Public Square progress report: New online forums
Late Wednesday, I met with two of our online staff, Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall, to discuss additions/changes to our Web site that would enhance interactivity and could be done fairly quickly and easily, without having to wait until our new Web publishing software goes online.
One thing we looked at was online forums, which we've had in some form or fashion since our first Web site went up 10 years ago. Our current forums are here; on the News & Record home page, look for the "message boards" link near the top right corner of the page.
In addition to previously created forums on specific subjects that we'd covered heavily in the paper, you'll find two new forums, one for area news and one for sports. I'll spend some time over there regularly, and I invite you to do the same.
Comments (4)
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Is there any hope of the News & Record implementing more-user-friendly forums like the ones found here: http://www.macthemesforums.net/ or http://forums.vwvortex.com/ or http://forums.macnn.com/
It's ridiculously inefficient to have to click on every single person's response in order to view it.
Posted on January 20, 2005 4:03 PM
That's a technical question I'm not qualified to answer, Jason, but I'll try to get an answer for you. FWIW, you're not the first person to raise that issue; I noted in my report that some readers/sources had suggested vbulletin or something similar.
Posted on January 20, 2005 4:41 PM
Most of the issues folks have raised regarding our message boards relate to the way information is structured in the "templates" that control visual presentation, not technical limitations of the software we use to power them. The presentation is fully customizable, and we can easily tweak our templates to make the forums a little more user friendly; we welcome further concrete suggestions from readers.
We are in the middle of implementing a new online publishing system for both News-Record.com and GoTriad.com, and that'll be a whole new enchilada. We welcome suggestions of the "I really like this feature of the message boards on site X" as we touch up our designs. We obviously can't adopt every recommendation, but we'll do our best to give you something attractive, functional, and fun to use.
Thanks for pointing out a few of your faves, Mr. Clarke. Let us know which features of those boards you think are the most helpful.
Posted on January 21, 2005 8:32 AM
I guess the main advantage of all of those over the News & Record's current setup is that they allow you to see a dozen or more responses to one thread on a single page. The threading of the N&R's system makes each response only visible via a click, which is inefficient and forces the user to remember which response had the information he was looking for. A setup like vbulletin or phpbb or zeroforum seems much more user-friendly in that regard.
In addition, bulletin boards like the ones I suggested allow partipants to create signatures, which makes their posts easy to identify. They also allow give users quite a bit of control over how many responses are viewed at any given point, how they'd like to be notified about additional responses, etc.
Some bulletin boards (like the ones MacThemes uses), allow theming so an artist can make the bulletin boards integrated into the overall look and feel of the greater Web site. At this point, news-record.com doesn't have a whole lot of its own look and feel, but maybe it will in the future.
Posted on January 21, 2005 3:34 PM