EBrown Posted January 3, 2012 Share Posted January 3, 2012 I really would like to see IPS step it up and do better. Xenforo software looks very impressive for only a year in development, I think it is time to listen more to the feedback section more than ever to keep current customers. Experience and design are two different things, you could be the most professional programmer in the world and not know a thing about designing something well. I'm not saying that this is the case for IPS, but it appears that Xenforo is taking larger steps than IPS at the moment. The skin lost many of its features, even though it is much more elegant the most important factor is easy to use. Something doesn't have to be shiny for it to work well, it needs to be flexible and friendly for any type of audience. I believe that firstly hooks and application support to help contribute more to 3rd party things should be done. Providing an index of all the functions, organizing it well so developers can follow the architecture of it, and many other steps to make it easier to use. What I mean by this is, you should provide this in the forum software itself. People may wonder why bulk it up more, well it could be a separate application if people feel that way. There should be a search function and things of that nature, even grouping would be great. The custom profile fields in IP.Board can have some significant improvements done to them that I believe would make IP.Board that much better. A.) Everything can be edited, there isn't any mandatory profile fields required except display name, username, password, and email. Unless they are otherwise specified by the custom profile fields section. B.) Make it more flexible by allowing a setting to have the users add their own custom profile fields. This can be enabled or disabled based on the administrator's decision on what they prefer. C.) Add more depth to the fields, allow private fields and things like that (could be based on friends only/etc). Other things could be done such as adding back wanted things users suggest that were removed from the old skin and many other things. I didn't spend too long on this since I wasn't sure if it would be read by IPS or not. :tongue: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Charles Posted January 4, 2012 Management Share Posted January 4, 2012 XF is a very different product than ours. We provide a full community platform with a variety of feature sets. While our software certainly support hooks and mods, our clients tend to prefer we provide the functionality in the default software. If you look at our interfaces they are just as clean and efficient but, unlike XF, we have a large feature set and capabilities we offer our clients. IPS will be 10 years old next month and we use that experience to combine a fully-featured community platform in a user-friendly package. We have thousands of clients providing us with feedback every day that we use to mold our offerings. From small, hobby sites to large enterprise clients they all have varying views. No one can argue that IPS ignores feedback - it is has always been the core of what we do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBrown Posted January 4, 2012 Author Share Posted January 4, 2012 Alright thanks for clearing that up. I do believe IPS is excellent at what they do, but I see loads of room for improvement still. I see things being added not as important, only reason why I was suggesting what I did above. I do love the new archive system though, that is something I look forward to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyrem Posted January 4, 2012 Share Posted January 4, 2012 Providing an index of all the functions, organizing it well so developers can follow the architecture of it, and many other steps to make it easier to use. Just imagine me clicking 'like this' 500 times on this sentence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Posted January 4, 2012 Share Posted January 4, 2012 I believe that firstly hooks and application support to help contribute more to 3rd party things should be done. Providing an index of all the functions, organizing it well so developers can follow the architecture of it, and many other steps to make it easier to use. What I mean by this is, you should provide this in the forum software itself. People may wonder why bulk it up more, well it could be a separate application if people feel that way. There should be a search function and things of that nature, even grouping would be great. All our code is documented with phpDoc :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBrown Posted January 4, 2012 Author Share Posted January 4, 2012 Oh, thank you. :) I'll take a look at it now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBrown Posted January 5, 2012 Author Share Posted January 5, 2012 I believe BBCode and Emoticons should work in member status', also there should be a rebuild function so that if they ever change we can rebuild the data just like post content. I've been using a 3rd party hook and feel that it should just be put into IP.Board itself, had to wipe all my status' due to it.Yeah, I know this is a suggestion but it feels like it is something that is important enough to consider a bug in some people's eyes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Posted January 5, 2012 Share Posted January 5, 2012 [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif][size=4]Yeah, I know this is a suggestion but it feels like it is something that is important enough to consider a bug in some people's eyes.[/size][/font][/color] It's not, that's incredibly minor, and something that most sites probably have no need for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBrown Posted January 5, 2012 Author Share Posted January 5, 2012 I could say the same thing about emoticons in signatures, it is actually less used for that type of thing. I have where emoticons parse with often used smiley faces such as " :smile:", " :tongue:", etc. So again, what is your point? >_> Focus more on community aspects, it is a community forum after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted January 9, 2012 Share Posted January 9, 2012 I think it's extremely important to remember that all of our clients have differing viewpoints on what is pretty and what is ugly, what is "bloat" and what is "necessary functionality", what should be added next and what should be left to mods. It is an incredibly difficult task to weigh up everything that everyone wants and then decide what we should do with that feedback. We can't possibly do everything ever suggested, so we do our best to gauge logical, valid, thoughtful feedback and determine how it fits in with our software offerings, how it stacks up to the feedback received from the rest of our clients, and finally how (or if) to act on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBrown Posted January 14, 2012 Author Share Posted January 14, 2012 Well that is extremely true, but consistency is something that is important too. Smiley faces working in most areas and not working in other areas just seems bluntly inconsistent. Instead of doing that, you could add where you can disable them in certain areas in the settings. I have never found a use in the signatures, but I am aware that it has a usage such as if I am putting: Regards, Elliott Brown :smile: But the same goes for status updates, it is something that is important to my board and I'm sure many feel it would be better to have than to have in a 3rd party add-on. Another random idea I thought of was add Have Read functionality to search results via View New Content. Sorry for all the ideas, hopefully you guys like one of them. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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