Fluid view for Forum+Clubs using the Clubs widget

[WebCMS]

I have a single forum and a few clubs. When I go to Display Settings of the forum, the "Enable Combined Fluid View?" switch is disabled with a warning -

Combined fluid view cannot be enabled as this forum does not have any sub-forums

Multiple forums will fragment discussions and lower forum activity negatively. I used clubs to segment popular topics but would like to offer an option to users to consolidate the forum/clubs content in a Fluid view. I guess it would be ideal to consider the Clubs as sub-forums and allow to enable Fluid View of the single forum in conjunction with Clubs. The Clubs widget (on the Forum page) could be reused/repurposed with checkboxes prefixed before each club name and Select-All checkbox to filter the Fluid view along with the single forum (to save space in the widget sidebar). It is like "View the forum along with these optional Clubs".

This is just extending the functionality across topics of forum/clubs instead of enabling Fluid view for subforums only. After all, Clubs are forums and the club content is just topics (similar to forum topics) - at least the URL structures of forums, clubs and their topics are very similar.

Clubs will allow us to group related topics in one place like Food, Wine, Entertainment, Travel, Music, Polls, Politics, etc. Consolidating forum and club topics in a Fluid view will resolve the lowered forum activity due to fragmentation of discussion topics across various clubs.

Edited October 24, 2023 by WebCMS

[WebCMS]

What are the differences between Forums and Clubs?

I guess if both the Forum data and Club data are stored in the same table, the above suggestion should be feasible to consolidate their topics in Fluid view because their URL structures are similar. Otherwise, it is understandable.

Please confirm if I could wait for this feature implementation or go with subforums instead... I thought Clubs sounded more modern, interesting and amusing for members to be a part of them and Clubs can have sub-clubs/subforums too. But the topic fragmentation using clubs without the  option to choose Fluid view is going kill the site with lowered activity.

Edited October 24, 2023 by WebCMS

[Marc Stridgen]

There seems to be some real confusion over combined fluid view there. You cannot have the clubs show under it, as they are not under that forum, they are in the club. These are 2 different areas of your site. You can use fluid view on the site as a whole, which may be what you are looking for. That would be done from Community->Forums->Settings, and not from under an individual forum.

From what you are describing, if you are only using forums in clubs, and for no other reason than categorisation, I would be using forums and subforums.

 

[Joel R]

Hi @WebCMS I know your question is related to fluid view, but to explain the broader difference of forums vs clubs vs the main community, clubs are meant to structurally exist at a level such that club forums are not the same as the main community's forums.  It can be a matter of semantics to a degree (aren't they all stored in the database in the same way?), but IPS did not design club forums to be equivalent to regular forums.  

Main Community: 

- Forums

- Gallery

- Downloads

- Clubs

--- Club Forums

 

There can be value to using club forums versus forums (micro communities of discussions, cohorts of users taking repetitive classes, niche areas that you intentionally don't want attached to your main forums). But if your only purpose is to divide your forums into subforums, then regular forums is probably the way to go.  

I liked your comment about the language around forums though.  Clubs and Social Groups do certainly sound more intriguing and modern and compelling than Forums (Forums are like the Blackberry brand of online discussions at this point 😆.) One creative idea is to rename your language strings or forum board names to refer to Discussion Clubs, which will give you both the language and the navigation that you want. 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Joel R

[WebCMS]

2 hours ago, Joel R said:

Hi @WebCMS I know your question is related to fluid view, but to explain the broader difference of forums vs clubs vs the main community, clubs are meant to structurally exist at a level such that club forums are not the same as the main community's forums.  It can be a matter of semantics to a degree (aren't they all stored in the database in the same way?), but IPS did not design club forums to be equivalent to regular forums.  

Main Community: 

- Forums

- Gallery

- Downloads

- Clubs

--- Club Forums

 

There can be value to using club forums versus forums (micro communities of discussions, cohorts of users taking repetitive classes, niche areas that you intentionally don't want attached to your main forums). But if your only purpose is to divide your forums into subforums, then regular forums is probably the way to go.  

I liked your comment about the language around forums though.  Clubs and Social Groups do certainly sound more intriguing and modern and compelling than Forums (Forums are like the Blackberry brand of online discussions at this point 😆.) One creative idea is to rename your language strings or forum board names to refer to Discussion Clubs, which will give you both the language and the navigation that you want. 

 

Hi @Joel R currently, we are able to consolidate forum and club forums into a single view already (as also confirmed by @FanClub Mike and I can show you Fluid view of forums+club forums on my site too) but here are some minor issues -

• View buttons are not rendered for Guest users
• Fluid view button does not render for logged in users who selected Table view before
• Once we click the Table view button, the Fluid view button is gone for some reason
• Forum Filters widget with filter checkbox does not render when rendering Fluid view.

So forums and club forums were designed to be consolidated but for the above a minor issues.

 

Why would anyone use club-forums if they are going to fragment discussions and lower the site activity with no way to consolidate their topics? IC's documentation states multiple forums would be detrimental to site activity. I've not seen any IC forum using clubs so far including this site (menu item exists but no clubs exist even for a demo but for a reason). In other words, clubs are not being useful due to the above minor issues. If their data is stored in the same table, what would happen if we consolidate their topics (which is already done) with a Forums Filter widget?

[Marc Stridgen]

Please provide an example user, the name of the club that isnt showing, and step by step how to reproduce this, as it sounds like you are referring to a bug whereby its showing sometimes and not others.

35 minutes ago, WebCMS said:

IC's documentation states multiple forums would be detrimental to site activity.

I would be interested to know where you read this, so I can clarify

[WebCMS]

On 10/25/2023 at 10:03 PM, Joel R said:

I liked your comment about the language around forums though.  Clubs and Social Groups do certainly sound more intriguing and modern and compelling than Forums (Forums are like the Blackberry brand of online discussions at this point 😆.) One creative idea is to rename your language strings or forum board names to refer to Discussion Clubs, which will give you both the language and the navigation that you want. 

Thanks, much!