I appreciate all the thought and hard work that is going into the site. That said, it would be nice to have a bit of peace and quiet for a while. I am finding the constant change a struggle. I am sure I will get used to all the new functionality and I dare say I might find that it improves my experience here. In the past though, I have stopped using sites that have gone into a ‘permanent revolution,’ as it just started to feel like work every time I logged on and had ceased to serve the function I most require, which is five minutes relaxed and peaceful meandering.
I don’t understand why this is becoming an issue. I actually like the change because it gives the place a more “traditional” feel, as far as forums go. Though this does lead me to believe that most SH users don’t also frequent 2-3 other forums.
There won’t be much changing for a while. I agree @Harlequin, I don’t think most folks here are used to what forums truly are.
If this forum is headed toward being a full featured forum instead of the lightweight version we’ve had previously, I think just moving things to phBB would work better than trying to massage Vanilla into phBB functionality.
I’m doing what I can with what I have. If it were up to me, the whole site would be on ProBoards but then we would lose everything that is on here. It still might happen one day.
If you are looking to move from Vanilla to a more traditional type of forum (ProBoards or not) there are many with conversion scripts out there. I would work from the angle of which ones have conversion scripts.
I actually kind of like Vanilla, I think it does what Drupal does and abandons the traditional forum which in many ways is an outdated construct in the modern web world. Granted Drupal is not just a forum, merely their forum interface behaves like that, unless you tie in a third party solution.
A tip, if you don’t feel like diving through each category on the home page just clicking discussions brings you all new and latest from what I see. If it didn’t I would say you need to add a view for that.
Ken
‘I’m doing what I can with what I have’ - Chris is working with a very limited dashboard (control) - most of it being non functional; ie you see what is apparently a function, apply it, and then find it doesn’t work. What most people don’t know is that Snuffhouse was just an exercise in site building by the original creator - snuff was just one of his interests that he decided to use as the theme and it was intended to be shut down after three months. It took off though, and by that quirk of fate the Snuffhouse community was born. Version two, as I understand it, was a further exercise. A new owner walks into a kind of virtual building site, where the plumbing has not been installed. But, by default, that gives us a very simple format which I’m sure lots of us like. I loved the changes that were made a few days ago, but anything more than those would possibly be extraneous to what the majority of users want, given there is probably a lot of first generation web users - too much choice can obscure the content sometimes.
Bad thing.
I’d just like to say that one of the great appeals of Snuffhouse is its extreme simplicity. It’s easy to stay “in the loop” with what’s going on without having to check lots of things. Having said, other ways to search for stuff, like tags, are always helpful. Thanks for everything. I really like this place.
I will gladly change it back to the way it was. If that happens though the reviews section will be gone, probably merged in to the snuff types category. Doesn’t seem like anyone uses it anyways. I will have to delete the reviews to keep the banners up top – gotta keep the lights on.
I say give the review section time. I think it will be used, or at least used in a way to figure out how it needs to evolve down the road.
Ken
Ok, I have a dialogue going with the folks at Vanilla to see why the Recent Discussions and such doesn’t work. We shall see what they say.
When I go to just discussions from the top menu it works, also recent discussions seems to work for me. I find the first anniversary badge I just got interesting since I have been here longer than a year. Also I am still trying to figure out how the “Best of” area is supposed to work.
If it matters I am currently looking at this through Firefox on Winblows XP SP3.
I can test through pretty much anything else you can think of except Mac and IOS at this moment.
Ken
I like the badges - the last thing I was awarded was for swimming 100 yards when I was 7, so I feel like I have amounted to something at last:)
I think the changes you made were cool if you can get them working.
@devilock76 the discussions tab only shows the new posts in the General category, not all categories
Yeah I just got a 500 comments badge. My profile says I have 5 badges but those are the only two I know about, not sure where to see the rest as they are not showing in my notifications view. It also says I have 37 points. So what is the end result of these points or are they just for novelty purposes.
Ken
@devilock76 the discussions tab only shows the new posts in the General category, not all categories
I did not realize that, well oops and oops x2…
Ken
They are probably just part of the badge add on, novelty value I suppose. I like baubles anyway.
I just found how to see the other badges. Which in my case were for earlier comment counts reached. In the my profile view it shows as an iconified list sidebar. Also discovered the badge notifications were emailing me. Had to turn that off.
Ken
If a general consensus think that the badges are silly or overbearing, say so and they will disappear.
I maybe, just maybe might have made the “Recent Discussions” tab operational, it now gives you recent discussions for all of the categories. Thoughts?
What would everyone prefer: Open up snuffhouse.org and it gives you categories or it gives you a run down of categories with the discussions under them like it does if you hit “recent discussions”?