I think instead of trying to plug all the holes, I'll just settle for removing the forums entirely until later. ;) Thanks for pointing that out -- I already noticed the archive list had forum entries, but I might have been able to fix that. Fixing everything just to hide the forums doesn't seem worth it.
I am. I think I'll start directing people here over the weekend. It actually was intentional that it disappeared...but it's not as it appears. :) I don't have a good way to hide forums right now (without installing a module just to do that, which seems like overkill). But I don't want users to be faced with the forums first thing. So I changed the Recent Comments list to not show comments from forums, and I'll remove the forum link from the top menu (but I'll give you guys the address, so we can continue to discuss as necessary). The reason that block disappeared is because I "unpublished" the old Community Chat posts, so there are no published posts with comments. It should come back the moment someone posts a new comment.
I may end up removing the forums completely, after archiving the content. If I do that, I'll make sure to send an email to my contributors here so you aren't too confused and so that you can send any comments via reply if so inclined.
Bill sometimes takes things off the wishlist and states them as facts for the new site. Hopefully people won't have excessively high hopes. All the comments are stored in the comment database, so if that wasn't being searched you wouldn't ever get a match for text that was in a comment. The main problem is that in Drupal, comments are "second-class citizens". There are "nodes" (almost every other kind of content) and there are "comments", which are not nodes. The search function likes to point you to nodes, and just incidentally searches comments as well. In the next version, they are supposed to make comments "nodes" as well, but until then I'll have to work something out.
I'll think about my options there. I like the button, if only I could make it work more reliably without me having to be constantly recompiling the program...
I was originally thinking to turn comments off for the help area, but you have a good point. Maybe I can make a note on the front help page explaining that people can post suggestions there and we will remove the comments as we address them?
I didn't originally realize that normal users didn't have access to flag as offensive, but now that I've decided that I'll wait on that feature I went ahead and disabled the module completely.
There is a module called Organic Groups that can turn the site into a Yahoo Groups style site. So people could make their own "group" for, say, precious metals, and have their own set of forums and whatnot. It's something I don't plan on installing now, but I'd be willing to look at it in the future. I think that's a better fit for user-created forums than the default forum module (it's hard for me to give someone admin access to only one forum with the current setup).
There is actually a way to do that right now, but it's unintuitive. Instead of looking at, say, my list of comments ( http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/1/comments ), you can go to http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/all/comments and it will show everyone's comments. Of course, since it's a modification of the original usage, it doesn't show the author (since you don't need that when looking at a specific person's comments), and the address doesn't make sense (since http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/all would be a dead link). So, I can do it, but I'd like to find a better answer before publicizing it. :)
I hadn't even noticed that -- thanks for pointing it out.
I enabled it for comments now, and removed it from the main Bill posts, just because those settings make more sense.
I installed that feature because I thought it might be interesting to have ordinary users be able to flag offensive posts. That module will automatically "un-publish" a post once a certain number of people mark it as offensive (I think the number is 3 right now). I still think that could be useful, but I'm starting to think that should be a feature added after launch -- we already have ignore if someone feels like a certain user is offensive, and we'll have a handful of people who act as moderators and can remove posts if they aren't appropriate. So I may just remove that feature entirely.
If I rely on Google Analytics, it looks like over the last month 54.71% of visitors use IE, and out of that, 30.38% use 6.0. That means about 16.6% of our viewers use IE6. That's consistent with your numbers. I figure if a few things look funny or don't work quite right, that's ok and those users are probably used to it anyway. I also expect those numbers to drop when IE8 comes out (right now just under 1% are using IE8).
I do not have a good reason for why IE 6 isn't following an anchor tag where both the link and the destination are in the same format I was using back in the late 90s. I'll look into it, but I'm willing to say that if you are still using IE 6, small usability problems come with the territory. I can't wait for IE 8, since that will hopefully cause a lot of the IE 6 people to upgrade. I mean, IE 7 was IE 6 with slightly less incompatible page rendering and tabs. I don't think many people cared.
I was going to launch last week, but ran out of time. I'd like to launch this week, but I haven't figured out the logistics yet. The fact is that I'm going to get myself in trouble if I ignore family over Thanksgiving to work on this, so I have to carve out some time for it. If I have enough time on the weekend, I'll get people signing up and looking around over Thanksgiving and then I can deal with site problems over the weekend.
This is clearly my fault. I had to run in the middle of editing comment_snoop.module last night, so I got it to a point where I thought it was at least not going to cause problem. Clearly that was not the case.
I think it's fixed now, though I'll be playing with that module for the next little while.
I could change that. Does anyone else have an opinion? The top link is clearly designed to get you to the first post (it's part of the forum upgrade software), but especially with the navigation menu at the very top it could be useful.
I think instead of trying to plug all the holes, I'll just settle for removing the forums entirely until later. ;) Thanks for pointing that out -- I already noticed the archive list had forum entries, but I might have been able to fix that. Fixing everything just to hide the forums doesn't seem worth it.
I am. I think I'll start directing people here over the weekend. It actually was intentional that it disappeared...but it's not as it appears. :) I don't have a good way to hide forums right now (without installing a module just to do that, which seems like overkill). But I don't want users to be faced with the forums first thing. So I changed the Recent Comments list to not show comments from forums, and I'll remove the forum link from the top menu (but I'll give you guys the address, so we can continue to discuss as necessary). The reason that block disappeared is because I "unpublished" the old Community Chat posts, so there are no published posts with comments. It should come back the moment someone posts a new comment.
I may end up removing the forums completely, after archiving the content. If I do that, I'll make sure to send an email to my contributors here so you aren't too confused and so that you can send any comments via reply if so inclined.
Bill sometimes takes things off the wishlist and states them as facts for the new site. Hopefully people won't have excessively high hopes. All the comments are stored in the comment database, so if that wasn't being searched you wouldn't ever get a match for text that was in a comment. The main problem is that in Drupal, comments are "second-class citizens". There are "nodes" (almost every other kind of content) and there are "comments", which are not nodes. The search function likes to point you to nodes, and just incidentally searches comments as well. In the next version, they are supposed to make comments "nodes" as well, but until then I'll have to work something out.
I'll think about my options there. I like the button, if only I could make it work more reliably without me having to be constantly recompiling the program...
I was originally thinking to turn comments off for the help area, but you have a good point. Maybe I can make a note on the front help page explaining that people can post suggestions there and we will remove the comments as we address them?
Thanks. It's a pain for me to update the list there -- I need to find a way for it to pull it out of a text file or something.
I didn't originally realize that normal users didn't have access to flag as offensive, but now that I've decided that I'll wait on that feature I went ahead and disabled the module completely.
Yeah, it's a Typekey problem that will no longer exist when we move over. I will probably also highlight his comments in the discourse.
Good point, I added the RSI link.
Yes, we can do polls, so that's something to consider.
There is a module called Organic Groups that can turn the site into a Yahoo Groups style site. So people could make their own "group" for, say, precious metals, and have their own set of forums and whatnot. It's something I don't plan on installing now, but I'd be willing to look at it in the future. I think that's a better fit for user-created forums than the default forum module (it's hard for me to give someone admin access to only one forum with the current setup).
There is actually a way to do that right now, but it's unintuitive. Instead of looking at, say, my list of comments ( http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/1/comments ), you can go to http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/all/comments and it will show everyone's comments. Of course, since it's a modification of the original usage, it doesn't show the author (since you don't need that when looking at a specific person's comments), and the address doesn't make sense (since http://caracommunity.com/drupal/user/all would be a dead link). So, I can do it, but I'd like to find a better answer before publicizing it. :)
I hadn't even noticed that -- thanks for pointing it out.
I enabled it for comments now, and removed it from the main Bill posts, just because those settings make more sense.
I installed that feature because I thought it might be interesting to have ordinary users be able to flag offensive posts. That module will automatically "un-publish" a post once a certain number of people mark it as offensive (I think the number is 3 right now). I still think that could be useful, but I'm starting to think that should be a feature added after launch -- we already have ignore if someone feels like a certain user is offensive, and we'll have a handful of people who act as moderators and can remove posts if they aren't appropriate. So I may just remove that feature entirely.
At work I'd use IE 7 if it didn't hang on our internal applications so much -- I am addicted to tabs.
Of course, we aren't allowed to use Chrome at work now, so that's out (it was my favorite for a while).
Between FF3 and IE6, I'll pick FF3 almost every time.
If I rely on Google Analytics, it looks like over the last month 54.71% of visitors use IE, and out of that, 30.38% use 6.0. That means about 16.6% of our viewers use IE6. That's consistent with your numbers. I figure if a few things look funny or don't work quite right, that's ok and those users are probably used to it anyway. I also expect those numbers to drop when IE8 comes out (right now just under 1% are using IE8).
I do not have a good reason for why IE 6 isn't following an anchor tag where both the link and the destination are in the same format I was using back in the late 90s. I'll look into it, but I'm willing to say that if you are still using IE 6, small usability problems come with the territory. I can't wait for IE 8, since that will hopefully cause a lot of the IE 6 people to upgrade. I mean, IE 7 was IE 6 with slightly less incompatible page rendering and tabs. I don't think many people cared.
I was going to launch last week, but ran out of time. I'd like to launch this week, but I haven't figured out the logistics yet. The fact is that I'm going to get myself in trouble if I ignore family over Thanksgiving to work on this, so I have to carve out some time for it. If I have enough time on the weekend, I'll get people signing up and looking around over Thanksgiving and then I can deal with site problems over the weekend.
Apparently, Inline doesn't work with comments.
I'm going to add that to the "after launch" list. Thanks for noticing it.
I just changed both. Is the stickiness slow enough now, or should I make it slower? Let me know if the top link doesn't work for anyone.
This is clearly my fault. I had to run in the middle of editing comment_snoop.module last night, so I got it to a point where I thought it was at least not going to cause problem. Clearly that was not the case.
I think it's fixed now, though I'll be playing with that module for the next little while.
I could change that. Does anyone else have an opinion? The top link is clearly designed to get you to the first post (it's part of the forum upgrade software), but especially with the navigation menu at the very top it could be useful.
I'm a keyboard guy myself, so I just hit Home. :)