Site changes Feb 5, 2006

When posting a comment or a forum message, there is now a "thread review" box that allows you to see (and scroll) through the previous messages while editing your post.

Thanks. It's going to be real help in long threads.

Nicely done. This is a much cleaner implementation than the one that the standard PHPbb forums (like rockclimbing.com) use.

Have you written this forum system from the ground up?

Yes, the forum was written from the ground up, but it is mostly just an extension of the overall architecture of the site. The actual forum specific code is rather small. It just fit nicely with the rest of the architecture.

We actually had phpBB powering the forums before we went live, but we weren't happy with the clumsy integration (it really isn't designed to be embedded in another user system). So rather than hack up phpBB like rc.com did, we just spun our own.

We have more features to add to the forum side of things, but we'll get all the important features that 95% of the users care about done within a few months...

I really want to get email notification (and/or on the homepage) when someone adds a reply to a thread. And I'm planning on adding that to routes as well.. so you can have it notify you if someone adds a comment to a route you've added or commented on. I think this will be a good way to allow route contributors to come back and integrate feedback from the comments into their route descriptions.

I think adding an email notification by default is a bad idea. There must be a way to opt out of this feature. It sounds like a lot of SPAM to me.

I do like the ability to review old threads...

The new scrolling feature works well as it lets me read comments as I am writing instead of toggling windows. Don't really understand all of the database parameters/terms discussed; but scrolling seems to be a good feature.

I don't know if e-mail notification will be more conducive to sharing information or instigating meritless arguments (Though, some arguments are not meritless & are worth discussing); but as long as people have to use id's that make them accountable instead of the anonymous postings of the past, your e-mail notification could work.

For sure the email notification would be a choice. I thought it was quite useful on the 'other site', as I posted a message and didn't need to check for replies... I just got emailed when there was one.

I was also thinking there would be an option to lump all the notifications into a daily or weekly email.