EJRav3n Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 I just read your 3.2 blog entry and I realized you are spending a great deal of time and effort making content more visible to users. Your ideas are great, and I believe I some great suggestions to accomplish this goal. I hope you strongly consider my suggestions, they are of most value for the following reasons: 1. Allow users to find content that is of value to them. 2. Allows users to find interesting content that may be of value to them per forum. 3. Allows users to view and read what is "going on" on the forum in a much faster and effecient manner. I think it would be a good idea for IPB to move forward to web 2 0 information display standards and reorganized forum and index view. Forum View Suggestion Forum view: forum view would be composed of 3 major tabs, with the ability for users to generate their own custom tabs based on predefined parameters, topic title, tag, category, by user etc. These tabs would transition via Ajax upon a user clicking on each of the tabs. Each tab would reload everytime a user would click on each tab and not all tabs but the default would load upon user landing on forum view (to save queries) and to help with views count if ads are being served etc. Topic Pagination Suggestion In addition, each tab instead of having a ceiling per se of topics displayed, a user could scroll down to the bottom of the page to the last topic and either automatically have the next batch of the default number of threads load up based on admin's settings, for example, if the default setting per forum is to display 30 topics, admin would get to select if 30 more topics are automatically downloaded via AJAX or if user needs to click a button to display the next 30 topics. The example of this pagination transition is Facebook and Mashable, but please remember to allow a period of time before loading the next batch of topics, because neither Facebook or Mashable understand this flaw and do not allow enough time for users to be able to scroll to the bottom of their page to click on the footer links. This is the only drawback of this pagination style imo. Forum Tabs I suggest having 3 default tabs on forum view, these tabs would be: Topic View, Most Discussed and Most Popular. Topic View: this would be your default forum view. Most Discussed: this tab would displayed most discussed threads based on the number of replies. Most Popular: this tab would display the most rated content based on thread rating. On default user would see this on forum view: TAB 1 (highlighted and selected by default)| TAB 2 | TAB 3 | TAB 4 | etc.... 1. This is a thread. 2. This is second thread. 3. More discussions. When clicking on tab #2 he would get: TAB 1 | TAB 2. (Highlighted after clicked by user)| TAB 3 | TAB 4 | etc.... 1. Most discussed thread here. 2. Second most discussed thread here. 3. Third most discussed thread here and so on... TAB 1 | TAB 2 | TAB 3 (highlighted) | TAB 4 | etc.... 1. Most popular thead here based on topic rating. 2. Second most popular thread 3 Third most popular and so on Btw I wrote via my htc google phone, what a pain! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joelle Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 I suggest having 3 default tabs on forum view, these tabs would be: Topic View, Most Discussed and Most Popular. I like that. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EJRav3n Posted May 5, 2011 Author Share Posted May 5, 2011 While its freshed in mind, allow each tab to be configured in the acp and with the following settings: Cut off date for threads, this could yield to tabs like: POPULAR THREADS THIS WEEK, THIS MONTH ETC. Ability yo choose how many replies makes a thread to the popular threads maybe make it localized for each forum since this is now a global variable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rikki Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 You'll be pleased to know that in IP.Board 3.2, some of these ideas already exist in one form or another :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EJRav3n Posted May 5, 2011 Author Share Posted May 5, 2011 I won't be happy until I have tab forum view browsing, IPB feels very primitive without it. The current forum format is a dead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rsyvarth Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 I would disagree there. I feel like the current forum format is still very alive, it is the best way to carry out conversations via text. Tabs to sort posts by popularity and stuff seems like it would only be useful to a member who rarely visits a board. If you are active at all you only are going to look for the latest posts. I have never sorted posts by any other criteria besides when the last post was / when the topic was started. I personally would never use an AJAX tab sorting system on the forums... just seems useless. I would like to see an AJAX refresh on the topic view, topic listing, and probably the index page. I spend a good amount of my time refreshing the page on forums and it would be cool to just have it automatically update, but that could cause high server load. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EJRav3n Posted May 5, 2011 Author Share Posted May 5, 2011 That's the problem there, 90% of most forum visitors are first time visitors onlyy visit your forums once in while. You are thinking a regular user, I don't need to attract users like you, you would visit a forum regardless, I want to attract the users that are regular social media users and whom are used to more efficient conversations and easier to find featured content. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tanax Posted May 6, 2011 Share Posted May 6, 2011 In 3.2 there are "tabs" to sort the topics in a certain forums. "Replies" "Most viewed" "Rating" "Start date" "Latest reply" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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