Any chance this would be on the agenda?
Quoting functions? Blocking functions? Ignore users/topics functions?
I know there’s a favourite thread button which, I use for tracking anyway, but are there any plans to increase the functionality of the forums, particularly as they get bigger and we welcome more members/topics?
Well, big problem is that CoG decided to use for forum Vanilla which is OK, if you have forum with a few users but it lacks some of the advanced functions that are in the better systems (phpBB,…). If they were to change it to some other forum system they would´ve lost all the topics.
phpbb kinda makes this forum look like crap… Darn I think ima bout to get hit with the banhammah if so Remeber me!!! If not, yea…
Ah right, I wonder if there’s consideration for expanding to a phpBB forum in the future then? As Fantom says there should be a way to migrate the content or just re-boot it.
http://vanillaforums.org/addon/porter-core Maybe? I think this version of Vanilla is a little outdated.
It says porter in the site name. Gonna look on the site now
EDIT: i looked and i’m Vanilla porter
Yea, the forums went online in Jan 2011, and while I think Dan did do some updates (I’m pretty sure it’s Dan in charge of the forum’s functionality), Vanilla stopped updating the version that (I’m pretty sure) we’re running on around a year ago, but as for just how outdated it actually is (in terms of functionality), it’s difficult to tell, particularly because of lot of the functionality appears to be limited to paid only users, and a lot of the user contributed stuff looks like it may be a bit buggy IMO, so I’d be doubtful of CoG’s willingness to use it. If the user contributed things do work well, a couple of them look like they could be nice to have on the forums, but I’m more than a little doubtful about whether the jump would be worth it, unless of course it can be done without any (potential) loss of information.
As for phpBB, the obvious question is: Are we big enough to warrant it over Vanilla, particularly over a jump two Vanilla 2 with the possibility of plugins for more features?
Not really my call on the phpBB and size = jumping decision. I don’t know what the requirements are for it, I haven’t really been in forum hosting/website hosting for so long anyway(!)
But I’d like more functions for the forums, if only so I can prune information I don’t want to see and tag users I want to highlight.
For example, in my usual hunting spot (Gamefaqs) I use the tag function and friends function to highlight all posts/topics by them. If COG had it, I could probably tag the author of a game in his topic so I can skip all the waffle and see his important posts. And on the other hand I can exclude those whom I don’t think are offering any information that’s worthwhile depending on the topic at hand.
Little things like that I think, while probably not too important at the moment would be pretty useful. =)
I use phpBB alot. It is simple to use but, two big drawbacks. Spam and adding mods is no easy task.
@RVallant @Reaperoa There’s no “minimum” size for a phpbb forum, and the software is free.
@lordirishdas I’d disagree with the mod comment (it’s not difficult in my opinion), as for spam, you’ll get that anywhere but they could easily do their ‘approval’ method with phpbb too.
@CJW I never said that there was. It’s just that phpBB is aimed at larger crowds and Vanilla at smaller, and I think that there is a point where Vanilla is just ‘narrow’ for a large a community (while phpBB doesn’t ever really have them problem), and I was wondering if we were at that point (everyone’s gonna have a different opinion on that). Additionally, I think that the appearance of an ‘empty’ forum is detrimental to the growth of the forum, (I know I’ve skipped over a few forums that interested me just because they appeared to be mostly dead), and I was wondering if we were big enough that that would not be a concern. Plus jumping to it would require more work than jumping to Vanilla 2 (I think), so I was wondering if all those things combined was important enough to jump to phpBB over Vanilla 2, assuming the guys up stairs want to make the jump at all.
Eh If I leave for a weekend or so the amount of replies per topic is sufficient enough for me to want the extra tools, plus I think it is enough activity to not look ‘dead’. Topic count fluctuates I suppose, but then I hope in a roundabout way that if we had plenty of topics, they were worthwhile.
Then again, (sadly) in my opinion a few of the topics could afford to be… unmade, as could a few spammy posts, but that’s me and I understand that probably goes against the ethos of a COG community since here is pretty lax in comparison to other sites.