page wasn't updating properly and I needed to do a complete refresh (Ctrl-F5) before I could even reply. But that's nothing compared to not seeing a fith of you post while you're typing it!

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

I can't disagree with either one of you.

Submitted by bass on February 15, 2006 - 7:17pm.

There's no question that the new board is harder to
use than the old board. And I, too, don't have as
much time as I used to. That doesn't explain the
propensity of self-promotion that seems to be
pervasive now. (Or is that too many 'P's?) I'll bet
many of us are disgusted with much of the nonsense
happening in Washington and around the world. And, of
course, some of us still like the occasional chuckle.
For instance, am I the only one who wondered if
Whittington (the guy Cheney shot) is a Democrat?

What makes the new forums more difficult?

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on February 16, 2006 - 12:35pm.

Dear all,

I'm wondering if you could specify what is it about the new forums that makes them harder / less welcoming / less conducive to good discussions? If it's something that CMD is able to fix, we will!

And thanks for the input.

- Diane

Reply Screens

Submitted by Maynard on February 23, 2006 - 9:59am.

During a reply, the right frame certainly, and for that matter also the left frame, is completely non-contributory, and in the way.

I don't want to reduce my font size. I have trouble enough reading it at its presently set size.

If you could use a different template for posting, it'd be a big help.

Other than that, I'm [still] getting used to it.

I've never had login

Submitted by ahapxnct on February 16, 2006 - 5:03pm.

I've never had login difficulties, but I did have the problem where the textbox gets covered partially by the sidebar when posting (Firefox 1.5.0.1). This was fixed easily by resizing the browser, but some people aren't blessed with high resolution desktops.

I guess my nitpicks would be related to visual presentation and organization. Having sidebars on either side is OK for the Topics List, but when you hit a topic the entire thread looks "squished". That would probably be fine if the thread layout was compact, but there's quite a bit of empty space per post, which means a lot of scrolling relative to the amount of content. Posts aren't clearly delineated. The use of text size and color is odd: in this type of forum, you're typically going to have one subject and many followups per topic, yet the subject of each post is heavily emphasized in bold blue letters in each post (and most the time it ends up being the first few words of the post, which means people aren't even bothering to enter one). Other info, like who's doing the posting, is in a small, lightly-colored font, as is the time and date. The former is kind of irritating- it's nice to not have to squint to see who's writing. The latter I wouldn't care about, except that until the user configures it otherwise, followup comments are presented in a newest-first manner, which threw me off- seems to me that it would be logical to present posts in chronological order. Also, when replying, you can only see the post you're replying to- it's nice to be able to reference the entire thread.

None of these are showstoppers, but they don't compare favorably with common forum software such as phpBB, YABB, etc. I think you are using Drupal, which I don't have experience with, but it ought to be configurable enough to fix some of these issues.

Sometimes, it's difficult to

Submitted by bass on February 16, 2006 - 3:59pm.

Sometimes, it's difficult to log in. This morning,
I couldn't log in to reply to another post. This
afternoon, it was easy. Plus, if I don't hit enter
the type goes under the sidebar, which is a little
annoying.

Frame sizing is the biggest problem

Submitted by Umina boy on February 17, 2006 - 9:04pm.

Frame sizing in the reply page is the biggest problem because a fifth of the text I'm typing now is hidden behind the links for the CMD books. I cannot see any options for adding attachments so I'll email a screen shot of what I'm doing right now to editor AT prwatch.org so you can see what I mean.

Other problems include

*Having to know old fashioned html as the only formatting tool takes me back a few years...

*In addition to bass' comments about font, I find whiote background screens hard on the eyes after a while

*a cascading navigation tree (sort of like the folder fram in windows explorer) would make it easier to find out who is replying to what - note Jupiter's thirding before my seconding

*Having the signature quote load up automatically in the comments box and flowing with the rest of the text is a bit silly and confusing - it should be differentiated in some way

*If you click "login in to reply" you don't get taken back to where you started ofter you're logged in and when you navigate back to where you were you have to refresh the page or you just get prompted to log in again

*and a new discovery! - if you accidentally click out of the reply screen you lose all your reply when you hit "back"

*if you could see everything that you are typing then the preview comment stage would be an unnecessary step

*the LIVE reply button under the preview comment is very confusing because if you don't scroll down far enough to see the post comment button you click that thinking it's going to post but just get taken back to a blank reply page - luckily I though to copy my text to notepad this time!

________________________________
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

decrease your browser's monospace font-size

Submitted by Hugh Manatee on February 22, 2006 - 8:12am.

Umina boy,

i posted the fix for the text under the right division in the forum text boxes a while ago. For me, using Firefox, the fix was to change my default monospace font-size to 14 or less.

Goto Tools-->Options-->Content

Then under Fonts and colors push the advanced tab, and next to the monospace font selection is the font-size setting.



"Oh my God!
The dead have risen and they're voting Republican!"

Bart Simpson
The Simpsons Show 2F02
"Sideshow Bob Roberts" - aired Oct. 9, 1994