I’ve actually already been hacking the forum styling, etc.. to make things a little easier.
Some comparison images (they’re around 1 – 2mb each, so you know before clicking).
Scroll right of the image to see the original (ie. what you see now).
Profile Page
https://img97.imageshack.us/img97/5184/profilewp.jpg
Thread List
https://img192.imageshack.us/img192/9808/threadlistwp.jpg
Post List
https://img404.imageshack.us/img404/9471/postswp.jpg
The above is accomplished by using a combination of CSS overrides and a jQuery based Greasemonkey script. Of course not everyone can see the edit, delete and spam buttons (but i wanted to show how i have it to make my time here easier on me).
Anyway, that said, here’s a run down of what i would like to see changed / updated.
Styling:
- Increase overall font-size (too many little pieces of text)
- Rethink the use of colours throughout the forum.
- Lose the round buttons, or at the least reduce the roundedness (it’s easy enough). See the “Add new” button as one example (if you’re using IE then you’ll have no idea what i’m talking about).
- Give the support status input(in the new topic form) it’s own row in the form table.
- Switch to using flexible width (you can still have fixed margins, just let the width run the length screen so those with bigger screens can utilise the extra screen space they have). This won’t help me, i’m on a small screen, but i do sometimes use another screen and i’d like to be able to use the extra space (surely others do to?).
Threads:
- Please allow the profile to sort in the same way as a forum lists it’s posts, by last reply.
- Rating thread system (use the same as i’ve seen on WordPress.com), either “This post/thread was helpful” or “This post/thread was not helpful”. I don’t personally think members should have a rating system (but threads should).
- Remove sticky and closed topics from “No replies” view
- Add paged links to thread listing (see my above image i’ve done this via script for the moment).
- Add report this post button with very simple text box, click report, small box appears and you type in a brief reason for the report (no html support or anything needed, it should just be simple text), no need for all that modlook tagging business.
- Stop automatically converting links, if i write https://example.com then it should just say that and not link (there’s a link button if i want it to link – or i can type in the a href etc..)
- Append posts modified by anyone not the original author with a “Last editted by” message with the users name.
- Add “Quote” button to posts, so we can quote without having to copy -> paste.
- Add “Request Close” button to posts. This could work like report, just it’s a simple request to close a thread.
- Add merge threads functionality?
Bugs:
- Any page where you see pagination twice, the element holding the paging links often has the same ID.
- Invalid/inconsistent markup in registration page and possibly profile/edit profile pages (can’t remember without looking and i’ve already spent long enough on this reply, lol).
Styling concerns are not really so much an issue for me, because i just restyle using a script, but i think it wouldn’t hurt to give the style some love (maybe use the twenty ten theme as inspiration, it has great typography and readability – better then the forum), and i’m sure whatever you guys whip up will look better then my CSS hacking.
Thread tracking, and keeping track of threads in general has got to be the biggest issue for me, i can only echo what others have said (although i don’t see a need for email notification, that’s what mailing lists are for imo – if it is added though please don’t auto subscribe me to every thread i reply to, i hate that on other forums).
I’ll also echo the login issue, i’d love to login into the forum, and automatically be logged into everywhere on www.ads-software.com where the same login is used.
I’m sure there’s a whole bunch more, i’ll post back when i recoup some energy to write another epic reply…
