A few things that might make the forums better

First let me say thanks so much for venturing into a new forum for us. I know we’ve badgered you about it for quite some time, but I also know how much work setting up a forum for around 50 users or so can be, and yours is much more than that I’m sure so kudos on your patience and perseverance!

I do have some suggestions to help make it much easier and better to manage.

  1. I don’t see a way to mark all posts in a category read/unread anywhere. This is something that is invaluable in being able to tell what you’ve already read and in this case everything in the entire forum right now is “unread” to me which I should be able to alter. Typically there’s a dropdown or selection at the top of the forum for this (sometimes at the bottom) … but that brings me to the next suggestion.

  2. If there’s a way to paginate the categories/threads it would be extremely helpful. In some areas we couldn’t get to the bottom of the page if we sat for an hour constantly hitting the slide bar down because it is showing “all” posts. This would also make the forums load more quickly etc. Usually there’s a setting in the user’s preferences that allows us to set how many posts we want to see on a page, but I’d be happy if that could just be a set number to say 25 or 50 or something reasonable in case there should ever be anything at the bottom of the page that is useful to us (footer stuff ya know lol).

  3. Full dates on posts would be helpful as well so we can see what order the posts are in once they have passed a specific date. I bring this up because there is a recent post (or at least the thread says so in the Latest section) for the thread embedding youtube video help needed. but there are no replies or posts since March of 2016. I do not know by looking at this thread if the first post is at the top or the bottom because all are the same Mar '16 date and no times … Which brings me to my next suggestion.

NOTE: I just saw now that the “Edit” image shows if a post is edited and when moused over the date of that post so I see now that the edit is what is tagged in the post above. Still isn’t very clear and I had to do some poking around before I noticed that icon changed color.

  1. Is there a setting for us that can be turned on so we can sort the threads/posts by date/time? I typically love to set my forums so that the most recent posts go to the top instead of the bottom. Keep it simple with those 100 post threads lol (j/k) but sometimes long threads can be a pain to have to scroll all the way to the bottom (another point made for pagination of the categories and threads).

That’s all I have for now that has come to my attention pretty quickly. I’m sure I’ll post more later LOL :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks again for doing this for us!

Thank you for the feedback, Jo! We’re still learning what can and can’t be done with Discourse. The settings screen is many pages long and your suggestions could very well be possible.

If others have experience with Discourse, and can share examples, we would love to how other sites have solved these issues.

Correct. I have not found any way to do this in any Discourse forum. I don’t think such an option exists. Probably not something Martin has control over. As ridiculous as it sounds, it looks like we’re going to be stuck with hundreds of old posts that Discourse will show as being “unread.”

I know that whatever options are available in Discourse are accessed by clicking your avatar and then the Preferences (last choice in the menu with the little gear in front of it.) Now that we’ve got Discourse as our forum software (thank you very much @martin) I’m going to do some Google searching to try and understand it’s nuances, and maybe get a few more answers to your questions @jo-r

So after doing some Googling, there seems to be no way to make older post “go gray” as it were (the way they change once you’ve read them. I think the best you can do is to view the page by clicking the Top button and then selecting the last week, month, quarter, etc. I also went through and set my preferences so that all the categories/posts are watched and I get notified on anything new, as opposed to only those posts in categories that I’ve responded to, or been mentioned in. This is sort of like “subscribing” in the old forums. You do this by clicking the little “bell” shaped icon next to the New Topic Button at the top of a category, and choosing your desired selection.

My contribution to the new forums. Someone complained that there was no way to know this was the forum website, and not the Bootstrap Studio website

Forum-logo

For the unread posts, apart from them displaying with dark text, does it have other effects on your browsing experience? Here are the buttons/links at the top that I see:

image

Even though there are thousands of posts I haven’t read in Discourse, it shows only the ones updated after my last visit as unread.

Over time those unread posts will be pushed down by new posts and will fall out of view.

I am not sure about that. There are plenty of signs that this is the forum, even a big banner for non-logged in users.

Just relating what someone else had mentioned. I think they said something to the effect that they were confused because the logo looked the same on both the Bootstrap Studio homepage, and the top of the forum page.

Personally, I don’t have any problem discerning the difference, but it was simple enough to make the image, if you care to use it.

Just want to mention that already this new forum software, to me, has been a massive improvement in terms of interaction with other forum members. Now we can all see when we’ve been mentioned in posts, and have developers have been super responsive when they’re mentioned.

So I’d just like to personally thank @martin and @gabby for this. I know at times I’ve been a bit critical of BSS’s development, but it’s done out of my passion for wanting to see this program become the best website builder in the world. It has allowed me to transform my own business in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I purchased it a little over it two years ago.

The amount of updates, the response and willingness to entertain and employ input and ideas from users (not to mention the affordability of the program) is virtually unheard of in software development these days. I see a lot of new potential on the horizon, with these new forums as a catalyst.

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Question… one of the drawbacks of the old forum was the inability to edit our posts after a short period of time. By default, Discourse normally allows you to edit posts up to two months after they’re made.

I just noticed some typos in a post I made a day ago, and I cannot go in and correct them. I think the time period for which we are allowed to edit our posts should be at least a few days to a week.

Thoughts?

Great suggestion! The setting was set to 1 day by default. Changed it to 1 week, which is the max it gave me (probably it’s affected by some other setting).

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So I’m also wondering why my name has a 1 at the end of it. I can’t find any way to change it.

Obviously because you’re #1 around here jo. :wink:

It might have something to do with character limits? I’m not sure but there might be a limit on how short a name or the content of a post can be. I forget, but my foggy brain seems to remember something like this in a discussion in another program’s discourse forum long ago.

Haha you’re so funny! :stuck_out_tongue:
Ya I figure it’s probably a char limitation thing.

@Martin can you change this for me to Jo R ?

@martin
What are your thoughts on adding a new forum section for the discussion of online components. Not just the components themselves, but perhaps ways to improve the program feature itself?

It’s a powerful feature that could be a much greater asset if a few key changes were made. For example, the ability to categorize components, to search for them by the uploader’s name, to filter them by certain criteria. A dedicated forum section would be a good start.

A couple of more ideas to improve the forum…

NEW CATEGORIES!

A category for people interested in buying Bootstrap Studio but who have questions about the program. This should be an open category (available to anyone, not just registered users.) I believe this would allow those of us with experience using the program to help people decide if BSS will be the right tool for them. I’ve seen both this week, and in months past, people who were upset because they bought BSS believing they would be able to import third-party templates, Bootstrap websites, etc, and were greatly disappointed to discover that the import features are not the same as simply being able to open and work on a third-party website template. Of all the complaints I’ve seen over the past two years, this has BY FAR, been the one that shows up most often.

A Showcase category where people can show others websites they’ve built with BSS. Again, I’d consider making this an open category that does not require user registration, because it would be a big selling feature for BSS, allowing prospective new buyers to see what people have done with the program.

A category to discuss online components, and ideas on how to improve the online component feature (I mentioned this in a prior post.)

A category for people looking to hire developers, or people to teach them Bootstrap Studio, or to post projects that they’re seeking to have built.

A category for people looking to offer their BSS services, perhaps promote themselves or their companies, or offer tutorials on certain things.

A tips and tricks category?

That’s all for now.

Thank you for the suggestions!

  • “Presales” category – I don’t think opening the forum to everyone is a good idea. It would get filled up with irrelevant posts by people who didn’t even bother reading the homepage. On our contact page we have a comprehensive FAQ that they will never see if they could just register on the forum.
  • “Showcase” category – This is a neat idea. Will do it right away. Again, should be open only to customers, otherwise it’s an invitation to spammers.
  • “Online Components” category – without a way to link to components from the web, this won’t be very useful. We need to have some section on the website where comments can be browsed. I am adding it to our todo.
  • “Hire” category – I am not sure if there is enough users on the forum for this to be useful, and even the users here are unlikely to hire others to do projects.
  • “Services” category – similar to the above, not sure how useful it would be, because there isn’t a buying side.
  • “Tips and Tricks” category – Will add this right away.

The reason for the 1 is that the old forum allowed 2 letter usernames, but Discourse has a limit of 3.

It appears that I can change your username. I can try to set it to “jo” but if it gives an error (likely), I will set it to “jor”. Would you like me to proceed?

yes please. Also was wondering if it takes dashes or spaces etc. if not that’s ok but if so if a dash/space/underscore/etc. could be added between the o and r that would be helpful. If not no worries, jor will be fine if it won’t allow jo :slight_smile:

Just a observation, but most forums have a dedicated moderator (or moderators) whose job it is to delete spam (and subsequently) block the spammers I.P. address) as well as keep things on topic. Assuming this forum continues to grow, it’s something to consider.