Forum upgrade ...

[Encephalon]

Thanks, Sean. We can all appreciate the captivity of website maintenance. It looks great.

[mYTHmAKER]

On first glance it looks good. Nice and clean

[sean]

Hey thanks everyone. It's my pleasure. I've been procrastinating this upgrade for sooo long, it's just been sitting on my to do list looking at me every day with a sterner and sterner expression. hah.

 

Pietro, everyone, yes please let me know any feedback. Anything. Comments about the look and feel, bugs, annoyances, things you like, feature requests, plugins you would like to see installed, etc, etc.

 

I am curious, what do think of the full width layout? Do you like it better than a fixed width centered version?

 

I am going to edit the first post with all feedback to keep this organized.

 

Sean

[sabretooth]

I thought it was okay as it was before.

Adding replies was easier as it was and the whole thing was easier on the eye's

Sorry.

 

sabretooth.

[Stigweard]

LOL just thought I'd add that I get a "special" version for my iPhone All the cool gizmos have been removed and I don't get the "View new comments" option

 

Re: the width. I would say that the centered column is definately much better IMO. Wouldn't be too hard to change

[thelerner]

No emoticons!!

 

Thanks for all your work Sean,

 

Still exploring. The old board had the promise of not only live chat but an audio chat function we never got to work. This week I want to see how live chat works and explore audio and even visual chat possibilities.

 

 

 

Michael

 

 

What the.. scratch that about the no emoticons, seems they've arrived

Edited January 19, 2010 by thelerner

[Pietro]

Pietro, everyone, yes please let me know any feedback. Anything. Comments about the look and feel, bugs, annoyances, things you like, feature requests, plugins you would like to see installed, etc, etc.

 

Thank you Sean, this is very appreciated.

Let me add one thing, since I am a developer too:

if you have requests... NOW is the moment to present it.

It is not just that the webmaster is working on this, it is also that in this job there are few burst of work. And then, after it, a lot of the details get fogotten. Which makes making small changes very long.

But the moment you are editing the code, and adding plugins, and so on, doing 1 or doing 10 takes little extra time.

Today I have no more time, but tomorrow I will give a full testing, with ideas, and suggestions.

 

I am curious, what do think of the full width layout? Do you like it better than a fixed width centered version?

I love the full width. Thumbs up!

[Stigweard]

Just to report, my profile tab in the top right is always open covering the "view new posts" link. Wasn't like this yesterday.

 

Also page loads are bugged at my end. Often timeout errors occur and I have try twice to get things done.

[Stigweard]

I am not getting full editing panel either. This has changed since yesterday as well.

 

And where did our cool TaoBums Logo go?

[Mal]

Just to report, my profile tab in the top right is always open covering the "view new posts" link. Wasn't like this yesterday.

Mine was good at fist login, I went in and used it and has now expanded to cover the search box and whatever is to the right of that.

 

-went in with a new window it's fine now-

 

Also page loads are bugged at my end. Often timeout errors occur and I have try twice to get things done.

I got that on the old version, also on sites unrelated to here. I though it was my net connection as it doesn't happen at work.

 

 

I loved our original banner, the new one quickly grew on me, but we would have to get new T shirts

 

Oh the insert image dialogue box doesn't seem to work, the pop up was way over past the left side of the screen.

 

Subscription icon missing

 

(browsing with IE )

Edited January 20, 2010 by Mal
updated info

[Trunk]

The voting-for-posts + and - buttons are not working yet.

 

That's probably the feature that'll be one of the most valuable to the community. It'll allow anyone to find highly rated posts and quickly bring themselves up to speed.

[DalTheJigsaw123]

This is great! What about adding a fast/quick reply to all the messages? We had something like that in the introduction section. Other then that, beautiful! Thanks for letting this site/forum be. It has changed my life.

[Taomeow]

The width it was before worked far better for me. My screen is wide as it is, and being a fast reader, I almost give myself lateral whiplash reading the new version if I go at the usual speed, or else I have to slow down considerably and then my eyes get tired.

[Stigweard]

The width it was before worked far better for me. My screen is wide as it is, and being a fast reader, I almost give myself lateral whiplash reading the new version if I go at the usual speed, or else I have to slow down considerably and then my eyes get tired.

Agreed. 17 inch monitor and I feel like I'm at the tennis

 

And my profile tab is still hanging over the view new posts line ... grrr

[Pietro]

Hi Sean, so happy you are back among us!

 

Here are a few things I found:

 

1) What version are we using? It looks like we are using a "3.0.5". Except that in the forum of IPS they don't speak about this. It is all 2.... or 3.1.... .

This might become an issue in future, as new things are rolled out. But usually they are rolled out for the latest version.

I wonder, because before suggesting to make changes in the code it is always better to see if someone have already done those changes in the official version. So you don't have to work on them again at every update. In this regard, why did we move to the 3.0 instead of the 3.1? If it's a matter of money I am sure among the whole community we can cover whatever expense they ask.

 

Which brings me to the next point:

2) We now have a status update, which I think it's extra cool. The reason for this is because soon people can use it to write what are their most recent focus in the practice. This can bring the community really together. But for this to happen the status needs to be echoed in every post. Like a line under the avatar. Would this be naturally possible, or do you need to code for that? There is already the code (which also includes the call to the DB) for the location, so probably just by duplicating that code, and changing the name of the info taken from the DB can work. But we go back here to the issue of the version. Is it worth to mess up with the code.

 

3) this is easy. We have an rss for the board. But right now it only shows 5 posts, and no name of the author of the post. Can this be changed to at least 100 posts (but would be better to have all the posts in the last 48 hours) and adding the name of the author of the post? This would permit to build services downstream with yahoo pipes that permit to someone to only follow posts by a certain author. I think this is definitly just something that can be changed in the settings.

 

4) less urgent, but potentially more groundbreaking. Tags. We have spoken abut tags many times before. We also had a tag plugin installed. That plugin did not work very well. I wonder if anyone used it to recover old posts. The first problem was that only the author could write tags, and the second was that the posts were echoed outside of the board. The fact that only the author could write tags was disruptive because each operson have very different views of the world, different understanding of how tags work, and different desire to fill them in. The result was too uneven to be used. The way broad folksonomy work (u can google it, but Sean knows what I am talking about) is that this uneavennes is balanced by having everybody tag the same material, and then taking the sum of the tags. This result in a very elegant way to categorise all the material. On the other side we know that you can't ask people to tag each single post (they are too many). So tags need to be thread centered. Also setting up a broad folksonomy (as explained before) system would be too complex. So it has to be a narrow folksonomy system, with a set of tags for each thread.

The way to move forward here would be the one done by stackoverflow. Although we are not going to set up such a complex system. How does it work there? Only people with at least x reputation can add tags. People with y>x reputation can add tags to a post from someone else. People with z>y>x reputation can invent new tags. So the result is few tags, used by everybody, and that effectively categorise the threads. This is not the same system as I was planning long time ago (I am sure you remember my blog posts). But it is something that would work. And considering how we have so many threads, but only few topics (kunlun, celibacy, review of teachers, yoga, taoism, religious taoism, ...), it would really help to let people find previous work on the same topic.

Ok, so this is the theory. The practice is that I have lookd through all the plugins, and there is none that let people add tags. (the only one that mentions tags is this one. But it is actually related to tags for the board, not for the single thread). SO I think this suggestion should be archived for now. It can only work if we program it from scratch. But if you want to do it, I am happy to help.

 

 

So my suggestion would be 4 things:

clarify the version, echo the status, extend the rss and in time program the tags (or we all pay someone to program them for us).

 

I do not comment on the look and feel of the board, because I am not good in that.

 

 

Cheers,

Pietro

[三江源]

Pietro, I was ing, about your triple post.

 

I'm not keen on the voting on posts and 'reputation' thing. I dislike that, at other forums I've seen, it's competetive and hierarchical and I dontlikeit.

[Pietro]

I'm not keen on the voting on posts and 'reputation' thing. I dislike that, at other forums I've seen, it's competetive and hierarchical and I dontlikeit.

Did I got it right that you don't like the voting

 

:P

 

There are indeed a few problems with the voting. The first problem is a general problem. When there is voting people tend to vote up their friends. And it tend to create some sort of group of people who rise to the top. But the positive side is that really it is a way to effectively sort out the post with content, from silly useless crap (and let's be honest we have our fair share of those here).

The way this is usually solved is by giving to few random people the possibility to vote. Only once in a while. And no possibility to store your voting possibility for later. This produces a system where people cannot vote their friends, and are effectively gently pushed toward judging effective quality.

 

The second problem is an onthological problem. What does it constitute a good post. Because in places like stackoverflow there is some real measurable result that can be obtained. Or not. Either the program does what it should or it doesn't. Here we have a problem. Most of us even disagree about what constitute reality, and even more do we disagree on what have to be done to achieve a "salvation". Whatever that means for you.

 

This makes the whole voting very shacky.

The solution would be to split the voting into:

is this grammatically correct (yes/no)? (are there many grammatical errors that makes it hard to understand)

is this meaningful (yes/no)? (does the author explain what he means clearly? Is it internally consistent)

Is this true (yes/no)? (does the author tell things that are true or false)

 

Essentially every post can be measured in terms of those three measures (there are probably others, but those cover a huge ground).

 

Then each person can just pick its threashold on each dimension.

 

Now the most confusing one will be the third. If something is grammatically incorrect, or internally inconsistent, that's easy to judge. But if you have a bunch of taoists and buddhists discussing about what is real, we are essentially having a pissing contests between two schools, where everybody pushes the posts of its own school. This is dangerous. But interestingly if someone was able to write a post that pleases both he would pop up. So it is still possible to be used.

 

In any case maybe we can just rename the voting as

is this grammatically correct and semantically meaningful?

or (more elegant)

 

"does this makes sense?"

[Trunk]

I'm not keen on the voting on posts and 'reputation' thing. I dislike that, at other forums I've seen, it's competetive and hierarchical and I dontlikeit.

I've never been in a forum w/ post voting & reps, so I'm just guessing...

 

The 'reputation' part of voting I find more problematic. Very little benefit. Plenty of downsides: the main that it corrupts the "flattened playing field", egalitarian conversation.

 

The 'post value' I find very desirable. It allows every/anybody in the community to vote on values of posts. To me, that translates directly into an archiving feature. Allows newbies to search for a topic then filter for just the positively rated posts in that topic. Cuts down impossibly endless reading and sorting to actually do-able quick quality reading.

 

I imagine queries like, "show me all of the positively rated posts about 'Sonnon'", or "Dr. Lin", or "Sungazing", or any of the other tons o' topics we've covered over the years. That seems really useful.

 

Maybe there's any easy way to simply hide the reputation feature?

[Mal]

youtube no longer embeds with square bracket {youtube}V6SVmMotBQw{/youtube}

 

is multiquote working or is it just different to the old board. Seem to work the same as reply directly to this post.

 

Intermittently the main page http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/index sometimes shows a shorter list of the personal practice forums. I think it is IE related as it can be a bit buggy (eg it goes a bit strange with popups, insert link box pops up off screen ) Chrome seems fine. I mention it mainly to see if anyone else is getting a similar error.

 

 

re feedback, my preview post is ok as it my page load speed, and I have a full emotional range yay

[Taomeow]

For the second or third day in a row, my logo in the upper left corner says "IP Board" instead of "The Tao Bums." Is it normal? is it still being worked on, or am I stuck with some earlier version for some reason while everyone has moved on?

[Mal]

After ~1 day of a swirly blue logo with "Discussions on the way" it reverted back to IP board.

[Mal]

Oh where did the "links" go

 

I use it all the time to look up trunk's site as I can never remember how to spell it correctly. Guess I should just stop being disorganized and bookmark it

[Mal]

youtube no longer embeds with square bracket {youtube}V6SVmMotBQw{/youtube}

 

Well it works if you use insert medial or do it like this

{media}

{/media}'>

[三江源]

Pietro - yes, people pushing the votes of their own school I 'm sure would be the case, and Trunk.. what you say sounds right in theory. But ime people vote for content that they agree with,and they praise posts that they are impressed by, not what is neccessarily correct/helpful/informative... newbies in particular are easily impressed, so we could end up with stuff coming up on searches which is just plain obvious and of course possibly misleading.

Pietro, the fact is we wont be voting on posts because they are grammatically correct or internally consistent.. I dont believe so anyhow: I believe voting will be subjective and partial unless laid down specifically to be otherwise. And that would involve some rules, which in themselves would be hierarchical.

[三江源]

I dont have a creative solution as to how to save the really helpful and wonderful material here into an easily searchable system. As I write that I also wonder if I believe that we need to pre - sift so that anyone searching doesnt have to do their own wading and discriminating.