You mean an email notification? If there's a notification center inside the forum I don't know about it. I'm talking about like for PM's that show up at the top - somewhere I can go to see everything relevant to me. Does that exist?

This is social media. These forums happen to pre-date myspace, friendster, facebook, and twitter, but it is a social media site. So, look to what today's successful social media sites are doing and cherry-pick popular commonalities.

Off the top of my head, I think you are being hurt by lack of:

1. mobile. Personally, I don't care, but trust me, fewer and fewer people are sitting at a computer with a big monitor and a keyboard, and that trend is not going to reverse
2. the ability to @user tag a user.
3. Like or up/down buttons. Sure, getting rid of extraneous "+1" posts is nice, but the real benefit comes from being able to filter on this data once you start accumulating it. Want to look at the most popular posts? Filter out troll posts. See users who have the best up:total post ratio or down:total post ratio. Etc. You can learn a lot from this data if only you had it.
4. facebook/twitter integration. Give the ability for someone to one-button click a thread or post onto his wall or feed, and all of a sudden you've got a potential of thousands of non-st users who are coming to your site to view the thread, register, and then respond.
5. threaded responses. so many threads get derailed, because you can't respond to a post and have that response be a separate thread under that post. Facebook allows just a single level of response threading, but just that one level depth would go a long way for you.
6. embedded youtube videos (should be easy)
7. auto hyperlinking of urls (should be easy)

"You mean an email notification?"

yes

"If there's a notification center inside the forum I don't know about it."

that we don't do. as of now. i'll look around for examples of that.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Should have been more clear. A notification center inside the forum would be awesome. I don't like getting my inbox filled up with notification-like email especially for a site that I visit regularly anyway. Something like we have for PM's would be perfect if it had a range of different things that you could be notified about depending on your preferences!

As long as their is an option to ignore any post in which any derivation of the phrase "I am putting you on ignore." is used!

I see that type of playground bullshit on forums that have ignore buttons.

+1. Imagine all the extra views the site will get while people are sat on the crapper

Yeah, agreed. Put someone on ignore if you want but just do it and don't say anything about it.

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Chicago Cubs - 2016 WORLD SERIES Champions!!!!

"If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams

I'm putting you on ignore!

Auto watched threads, love this on other forums. If you reply it automatically goes into your watched list. For work stuff this makes my mornings quite simply. Click on the forums and watched threads it goes right to all the ones I was involved in the day before to make sure if i need to follow up I get those first.

Also maybe a way to quote or multi quote. The auto multi quote can get really annoying and seems to cause lots of people to screw up the quoting. If you can just reply with a quote to the most recently one or quote the chain if needed makes it easier and I know other forums have this.

vbulletin does both of these, I'm sure you have contacts that use it but if you want to speak to someone at a massive forum that uses it let me know I can get you some contact info. No clue how porting over to something like that would be handled.

Search would be cleaner if it gave you the single thread not the individual posts. I was trying to find something regarding a model of paddles the other day, pages and pages and pages of the "month swim" threads had to be scrolled through to find anything. I Was looking for something in the classifieds and same thing where several pages of results were the same year old classified ad showing you every single post.


In regards to ignore, I have never used it and never plan to, so I won't say don't give other people a feature that they want. But I think with the limited moderation here (good) it can be worse then sites who actually moderate a lot. Seems counter intuitive but it isn't. On sites that moderate a lot the trolls don't last long, if you ignore someone they are usually gone in short order. Since moderation here is limited you might get someone who is around for a while, you ignore them then 6 months later they are still here and actually contributing but you are missing it.

You have chosen to ignore the user "Kevin in MD".

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Chicago Cubs - 2016 WORLD SERIES Champions!!!!

"If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams

Agreed. It makes searching very difficult. Also would it be possible for searching to NOT search people's signatures?

+1

In no particular order:
- mobile version
- improved search
- auto hyperlinking

Thanks for taking the time.

+1 to #3 up above. Sometimes (many times) I just want to "Like" a comment without having to create a reply. #4 would also be awesome. I think also having a mobile-specific forum site would be great.

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http://dontletitdefeatyou.blogspot.com

I don't know if wholesale change is included under "upgrade," but the SoylentNews/slashcode - most famous for use on slashdot.org - is second-to-none. And free.

Ads - no problem.
Mobile - no problem.

It also might help your staff in moderation. It allows for members of "good standing" to flag abusive or inappropriate posts through the use of "moderator points."

Just a thought. As a slashdot contributor, I find it a phenomenal forum interface.

Isn't it easier to migrate to something fully featured like XenForo? You get basically everything people are asking for plus easy integration with the major social media platforms.

Dont change the colors. I like this format.

I also would like to have seaech function turn up a single thread, not every response.

hide threads you want to ignore...

More articles from you Dan!

Without blowing smoke up your ass, you are one of the gems of the tri world. Not only are you the genesis point for what we almost all swim in and ride on, you have a long and varied participation in the sport/industry. You've already forgotten more about tri that virtually all of us will ever know. You are a fountain of knowledge and getting more of that written down so we can voraciously devour it, is a must.

None of us are getting any younger. I believe it's your moral responsibility to spread your wealth of knowledge as much as possible before any of us fall off our perches. It doesn't hurt that I pearticularly like your writing style.

so dude, hurry up and get writing.

(and a like button and a mobile version so I can read ST while I cycle commute to and from work. I'd much rather read ST than listen to Britney Spears on my daily commute).

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

+ X.

This was my top pick and it was the second post. I suppose I should count the number of times people have endorsed this idea, but I am too lazy to scroll through the rest of the responses.

My 2 cents. Please don't change the graphics much. I like the current crisp presentation. Contrast - every new version of a Microsoft product that comes out looking fuzzier and cuter with every edition (that also hides features I used to be able to use easily under some obscure new menu structure). Avoid gimmicky graphics like gradient fills behind text, unnecessary white space around menu headings that only serve to make menu headings larger and reduce the usable - *readable* - portion of the screen. There are some new program iterations out there that take my entire computer screen and convert the window I can actually type into to a slim 1-2 inches at the bottom --> please don't do that. Oh, and scroll-over pop-ups - I friggin' hate those. (I can read the menu just fine, I don't need flashing text to appear that reiterates what the darn menu heading says or worse, covers up something else I may have been trying to look at.)

Love what you do here, keep it up!

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To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

^This. Ability to search and only have the thread show up instead of all the posts within that thread.

Also would like the ability to search within a thread. There are some threads (eg the speedconcept thread) that have tons of information in it but have 50+ pages in it. Instead of having to go page by page to find the information, you could search the whole thread and it takes you right to the post.

I frequent other forums that have both of these abilities.

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blog

how would you like search organized? at the bottom of every thread are:

previous thread, watch thread, print thread, view threaded, back to forum. no reason why we couldn't put search thread on that list, on the bar at the end of every thread. and we could, i imagine, put that bar at the top of every thread as well. right now we have watch thread and print thread at the top of every thread. who prints the thread? maybe search thread is a better option up there.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

great suggestions. thanks. we're going to look into them all. one thing, on threaded responses:


we do have the ability to either view as "flat" or as threaded. is there a specific way you'd like the heirarchy of responses displayed?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Definitely youtube embed

and the ability to post a photo directly into the post instead of having to use tinypic, etc.