Meta: A new kind of forum leveraging Web 2.0 technologies

giginger

I'm sold on Web 5.0.

Kosmo

Fuck that, I always tought that they made better games before and the information on Usenet and BBS cans were so much better than the shit of todays internet, I'm going to go back to basics and start a Web 0.129 beta consortium.

timberford

funny i was only thinking how irritating the phrase web 2.0 was this morning!

another thing getting on my nerves is how nearly everything is released with beta slapped all over it like it's some kind branding.

Kosmo

Beta is one step better than Alpha so people have confidence in it, but it gives the developer the freedom to fuck things up and if something goes wrong you can just say "hey it's a beta baby."

giginger

Which is exactly what google do. Most of their products seem to be in permanent beta.

shad0w913

Tagging is awesome. A tagging extention could probably be written for Vanilla. For example, you could have a list of the top tags in the sidebar, and clicking on them would bring you up all the topics tagged, maybe, "windows." Now, figuring out how to add the tags themselves would be a whole other beast to tackle.

Louis

To me, coming from SMF or PunBB or Invision, where categories mean two clicks to view any thread, something like Vanilla or "Meta" is a breath of fresh air. I was already planning stuff similar to this last year, with PunBB, but never got far enough in my modifications before I gave up - too much to change. Vanilla has promise, but it won't take off until people can convert to it in one click, and have quoting, and a page explaining whispers to people who have an email/PM background. And there are way too many options - and too few. As an administrator, it seems you can't configure the default options for all accounts without editing php code. And stuff like "format comments as ..." or "whisper your comments to" seems a little redundant. (Whisper should come after the comment box, because even if you want to whisper it to someone, you should already know what you want to say and type it out before you enter the name of the person to whisper to) The tabs at the top are useless too. Make a "Change My Account" link on the top, near Signed in as ... Signout, put a search box on every page, and move the categories to the sidebar. There, no more need for tabs. That's what I plan on doing for my installation of Vanilla, at least. Seems much more intuitive. Other small changes like that and this forum could be perfect. I wonder if I can make some or all of these changes in a theme, or if I'd need to modify more of the PHP ...

NickE

The tabs at the top are useless too. Make a "Change My Account" link on the top, near Signed in as ... Signout, put a search box on every page, and move the categories to the sidebar. There, no more need for tabs. That's what I plan on doing for my installation of Vanilla, at least. Seems much more intuitive. Other small changes like that and this forum could be perfect. I wonder if I can make some or all of these changes in a theme, or if I'd need to modify more of the PHP ...

I was, um, bored again, so does this extension do what you were thinking of?

But yeah, you'd need to edit the PHP files or, preferrably, make an extension to do that.

jesusphreak

The tabs make important links really stand out. And I think they give Vanilla something unique.

shad0w913

I also like the tabs. Every browser is adding tabs these days anyway. Makes sense to me.

Louis

Thanks, SirNot. I'd have done it myself, but I'm actually travelling still - posted my first comments in Montreal (Canada), and now I'm talking from a hotel in Kingston (Ontario, Canada). I was under the impression that it would only be possible - or maybe just be easier - to do with the newer development version of Vanilla, but wasn't sure where to get it (svn/cvs/whatever). As for why I don't like tabs, well, I do like them :) But only when they're necessary. And here, they aren't necessary. There's so much space in the sidebar (excuse me, "Control Panel" - what a stupid name for a sidebar) that category names could easily fit, with descriptions inline or on hover (using titles, or perhaps nicetitles js), and search should obviously be front and center - it's so good with this board (and think Google - search comes first) - while the account tab is damned hard to find, yet important. In fact, I'm thinking I'll show each user's information at the top next to a search bar, and have buttons to sign out, or "change info", something like that. Seems again, much more intuitive. Still, this is a good start. Can't wait to make some mods for this. Maybe I can ask Mark about the ETA for the next version of Vanilla, so I don't code too much for this version if I have to re-write most of my extensions in half a month. (He's got to finish a beta of *something*, at least), unless someone knows more about this than I? Oh and one last thing about the tabs, or my other comments, it's all about how I like to design things - I try to look at this as someone who hates "stuff", asking myself "why did I put this there?" and if I can't come up with a good answer, I remove it or rework it. It's not fussiness, because it really does make pages better, if you've the time for it. For example, there are way too many lines on the current theme, the "1 to 31 of 31" thing doesn't need a line below it, and the Add your comments heading should be inside the lightly coloured box, with whisper as an option near the bottom - when I want to whisper something, I expect a whisper button, not an "add your comments" button. The two should be different, and you shouldn't have to wonder, "what's a whisper" before you type your comment. And why are the block user/block comment links up on the top right of every post? That's distracting, and doesn't align with the username / post info line. Block user could become an X inside a circle next to the user's name (and a hover/title of "Block User") while block comment could be a similar X ... somewhere. Bottom right, maybe? This would take testing to figure out, I guess. It just doesn't seem right, to me. And why is the sidebar only useful near the top of the page? There should be "next actions" at the bottom of the page too, since once people are done, they will want to do something. Adding comments is a useful action, and so is going back, or to the top of the page, but how about new posts in places you've recently posted in, or what if there's a new post while you're still reading an older version of the discussion in your browser? Or want to search? Of course, this would probably only be useful with longer discussions like this one, and with your profile settings set so you can view 50 comments per page, but even google gives you a search box along with other navigation at the bottom *and top* of the page. Google is usually very good at understanding people, and using minimal design that "just works" for pretty much everybody. I try to take inspiration from that, in some ways.

lech

/me has no clue what Louis is raving on about.

Minisweeper

*head spins manically You certainly have some interesting ideas, i'd like to see your louisified vanilla, even if it does seem a little too jakob nielson-ish.

lech

The tabs are more than necessary, on all other boards, everything appears a bit obscurred with breadcrumb links and useless other text which I usually NEVER read. As far as this complaint goes, when Mark gets templating implimented, you will be able to rewrite all aspects of how Vanilla displays to your liking, tabs or without. The point is not to have an information overload, or make links redundant and annoying. At least I think that was marks goal, it's plain, simple, and pretty much to the point. Against the grain, not some carbon copy of your run-of-the-mill Invision/phpBB board. It has room for improvements, but so far, it's great. As for the rest of your comments, look back to the first paragraph in this reply :) typically, when templating comes alive, you'll be able to rewrite nearly everything (hopefully everything), for now you can reposition it all with CSS if you're daring enough. Proper XHTML will hopefully also be included in the next revision. From what Mark has mentioned 0.9.3 should hopefully be released towards the later end of November. So until then, sit back and enjoy the nail-biting ride as Mark SLAVES away his FREE TIME cooking up all the changes and bonus' in the next version. I'm sure he's taken everyone's thoughts into consideration, as for executing them, only he can vouch for that. Remember though, Vanilla is still technically "Beta" and growing, so we'll just need to see what comes of it. Enjoy the ride :)

Louis

Thanks everybody, for reading (skimming?) that 3 am rant of mine. And as I've said elsewhere, I'd be happy to make modifications to it, like I have for other forums. I love what's been done so far. I want to help him make it better, as others do, I'm sure. And minisweeper, louisified vanilla is not *Jakob Nielsen-ish*! :P Actually, it's more in line with Google, or the guy who did Wired.com a few years back, Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign (http://www.stopdesign.com/). And like Nielsen's partner, Donald Norman, I care about how people use technology, not just how simple it is, or the metrics behind a design. To me, design can have graphics, it can have lines - they just must have a reason. That's different from what Nielsen does, because the reasons I use come from myself and my limited tests with others, while Nielsen much prefers using statistics and other more technical tests and number crunching to prove that one way is better than another. I'm not one to say flash is bad, but like him, I agree that *most* flash is bad. Personally, I prefer flash in limited animation uses on websites, or perhaps for image-replacements - but not as a replacement for good clean XHTML and CSS. But we won't go there now, I suppose, since we're both chatting about people we've probably never met and won't meet. ;)

Kosmo

Well, when the next version of Vanilla comes out, there shouldn't be anyone who can use minor inconviniences against it, if you don't like it, take a shovel in your hand and start working. Something I like about in Wordpress and Textpattern, there just isn't anything you can hold against them, they are so genious in what they do, if there is something you don't like about or don't have, the only think in your way is you.

Minisweeper

Actually there are people on this board who've met Jakob, i believe. But yeah - i've never had a designing mind so when it gets down to the nitty gritty of what should be improved i wouldnt really notice - if something looks nice i'll like it, whether or not there is an extra line there i may prefer if it was gone but i wouldnt notice eitherway. I suspect if i had the ability to muck around with stuff as easily as other people might find it then i'd have a play and get it 100% how i wanted it - but as kosmo says, waiting for the next rev would definately be a good idea.

Louis

I hate waiting :P

briantech

Hey guys, I'm the lead developer for Meta and found this thread, its pretty interesting. It's nice to get feedback, and i'd like to address a few of the issues raised in this thread. First off, yeah it is a beta and we know it -- there are tons of things on it that either don't work at all, or don't work the way we've envisioned them yet. TONS of things. Its hard when you have like, 2 people working on it who aren't getting paid and have to go to their normal jobs everyday. Whoever said they don't like popups for the thread preview is an idiot. I can't stand reading forums that don't have that very basic feature now because I can't tell if a thread is worth going into or not. Those thread previews make reading and keeping up with an active forum so much better. Hell we're planning even more features that let you monitor a thread just from the thread listing. The one thing where it listed one person's moderations like 50 times was a bug, that wasn't supposed to happen. It's been fixed. Though at this point it would show all the moderations if 50 different people moderated a single post, but I'm planning to make it so that it only shows the top 3 moderations and then just has a link that says "Show all" or something. In regards to a "spammer with 2000 posts" being able to come on and wreak havoc, well that just wouldn't happen. The exact POINT of the NRi system is to protect against that -- a spammer with 2000 posts would have an abyssmally low NRi. The NRi is based on several different measures, of which post count plays a tiny role. The level to which other people moderate your posts is much more influential in the calculation, so a spammer would be instantly negatively moderated into oblivion. The liveThreads animation, in the future, will be toggleable. However you guys have no idea how nice it is to just be able to leave the page open in a tab, and periodically throughout the day just tab to it and see new posts without having to refresh. Same goes for when you're reading a thread... new posts just appear as they are posted from other people, no refreshing required their either. It's *almost* like a marriage between a forum and a chatroom because of the way things appear live. The actual styling of the forum is irrelevant. I'm the first to admit that I'm not a very good graphic designer, but I had to make something just to get going. The whole system is entirely "themable" though, just like our blog software (its built on the same framework). So yes, anyone with some decent CSS knowledge can come along and completely dictate what the forum looks like (and hopefully someone will before its released, haha). I hope this clears a few things up, and honestly its really great reading criticism like this -- especially negative criticism, because we definitely need that more than anything so we can fix things that people don't like about it. I think we're all sick of all the vBulletins and phpBB's of the world, so its nice to see things like Vanilla and others coming around.

chimaira

Looks interesting.

I still LOVE vanilla though. (L)