I'm not a huge fan of the subforum layout, but the 'sort by date' classic Board view works for me.

The subthread lines work nicely, on this Board I would position my cursor over the point and the use the scroll-wheel to sort out which message it was actually a reply to - that worked fine on my laptop, but was considerably less effective on my phone (particularly as the smaller screen size of my phone meant that that issue came up more often). I've just checked out T-Board from my phone, and it's so much easier to see where replies are coming from.

Being able to expand longer posts while looking the at full thread is also a good thing, and makes it quicker to read a full conversation. Again, this benefit is really noticeable when browsing on my phone, as it cuts down on the amount of page loading I have to do.

The 100 character limit on post titles also seems like a good idea (that seems to be about twice our current limit), as it can occasionally be a little difficult to get a sensible post title to fit in here.

The only advantage I can think of that this current Board has is that, if I make a post while I'm signed in (and I tend to sign in - I've never had any problems doing so), I get an e-mail alert whenever someone replies to it. That doesn't seem to be the case with T-Board. It's not a huge thing, because I have to browse the threads anyway to see anything that isn't a direct reply to me, but I have found it convenient to be notified of any replies. Out of interest, is this something that could be implemented on T-Board (and how difficult would it be)?

Also, a very minor point, on the 'edit your profile' page there appears to be a typo in 'confirm'.

From just a quick glance I noticed that clicking on a specific post seems to open the entire thread... was that intentional, is it just not been noticed yet, or have I not looked far enough in to discover it might be just on that thread?

I'll address the concerns about the software running T-Board in a later post. For now, I would like to note current and possible future problems with the hosting I'm using, which has the side-benefit of being free.

1. T-Board currently routes its emails through my Gmail account. This is not a good thing, and can be solved by getting a dedicated PPCBoard@gmail.com or something like that.


2. Search is not working because Heroku (the guys handing out this hosting) want $$ for that.


3. The import of the RP Board is an older import that hit a really minor bug related to character encoding, which has since been fixed. This is why some characters (mostly Word-style quotes) didn't come through.


4. We might run out of database rows, especially if we import all the posts from the Board. Heroku gives out 10k database rows for free, and lets you have 10 million rows for $9/month. If we stay on Heroku, we'll have to pick up that cash somehow. A medium-badness solution is to run some not-too-annoying ads (maybe Google's) to try and offset the hosting bill if we start to acquire one.

It seems to be pretty much similar to this place, but a bit more confusing. But this is coming from an idiot who only looked at it a little, so I'm not sure how much my opinion matters.

In any case, I still prefer this Board, really.

I would be willing to pay some money for it. Dunno how we would organize it exactly. Perhaps a donation drive? Of course, that requires trusting someone to pay the bills, but that doesn't seem like a huge issue.

Before I start, I just want to say thanks for the concrit. Also, T-Board is a wonderful way of referring to my thing. Mind if I steal it?

With that, let's get to it:

• All recent activity

Right now, the "New" tag works like the highlighting on the Board. This breaks down a bit in Modern mode, since you only see the root post of a thread before going in. For that, I think I could throw up an "N new replies" feature. That might help.


• Finding where the replies are

In Modern mode, clicking on one of the links in a subforum takes you to the thread. When viewing a thread, "New", "Edited", etc. are still displayed. This might help with the reply discovery problem in Modern mode a bit.

The "edited" flag goes up on a post when someone makes an edit. If it shows up on the Modern mode link to a thread, it means the top post was edited.

"Newest thread" collects the thread that would be highest up the page in Classic mode. This behavior is probably not the Right Thing. I'm open to suggestions for what "Newest Thread" should actually do.


• Finding individual posts

I have nothing to add to your comment except that the search bar is a full-text search of the forum.


• Threads that wander off topic and the wrong forum problem

On T-board, "at least one post in thread is tagged with X" ↔ "post is in the X subforum". This means that the same thread can be in multiple subfora, which should alleviate the wandering thread problem. For example, someone posts something tagged "Mission Report" (or "New PPC writing" (who knows what the tag names will be)) and one arm of that thread turns into an RP. Then, someone can just put the "RP" tag somewhere in the diverging part of the thread. This causes the entire thread to appear in the "RPs" subforum and the "Mission Reports" subforum.

If Joe Newbie posts in the wrong subforum, which is equivalent to uses the tags inappropriately, the issue can be fixed in one of the replies simply by adding the correct tags. Of course, this only deals with under-tagging. The only way to deal with a over-tag is editing, either by a mod or the poster. If over-tagging/excessive cross posting becomes an issue, we should be able to implement a solution.


• Instant top-of-page notices

You have a very valid point. The header can easily be made to appear at the top of subfora.

We also have a solution for things that vary in importance from a "normal" thread, the sort timestamp. The sort timestamp is initially equal to the time a post was made, but it can be changed by a mod. Changing the sort timestamp causes a thread (or subthread) posted at time X to behave as if it had been posted at time Y for the purposes of sorting the Board. This feature allows for some interesting things to be done. For example, the survey thread can kept alive for a little longer by ratcheting its sort timestamp up by a few days. An alternative use for this is banishing threads to the past, where people are less likely to see them. This is actually one component of the "soft delete", which is meant to make a thread go away without actually deleting it. I'll expand on that in the mod powers section.
Posts with modified sort timestamps have that indicated when you specifically view the post, but not by the subject line with indicators for "Edited", "Locked", etc. This can easily be changed if we want that. For now, a sort timestamp change counts as an edit, which should serve as some indication that things have been happening.


• The arbitrary divisions problem

I agree that that could and up being a problem, and I don't have a proposed solution to that one. Cross-posting might help a little bit, but it won't actually fix things. The fact that classic mode is the default might help prevent the situation from developing, but I'm not at all certain of that.


• No thread bumping

There is no thread bumping. We might have some form of that with the "Newest Thread" in Modern mode as discussed above, but that's still undecided.


• Multi-threading

Yes.


• Logins

Yeah. Logins are required right now. I personally think anan posting is more trouble than it's worth (see spambots and nymshifters).


• HTML filtering

Yep. There's an HTML filter in place. It's a default-deny setup, so anything outside of the approved list is tossed out. Currently, the filter allows everything on your list except horizontal rules and color changes right now. Patching in horizontal rules and the <font> tag is a configuration change and is now on the to-do list. Allowing <span style="..."> is being considered.

The filter prevents bad HTML from spilling down the thread.
Currently, there's no HTML in titles, but I can change that to a super-restrictive filter that only allows bold and italics if that is desired.

There's also support for Markdown posting so people don't have to try and fiddle around with HTML.

• Mod powers

Currently, there's no "User X is a mod" indicators anywhere, which I think is a good thing.
Mods can, as you mentioned, create bans, which are publicly visible so people know what's going on.
Thread locking, along with thread poofing and sort timestamp tweaks, can be applied by a mod to any post, and they propagate to its replies. This means that subthreads can be locked.

Poofing a thread makes people accessing it have to go through a "Do you really want to read this?" prompt, the text of which is up for customization. That feature is supposed to be used for threads that are near "Get the Nameless Admin to nuke it" on the Nope scale.

Sort timestamp fiddling was discussed above.

Tossing these three things at a "bad, bad, bad" thread is, in my opinion, approximately equal to a reversible deletion.
Mods don't actually have the power to delete threads; the Nameless Admin has to preform database surgery to do that.

Anytime a mod does one of these things to a post or edits it, the post goes in as "Edited" with the author pointer of the new version changed from the user to the moderator. This feature is intended to prevent secret mod actions. The post accessible by clicking "Previous Version" from the edited post still retains a pointer to the original user's profile.


• Entire text

Yep. T-Board displays the entire text right now. I don't expect that to be a problem. Reddit et al. don't seem to die because of that.


• Long threads

No, I don't have much of anything for long threads right now. However, I noticed that the T-Board doesn't smush threads as much as the old Board does (here is a screenshot of the "Power Rangers RP" from the other board imported onto the T-Board). I like your Wikipedia-style arrow solution, which I never considered.


• Word limit

None.


• Tag choice

Those map to subforums, and so the set of tags is fixed, but amendable by the Nameless Admin.


• The header

That, along with the styling, are in the code for the Board. This means that the Nameless Admin is needed to push those changes.


• Hosting

That's actually an open question. I'm open to suggestions. The project is in Ruby on Rails, which opens up certain cloud hosting platforms, though that kills our internal search box.

I hope I addressed all of your points to your satisfaction. If you have any more questions, please feel free to reply.

First off - the important thing to remember here is that this is a prototype. We can change literally everything about it, if we want.

Probably the biggest feature we've added is editing - this is meant to be how one fixes a typo, broken link, etc. In fact, we'd considered making posts lock after a given time after posting. Edits should be in-place, without affecting ordering, newness, etc. The intent here is that if you have new ideas to bring up, they should be in a new post. The "edited" tag is there so people can't edit away inflamatory posts and then cry "OMG you're so mean!" (Hopefully, this won't be a concern - but we decided that safety was better than sorriness on this one.) Personally, I don't think that the edited flag should appear at all on the main views - it should only show up with the posts themselves. I'd be interested in hearing what you think?

One of the big themes that seems to come up in your post is how we define "newest" - which, fortunately, is completely up to us! You do raise a good point, that we've seen that bumping on the Classic Board causes trouble, while not bumping on a Modern Board is a pretty strong contradiction of what people expect. And you're very right that we want people to be interacting with essentially the same set of threads, regardless of view.

There may be a reachable middle ground here... We could have threads float - rather than a reply automatically bumping a thread to the top, it adds to the thread's buoyancy. As threads age, they become sinky, with their bouyancy counting for less and less. (This could be a very aggressive sinking policy - after, say, a week, they could be back in their time-ordered position.) It would be a change for both views, but it keeps interesting threads from falling off the front page for a while, while also enforcing a death time.

And on individual comments:

On flagging new posts: Unfortunately, if someone visits us from an IP that they've never visited from before, on a PC they've never used before, and doesn't log in, we have no way of knowing that they're them. This is simply one of the fundamental limitations of the internet. What we could do is, once people have logged in, park a cookie on their box that says "I believe that this person is the Sunflower Official", and then reference that to their last known visit time - this cookies wouldn't give them any permissions, of course, but it would give us cross-computer last-visited time once we know who that computer is. We could also set it up to work in multiple ways - if you don't have any of our cookies, it highlights the last 24 hours, and if you do have a cookie, it highlights everything since your last visit instead.

I don't recall what the status of the search bar is in the prototype - when it's done, of course, it will be a full text search, and do all the expected shiny things.

The dual setup does risk fun with offtopicness, but there are a few mitigation strategies: Firstly, tags on the Classic Board are forums on the Modern Board, so as long as people tag things appropriately, they should show up correctly. Secondly, and this one is a bit more hand-wavey at the moment, replies can be tagged as well. So, if a newbie thread turns into a badfic discussion, a badfic discussion post can be tagged with "badfic discussion", and the entire thread will also appear in the Badfic Discussion forum. (With appropriate tags to make it obvious that it exists in both places, user configurable, subject to design review and usability study, etc, etc.)

Note visibility is trivial to add - every main Board page should have the same header with constitution, wiki, etc, IMO. It's all of a single line of code to add the header, so we can change our minds on it for free.

I'm not sure that slow subfora is a huge problem - as long as they're all visible from the main Modern Board page, we have a single place that shows where all the new posts are, so new posts aren't going to get lost in the shuffle.

One of our thoughts with logging-in is that a lot of people (myself included!) don't log into the Board to post. We would like to keep this ability - set it up so that users can decide if they want non-logs to be able to post as them or not.

Regarding spambots, it'll be a lot easier to handle the content of spam than the sources, I suspect. Given that we have members with multiple computers, using proxies, not logging in, etc, detecting content is a lot easier than detecting a deliberately stealthy user. We definitely plan to create repeat-thread detection, which will happily snark at anyone trying to ypur the board.

*Dons the Security Fedora to address the point on HTML*

Allowed HTML tags will be whitelisted, not blacklisted - we will allow only tags that we know to be inoffensive, and disallow (probably by stripping them out) the rest. This is the only way to really protect against cross-site scripting: there are thousands of tricky ways to get javascript to run on a page, it's impossible to blacklist them all.

This is going to be a large set of tags - text formatting, links (minus certain vulnerable attributes like onClick), images, tables, etc, are all totally legit.

I suspect that we would want to switch over to BBCode-esque tags, rather than raw HTML - it's much harder to escape the post section with bbcode that we translate, on the backend, to HTML.

As far as mod powers are concerned, that's not really a question of what the prototype supports as much as it's a question of how much power we, the community, want to give our mods. Everything you've listed is totally doable.

Hosting is a very good question. You're right that we don't want it predicated on a single member, but at the same time, we will want someone relatively technically savvy in a Nameless Admin position paying the bills, keeping an eye on the database, etc. Sadly, this will almost definitely not be free. So, it's a big question. I am totally against a mandatory community fee, and really have no good ideas beyond that. Hosting is probably not going to be expensive - I'd be surprised if it was more than $20 a month.

Tags will have to be chose-from-a-set to keep the forums under control - we could possibly have two sets of tags, a canonical set that map to subfora and an enter-your-own set that don't? Even that seems complicated. I dunno.

Your analogy implies that there are new facts that came up. What are these facts (aside from the fact that this board is perfectly hackable, that is)?

Switching to a new forum would not remove all kittens from the world, and even if you said it would there would be no proof of that statement, so your analogy is invalid. You also completely skipped over Data saying that the majority is in fact in favor of moving.

... that's the first time I've seen anyone do that. ;) I've seen people mess up images and links, sometimes to the point of blocking the Post Reply button from view, and of course throwing an accidental bold or italic down the rest of the Board - but I've never seen anyone work a popup in.

hS

This may not be the case any more, but at one time, yourwebapps boards actually auto-disappeared entirely after they'd been activityless for long enough.

hS

In retrospect, I shouldn't have made the comment about it working on mobile, because I don't have a phone, I have a Kindle Touch.

Also, I believe there was this section in FAQ: The Board.

"Hey, why do we keep to the Board still? It's all old and topics drop off! Can't we go someplace else?

Simple answer: No.

More complete answer, which has been stolen from Huinesoron's latest reply to this question on the Board:

This is where everything links to, including many pages we can't edit.
When we have our occasional heated debates, it's actually better that they drop into said abyss.
For the PPC, it's better to have a Board that's constantly moving than one where topics get pushed back to the top when commented on, since it means new topics don't get lost, old ones don't get dragged out by a couple of people, and any particularly interesting ones can be restarted after it falls off the front page.
The simple layout is i) traditional, and ii) easy on the eye.
People keep coming back after years of absence, and they wouldn't be able to find us.
We're just too stubborn to give up on this place, especially given the weight of tradition behind it now.
Updated answer: It's Complicated.

The above answer is somewhat outdated, since at this point Oddlots has dropped off the face of the Earth, the community has swollen to a size that makes the Board difficult to use at times, and we've somewhat outgrown the current Board.

However, many of the previous items from the hS answer still apply (bump mode did not work out too well).

To this end, Techno-Dann is currently working on a custom built new board in an attempt to resolve the current problems."

If it would work pretty much the same, why change it?

I'm not techsavvy enough to keep this up, so I'll leave and let hS do the talking.

What I was under the impression of is that the categories would be more "badfic" "new mission" "new people" "EVERYTHING ELSE", since the badfic and new people threads seem to be what people are concerned about when they talk about stuff getting nudged off. There's no reason to go "I will only hang out here" if the only place where actual hanging-outing is done is in the one subforum.

(deeeeerp) Also, I would like to nudge you gently towards Dann's post. You'd have the option of viewing the Board as-is. Presumably there'd also be an option to not have thread-bump.

The Board is, as EF has demonstrated, capable of breaking down in potentially dangerous ways. It also has other failure modes - for example, trolling as someone else, which we've seen happen.

And yes, I can be reasonably sure that a forum I work on would not be the Reliant Robin of websites - I work for, and have learned a ton from, a company with a bit of experience in the matter.

Wasn't the Fiesta notable for being an incredibly terrible car, though? I mean, my uncle's a mechanic and some of his worst horror stories come from Fords.