Forum too simple, needs better structure

Kozuch · 2010-09-25T21:03:11.000Z

Although there are the language forums, the forum is generally way too simple. What about to grow the structure a bit, maybe creating some subforums in Q&A forum, forums for editors (JOSM etc.) would be nice too…

Emploi · 2010-12-08T22:58:19.000Z

What’s about a new better forumsoftware like vBulletin®?

I would even donate some money for it.
FluxBB is a forum, yes, but it’s very ugly, has no evaluation function, no subscription feature and there are too few subforums here. “New posts”-freature is not enough.

That is, go to the individual country forums too many posts in it!

Harry_Wood · 2011-03-19T01:36:43.000Z

With this old suggestion I said there should be more subforums. There’s pros and cons of that (as described) but I think it would be a good idea.

(The main disadvantage is that it’s harder to notice new posts. This is mitigated by a nifty feature which is somewhat hidden away. On the main page scroll to the very bottom and click ‘Show recent posts’ )

Lambertus · 2011-03-19T09:57:50.000Z

Emploi:

What’s about a new better forumsoftware like vBulletin®?

I would even donate some money for it.

Each forum has pro’s and con’s. vBulletin isn’t the holy grail (imho) and I like -in the osm tradition- opensource software over commercial stuff. But before even thinking about buying a new forum software: what are the benefits of vBulleting over FluxBB that justify spending money? And can we find ways to get these benefits without changing the forum software?

FluxBB is a forum, yes, but it’s very ugly,

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I like a clean, fast, simple interface, but there are skins for those who fancy more eyecandy, and plenty of them. Some are already installed (I’m using the Radium skin). If you have a skin you would like to have added: fine by me, just say so.

has no evaluation function

What’s that? Can you elaborate?

no subscription feature

There is! All kinds of feeds are available and there is a subscription link to get emails but first you will need to configure an email address in your profile to get that functionality.

“New posts”-freature is not enough.

I agree with you there. The current new posts feature is not good enough for an international forum. I would love to have an option to be able to configure which forums you want to see in the new post list.

That is, go to the individual country forums too many posts in it!

Well, it’s an active forum But how would you like to reduce that number? Deleting/Archiving old posts? More categories or subforums? Subforums in subforums perhaps? With regard to the latter: this will no doubt require much more moderation as not every user will post in the correct subforum. Do we have the commitment of the community to provide active moderators? E.g. I’d need some new German subforum moderators as the current ones aren’t active on the forum anymore. This would become a continuous burden I suspect.

and there are too few subforums here.

Harry Wood:

With this old suggestion I said there should be more subforums. There’s pros and cons of that (as described) but I think it would be a good idea.

(The main disadvantage is that it’s harder to notice new posts. This is mitigated by a nifty feature which is somewhat hidden away. On the main page scroll to the very bottom and click ‘Show recent posts’ )

Well, unfortunately, FluxBB still doesn’t support subforums in subforums yet, but I also feel lost sometimes on other forums where there are lots of subforums and sub-subforums. By using many subforums information gets sorted but also spread, so I think there needs to be a balance. But it’s well possible that the balance is now way off the optimal point so I’m open (and have been open in the past) to good suggestions.

Would it help in any way if the forum software is uploaded to SVN? (So that OSM specific changes can be implemented, skins added, etc)?

Finally, I like to add that administering this forum is only one of my many OSM activities. If possible, I wouldn’t mind to spending too much of my spare time moderating this forum.

Lambertus · 2011-04-04T07:59:05.000Z

I added a new subforum: Editors.

Are there any comments regarding the above discussion?

Harry_Wood · 2011-07-07T17:03:29.000Z

We should have some stuff in SVN yes. The skin at least.

For the rest of the codebase I guess you have to decide, do you want to be getting updates from FluxBB central? (I see they’re powered by FluxBB v1.4.5, and we’re on FluxBB v1.4.0) or do you want to consider our code a “fork” of the FluxBB codebase? Perhaps you’ve effectively forked already with some of the CSS and authentication customisations, in which case it’d be good to stick all the code in SVN