Bay Six Software

[Brent]

I'm sure most of you have used many different forum softwares over the years, and have found each has its strong points and its weak points. I'm interested in the parts of forums that sometimes (or oftentimes) leave you feeling frustrated or insulted. I want SapientBoard to be able to avoid such pitfalls, giving the user as positive an experience as possible.

One thing I can come up with is when admins or mods sticky a lot of topics in the same forum. I believe this can lead to "sticky blindness" where the user just scrolls right past the sticky posts to get to the new posts. Any new posts to a sticky topic could get ignored by the person best qualified to answer them.

I believe the solution to this problem is to hide the read sticky topics--only showing them when a link is clicked. The unread topics will be made more prominent by eliminating some clutter and prevent the users from developing bad habits.

What do you think?

[STPendl]

[Brent]

If I understand you correctly, I wouldn't be so quick to hide normal topics. On a very active forum, topics could become hidden quickly. New members who aren't familiar with the forum, might mistakenly believe their unanswered post has been deleted.

[Alyce]

Okay, this is a general observation, not tied to what you've done in SB...

I like an easy way to view recent posts. The LB board does not give you the ability to display only unread posts, or more than 10 recent posts.

I dislike boards that have a karma feature.

I like boards that allow you to upload an image. It's a pain to upload images to a distant site, then post a link. (Images limited to small file size are fine.)

Board admins should be able to allow/disallow things like member edits and deletions of their own posts.

I'm sure I could list dozens more

[STPendl]

[STPendl]

[STPendl]

[Alyce]

[STPendl]

[Brent]

Another thing is when people do unnecessary quoting when replying. Not only do these clog the database and use more bandwidth, but they too often make posts harder to read.

I think a solution to this is to have the software remember to which post you are replying and automatically generate a link to that post. Of course I wouldn't eliminate the quote feature, because some people can have a lot of questions or opinions that would best be handled like a conversation in a reply.

The most popular BB packages don't do this sort of thing. I can see that there might be issues like what to do if the replied to post gets deleted or split from the topic and moved to a place most users can't access.

I reckon the reasonable thing to do when deleting a post is to check the other posts in that thread and zero out the reply backward reference and leave it at that. But it may make a difference who deleted the post. The aforementioned solution is appropriate if a moderator deleted the post, but not so clear if the poster deleted it.

Maybe then the user should not be allowed to delete posts that have been replied to directly. But who knows if the reply was direct or if the person replying just clicked the first reply button he/she saw.

I know some of you feel that only admins and mods should be able to delete posts. However, do you also disallow editing? The poster could edit the post and replace it with, "Please delete." Or he/she could reply to the thread asking a mid to delete the offending post, then the mod has to delete two posts.

I think the best solution for this problem is to allow (registered) users to delete their posts (or even whole topics with replies) in a short timespan after the post is submitted and after that disallow it. This could also apply to user edits as well.

[STPendl]

[Alyce]