Welcome to Our new Discussion Forums

edited November 2007 in General Discussion
Remember the days of Webbbs? When things were simple, clean and elegant?

Well sorry, I don't have hierarchal discussions, but I do have new "Web 2.0" discussion software installed, hope you like it. I did my best to import the old discussions and users without messing things up too much.

As you're likely aware, the old forums were buggy because of the way I tried to wed them with a rather over-complex CMS system. A pain in the ass to maintain, and they were being inundated with spammers. I deleted somewhere around 4800 superfluous users. Bah. Plus the "forgot my password" dealie was broken and geez, I totally apologize for taking so long to do anything about it.

I'm going to keep an eye out these next couple weeks to see if the spammers try to return. If I have to I'll add captchas or invite only for these boards.

OK, with that out of the way how do these boards work? A quick Q & A.

Q. How do I login?
A. There's a link top right side of this page. Old logins have been transferred over. If you forgot your password, click the "Forgot your password?" link. An email will be sent to reset your password.

Q. Where are the Forums?
A. Forums are not so rigid with Vanilla. "Categories" are analogous to forums. Click that tab at the top to see them.

Q. I don't want to see all the WoW categories in the Discussion tab.
A. EZ 3 step process:

1. Click on the Categories tab.
2. Click on the "Block category" at the bottom of each Category that you don't want to see.
3. There is no step 3.

Q. That quoting thing looks nice. How to do it? What about links etc?
A. I've installed a BBCode extension. You can add bold, block quoting, links to images etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
I've also installed a Markdown extension, if you prefer to format your posts that way. Info here:
http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/concepts/

For security purposes, HTML formatting is not allowed.

Ask any other questions, I'll add them here!

I know this might be a big uncomfortable change for some people, but I hope after using this for a bit you'll see that this forum software is much cleaner and makes it easy to keep up with discussions.

Cheers!

-- FC

Hmm, I can edit this? -Eye
Not any more! Thanks! - Chief

Comments

  • Soo... what "Web 2.0" functions does this have? I'm interested in information collecting stuff, like ways of generating lists of people's Gamer Tags, Steam IDs, WoW names (shudder), etc. I'm picturing an opt-in master list of who plays what, with links to their online profiles, with their profile info also embedded into their user profile here.
  • Well, if you click the "Account" tab you can see at the bottom you can add customized fields.

    So if we standardized on a collection of fields it wouldn't be hard to whip up a small extension that slurped that up.

    A great idea!

    Xbox
    Wii
    SteamID
    WoW Realm/Name

    What else?
  • edited November 2007
    I'm not sure what other folks think about this, but I like having a user profile summary attached to their posts directly. Do the display options allow anything like that?

    For instance, I have added as a custom field to my profile that I am in fact classified as a "Meat Popsicle", and this information is only displayed if someone clicks on my name, rather than being open broadcast.
  • At Infininight's request, I have also installed Markdown support.

    sweet

    My Header

    • list one
    • list two

    Quote me
    right here

    Let's try:

    1. Another list thingy
    2. List thingy 2
  • edited November 2007
    I'm not sure what other folks think about this, but I like having a user profile summary attached to their posts directly. Do the display options allow anything like that?

    I spent too much time ensuring that the Everlasting Coke Thread wouldn't die to look to deeply into theming and doing stuff like that. :)

    But I'm sure if it can't be handled by a custom Theme or Style, some sort of simple Extension could be made.

    http://lussumo.com/addons/index.php
  • Markdown woot!

  • Hey, looks like you figured out how to get an icon. :)

    I just added a plugin that allows people to upload icons and account pictures to this site to make things easy-peasy
  • edited November 2007
    don't you think he is ranking himself a little high? i think infini is more of a dagger:)
  • edited November 2007

    How's about the villager icon? ;)

  • Thanks for taking care of this Chief!
    We were sorely in need of some kind of change - the spammers were driving me crazy !
    Hopefully, this will take care of that problem.

    I had to admit, this style is taking some getting used to.
    It feels like I can't sort things properly.
    What is markdown?
    What are you talking about ranking?
    I feel like I'm lost here.
  • edited November 2007
    Yeah, I admit it's a big change. Took me a while to get used to. But once I did, man I'd never go back.

    Not sure what you mean by sort things properly. If you want the same "just give me the forum posts" as the old forum, use the popup on the left, or the tab "Categories" at the top. I find it more efficient just to use the "Discussions" tab and see what's new all in one page.

    Markdown is a plain-text to HTML conversion tool for writers. See http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

    It allows you to type something like **bold** and have it rendered in bold or

    ## Title

    And then that would show up as a title. if you type:

    * list item
    * list item

    It will show up as a nice list with bullets. If you type

    > This is quoted text
    > another line of quoted text

    Then it will be formatted in a pretty blue box. For security reasons, it's not a good idea to allow HTML in posts. BBCode and Markdown are two ways to add some formatting to posts in a plain-text way.
  • GREAT JOB FC - THANK YOU. I haven't poked around here too much yet, but so far, I like it. I know its a lot of extra work to do stuff like this, so I appreciate your hard work. I'll let you know if there's anything that bugs me.
  • Hello all. I'll just throw in my dos centavos here. I really miss the threading. Like.... really really really miss it.

    Regardless, it's good that it killed the spammers dead!

    Viva CP!

    - M
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