Phirate - Forum Stickies

2/17/08 16:20

Essentially, sticky topics in the context you're talking about are a poor attempt at rescuing failure at other levels. It should not be necessary to come to the forum to ask about these things, we should have done a sufficiently good job at communicating on other pages on the site to prevent people from needing to come here and ask.

Many forums use sticky topics as a poor excuse for a knowledge base, which in turn is a poor excuse for communicating correctly in the right place, which is a poor excuse for behaving in an intuitive/correct fashion in the first place. I'd rather focus my time and effort at the top of that chain.

We'll never get everybody, there are people who claim to have read the FAQ and the help stuff etc who are asking a question answered on page one, but I have no faith those people would read sticky topics either :)

Phirate - Third Party Forum

2/17/08 06:35

We have stated previously that we do not intend, at this time, to switch over to a third-party forum solution. It relates to future plans and the level of integration we want to achieve.

I understand that the existing forum does not offer the full suite of features something like vbulletin does (although I admit in a number of cases this is by design), however we have limited resources at this time.

Regardless, any attempt to integrate a third-party forum would require significant development resource on an unfamiliar platform in order to integrate even to the level that the existing forum is, and then I'd have to go and switch off all the stuff I explicitly designed out of this one anyway..

Basically, at this time I do not foresee any likelihood of us moving to another forum system. I'm still open to argument on this topic, but please take the above into consideration.

Phirate - Forum Spam

2/10/08 19:08

A solution to this problem is in the works.

Essentially, much of the stuff we're talking about as spam is only spam because it's in the wrong place. It is site promotion, and Entrecard is about helping bloggers promote their site.

The problem is that we have mechanisms for site promotion, and then we have mechanisms for community. The two are being confused, and people are trying to use community mechanisms for promotion (ie, message spam).

We intend to provide proper site promotion mechanisms to match the currently abused community ones, which will allow us to provide better tools for managing the few who continue to misbehave.

For the moment, please do just flick the URL for any post you feel is spammy into the feedback box and it will be dealt with. Sometimes we leave the post there and simply keep track of the user concerned and then remove their forum access after they have demonstrated a trend - a short term loss but long term win.

Phirate - New Forum Design

2/07/08 17:40

While I emphasize that this is not a change in our general position that the forum is not exactly core business for us (although it's pretty close, entirely because of the community), last night the version repo broke for a while so I couldn't do any core work, so I took the opportunity to see how much of the forum I could do up before it got fixed. Turned out to be a fair bit.

AND

If your browser reacts to links correctly, they should change color to a darker color when you've read a given topic/forum. They'll return to the light color when there's another post you haven't read.

This is what I see:

http://phirate.com/forums.png

If you don't get those darker colors for read topics/posts, please let me know.

AND

We are not currently considering a karma system of any kind. We haven't got a compelling use-case for it at this time.

Phirate - New Forum Design

1/25/08 05:26

Not precisely. There are a list of things we intend to improve on the forum, however it isn't core business right now so it'll take a little time.

I understand the motivation of those suggesting we use other packages however we have compelling reasons not to do so at this point. We may eventually be forced to because we run out of time but if we have time available, improving the usability of this system is preferable.

We won't keep everyone waiting around for a better forum forever, I promise. We're doing the best we can with the resources to hand.

Phirate - Forum Etiquette

1/18/08 23:27

We highly recommend ignoring offensive users. Private messaging can be blocked using the Block button at the bottom of any given message.

We do not in any way approve of insulting messages or forum topics. It is, sadly, a necessity to permit some degree of this on the forums to prevent chilling effects on users' willingness to post.

That said, it is all too easy for the same to be generated by overly hostile posts. Users should be aware that we can and will revoke forum posting privileges in the event that we feel a user is acting persistently in a fashion detrimental to the good of the forum.