Forum Improvement Proposals (FIPs)

General Counterparty
1

Hi all,

What can we do to make this forum more appealing? I have proposed some FIPs below:

FIP 000001: Change the forum software. This one looks slick and minimalistic but it is missing some very basic features (deleting posts, editing posts after 24 hours) and familiarity (Bitcointalk Forums, i.e. Simple Machines Forum Software)
FIP 000002:  Change our behavior when .posting in the Counterparty Bitcointalk Thread. Various distracting dialogues can occur for many posts at a time there. It should be used as a lean information channel and cross-links should be made to more in-depth discussions here.
FIP 000003:The forum categories (sub-forums) here need to be updated  (Example, a Bountysource category to cross-link to various issues on Github that have bounties attached to them.
FIP 000004: Suitable moderators need to be identified for relevant categories.

Feel free to add more FIPs to the list! =D

2

FIP1: we had Simple Machines before this and not many people liked it.

Apart from the the obvious (effort/time required), a problem with making a change is that posts/links need to be transparently migrated and that doesn’t always work well. The last migration was 95% perfect, but some small problems remained (for example, date/time of old posts didn’t migrate properly). Sure, that could be fixed, but it requires additional effort which can be made but it’s a matter of priority (what’s better, to spend 8 hours on making improvements to the forums or to spend 8 hours creating Wiki content, for example?).

I thought that deleting & editing works for everyone (the little gear icon). I’ll have to check the docs. 
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Update: Deletion of own posts after 24 hours can be added by patching the source (and doing so after every update) - see https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/issues/1364, so it’s extra effort on a continued basis. For editing after 24 hours it seems the only option available is to contact a  moderator with a request to update/edit the post. 
Editing is available within 24 hours. Deleting within 24 hours is the same as editing - just replace your post with a . or “(deleted)”.
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Personally I think this new s/w is better than Simple Machines, but it’s not ideal. However there are many things that need improvements (example: how-to’s on using Enhanced Smart Contacts with Counterparty need to be created, the Wiki needs to be updated, etc.), for now Vanilla Forums - because the change was made fairly recently - could stay for a little longer.

FIP2: I agree that occasionally there are off-topic comments that should be split to create a new topic. 
As a moderator I am trying to minimize invasive actions so I haven’t used it a lot because that can be annoying, the volume of posts is much lower (compared to bittalk.org, for example) so in many cases slightly off-topic comments are not having a huge impact, and I’m not in favor of aggressive moderation. But I’m not the only moderator so others can moderate as well - if any of them splits or sinks a topic because they think it’s appropriate I am not going to try to reverse that.

FIP3: I think just last week some changes have been made (I think one section was archived) and there will be other improvements. 
3

One big improvement would be a simple Recent Posts list at the bottom of
the front page… just titles and date stamp of the top ~10+ posts. That
makes it easier to see activity and to jump in to interesting topics.

Incidentally, there’s a bug on posting a comment, if you’re not signed in. The sign-in doesn’t post the comment!

4

@davidpbrown, there’s an option to either display categories or recent discussions in the main page (although categories displayed on the side still remain displayed there - basically this page https://forums.counterparty.io/discussions becomes home page). That change is a simple setting and can be done easily if people agree.

5

I actually much preferred the Simple Machines Counterparty Forums. Not being able to edit after 24 hours is incredibly bad. For example, I made a thread here about XCP Price Speculation - https://forums.counterparty.io/discussion/701/xcp-price-speculation. I can’t keep updating the first post (the data there is stagnant and out-dated) with the latest data, I have to keep doing periodic update posts.

This is unacceptable. No thread on a specific topic can be started and well maintained. This really ties in with your comment about “how-to’s”. Does someone have to read an entire thread to get the latest information on “how-to” do something? When the latest info should be accessible in the first post in the thread?

I use “Recent Discussions” all the time but it is not as accessible as having a little box of the latest 4 or 5 discussions explicitly referenced on the homepage. This is very noisy as a homepage - https://forums.counterparty.io/discussions.

6
Simple Machines was bad in terms of spam control (5-10 new "Hello that's a great comment please visit my MP3 site" every freaking day) and formatting was very poor (worse than Vanilla Forums I would say). (Even so, I didn't criticize it, I just thought it was really bad).

Does anyone have objections to Discourse (https://meta.discourse.org/- forum maker's own forum)?.

It allows both editing and deleting of posts, it allows easy moderation, it lets Category moderators create subcategories, you can sign-in with anything (e.g. Google, Github, Yahoo, Twitter accounts), and it has all the other nice features one would expect (including decent markup support very similar to Github markdown). It simply works and fast.


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Simple Machines was bad in terms of spam control (5-10 new "Hello that's a great comment please visit my MP3 site" every freaking day) and formatting was very poor (worse than Vanilla Forums I would say). (Even so, I didn't criticize it, I just thought it was really bad).

Does anyone have objections to Discourse (https://meta.discourse.org/- forum maker's own forum)?.

It allows both editing and deleting of posts, it allows easy moderation, it lets Category moderators create subcategories, you can sign-in with anything (e.g. Google, Github, Yahoo, Twitter accounts), and it has all the other nice features one would expect (including decent markup support very similar to Github markdown). It simply works and fast.


+1

8

I am just now starting to get involved in these forums is there a way to display the last user that has commented on a post so that way i can see if discussions have occurred on a thread after I have contributed a comment? If not this would be a nice feature to have

9

At the bottom of every topic (discussion) you can see that “Tracking” (default) is set, which means “you will receive notifications because you posted a reply to this topic”. That’s the default.

With that you get notifications for all replies for such topics when you return. A more aggressive option is Watching, where you get notified for all comments in that topic.

1 Like
10

Thank you very much, i have not seen a forum style like this, but its nothing i cannot get used to, its neat but would still be nice to show a detail of the user who commented last permanently on the thread

11

Robert, I’m not sure I follow. What would you like to see displayed and where? Maybe there’s an option in the admin area…

12

If you go to https://forums.counterparty.io/latest you can see that (the rightmost icon would be the last commenter).
By default we don’t use that for our home page (some people find it too noisy), but you could bookmark it as your default landing page.
Personally I use the default home page but then I always click on Latest because I do like that page.

Slightly related: in https://forums.counterparty.io/users/YOUR-NICK/preferences you can fine-tune email notifications, mute certain users, watch certain categories, etc.

13

@something @ivana Something you answered my question, so the picture in the right most position is always the latest comment, that is helpful to know and thank you guys!