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tashippy Wrote:I would like if the forum index is capable of presenting a larger list of main threads that members might want to become familiar with

Sticky threads?

Quote:(...) and as a central place to put essential stuff and for threads that are already loaded with information to expand and develop rather than new threads asking the same things-i.e. people can post their own situation in an umbrella thread for such things as "where do I start" and "just finished RTK, now what?" etc.

This is a good idea. I think we could try (me and the moderators) to create more such umbrella threads in the future. Definitely pop the question in the relevant threads now and then, and if the volume or interest warrants it we should consider it.

I love the way the current forum looks and functions.

Not a very productive post, I know, but I guess I just want to say the current standards have been set high as far as I'm concerned.

http://xenforo.com/ is one of the best new (paid) forum software around. Though I haven't checked into Japanese support just yet.

Thanks for the replies Fabrice. Perhaps we could have a 'media' sub-forum under 'general discussion' although this sort of fits under 'learning resources' as well in the sense of creating an immersion environment.
For example, 'Dope Japanese Hip Hop' and 'Japanese Film sites/forums' are in the top five most current topics in GD, and in LR there are 'Kindle Paperwhite 2 with J>E dictionary', 'Kanji Games for the Nintendo DS' and 'How fast to finish textbooks', the latter of which probably belongs more in LR than in a media thread, though a textbook is media.

I really like how it looks currently, the simple design is appropriate for an educationally focused forum like this imo, it helps make it easy to read, with no distractions. The cream colour scheme is good, too.

My favourite forum is GameFAQs (which I use daily), again the minimalist design is part of the appeal there - I'm not using the latest, completely horrid, redesign when browsing it, though, but the throwback mode that lets you use the previous design. So, if it ain't broke...

A media sub-forum does sound a good idea.

More of a lurker than a poster, but just chipping in to say I like the current layout; It's simple, fast, and easy on the eye.

As for searching, I tend to cheat and use Google to search the forum if I really need to.

Personally, I believe the two essentials for a forum to be really useful are the ability to jump to the first unread message in a topic, and the ability to favourite/tag a particular topic for personal reference. We already have both of these, so I'm happy.

The only thing I miss from more advanced forum software is persistent read/unread post marking. If I visit the forum here and don't read all the new posts right away, it forgets about them.

Woodgar Wrote:More of a lurker than a poster, but just chipping in to say I like the current layout; It's simple, fast, and easy on the eye.

As for searching, I tend to cheat and use Google to search the forum if I really need to.

Personally, I believe the two essentials for a forum to be really useful are the ability to jump to the first unread message in a topic, and the ability to favourite/tag a particular topic for personal reference. We already have both of these, so I'm happy.

I agree that it's already adequate for me, as I've gotten plenty of use out of this forum, but I wanted to offer suggestions since Fabrice (don't forget to donate, ya'll!) was asking. I think the forum has been a little slow lately, maybe an update would breath some new life into the community.

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tashippy Wrote:I think the forum has been a little slow lately, maybe an update would breath some new life into the community.

I agree about the need to refresh and enliven things up a bit.

I wouldn't worry about forum activity though. It goes up and down throughout the year according to holidays and other black magic I am still impervious to.

Traffic is actually growing, relatively speaking slower of course than the big forums out there but the most important is that it's growing and not declining Traffic has seen roughly 100,000 (one hundred thousand) more unique visitors in 2013 compared to 2012, according to Awstats (bandwidth also has gone from 9+ GB to 17+ GB >_> ).

And while there is the usual spam traffic (trying to get through registration), I also added a lot of block rules to htaccess last year to block annoying search bots as well as abusive IP ranges used by spam bots.

PS: Also Google incoming links was ~38k in Dec 2011, up to ~59k last December.

I quite like the design of this forum, and think it's one of the better ones on the internet. The backend could use an overhaul to fix the text encoding issues you've outlined, but other than that I see no real reason to change it significantly.

Another option for forum software is BBPress, which is built by the people who make WordPress. I see on the BBPress support site that there are punBB -> BBPress importers, so this may be a workable option.

I'm not certain about the search functionality in BBPress although there, like WordPress, many plugins that can extend functionality of BBPress.

It might be worth a look, bbpress.org.

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I was going to mention the rather small horizontal width of the forum (~800px), but the koohii-fluid layout fixes that nicely apart from the odd glitch (e.g. Quick Reply size).

I like the minimalist look we have here, but that should be easy to replicate on another board.

Forum based PMs would be a nice improvement over the current solution.

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I guess the problem with fluid layout is that it's not very readable to have very long lines of text. Otherwise I would have considered just changing the default style of the forum.

Hmm maybe as monitors resolutions increased I shoud consider just a little wider fixed layout ? I guess it was designed to fit in 1024px. Maybe I could set it to 1280px hmmm...

Regarding the width of the site, you might try using responsive design principles. ie. setting a fixed width for the content on devices with larger screen sizes, and a fluid design for smaller devices, ie. tablets and mobiles.

This articles gives a good introduction to Responsive Web Design.

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sonicpixel Wrote:It might be worth a look, bbpress.org.

I have considered it.

The question is which forum platform suits this community needs best.

Tags do seem pretty useful, and I think users here would make a good use of it.

Some way of promoting posts to a "wiki" status would be interesting, is there such a thing for forums? (I do mean forum and not the Q/A format used by StackOverflow sites).

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tashippy Wrote:Perhaps we could have a 'media' sub-forum under 'general discussion' although this sort of fits under 'learning resources' as well in the sense of creating an immersion environment.
For example, 'Dope Japanese Hip Hop' and 'Japanese Film sites/forums' are in the top five most current topics in GD, and in LR there are 'Kindle Paperwhite 2 with J>E dictionary', 'Kanji Games for the Nintendo DS' and 'How fast to finish textbooks', the latter of which probably belongs more in LR than in a media thread, though a textbook is media.

Any other opinions on this? (a "Media" sub forum).

What's the size for the avatars?
I've been resizing a pic I wanted to use as avatar, and it's already really small but still too big to be used in this forum.

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Quote:An avatar is a small image that will be displayed under your username in your posts. It must not be any bigger than 60 x 60 pixels and 10240 bytes (10 KB).

Roger that! Thanks, appreciated!

Some forums have this thing where you're not considered a member until you get X number of posts/threads approved by Mods. Seeing how a lot of our members have exactly 0 posts this could filter that out?

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Not sure what functionality you are referring to with filtering on number of posts, murtada.

I think he is refering to the "New Member" title that people have until they make like 10 posts or something.

@murtada: The title is just fluff, it does nothing. New Members and Members alike can post anywhere (I believe).

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Btw in July we hit an all-time high of 67000+ unique visitors! \o/

Since I've been setting up a small BB myself, I realized a feature which I would really like to see around here. My largest annoyance when reading fora is that there are usually dozens of threads talking about the same exact thing. A 'related threads' plugin when you are starting a new thread would hopefully keep things a little more organized - especially if mods help keeping things tidy.

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What forum software did you use? DO you mean that it suggests related threads by analysing the title?