[Plugin: Mingle Forum] Too many layers, users don't get to the content

[photocurio]

I’ve been having trouble configuring Mingle Forum. Our issue is that users can click on the forum, but they don’t see any content. They just see a list of categories. If they click on a category, they still don’t get to any content, they see a list of ‘forums’. If they are persistent, they will click on a forum and then they see a list of posts, but they only see topic headings, not actual posts. At this point they could click on a post.

This is far too many clicks to expect a user to endure. Users who don’t know about breadcrumbs will be utterly lost. I’d love to streamline all this. Why are categories of forums necessary?

Also I’d like to be able to have forums display with topics expanded. So you could read actual posts on the forum page instead of a list of linked headings. Users don’t always write descriptive headings.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/mingle-forum/

[John James Jacoby]

Good thoughts, but it sounds like you just perfectly described a blog. ??

[OC2PS]

Except in terms of organisation…if you could sort a blog by “newest comments”…it would be somewhat similar to a flat forum… ??

[OC2PS]

https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=105&t=36366

[photocurio]

I’m back to this same issue (trying to format a forum so that its more friendly) and baffled that Mr Jacoby doesn’t see the problem. The problem is how to get user-contributed content on the front of the forum? Ideally this would be many topics from many users.

How can I entice users to enter conversations if they don’t know what conversations are active? The forum itself doesn’t have to be flat—a categories level is useful—but there needs to be a front page, as OC2PS put it, “sorted by newest comments”. Or another way to present this would be “sorted by most active topics”.

An example of a spectacularly successful forum is boardgamegeek.com. This site is a bit of a mess in terms of design. But it boasts a very high level of user interaction. In large part this is because nearly every visitor finds something interesting to click on from the front page, where perhaps a hundred individual topics are listed.

[photocurio]

P.S.. rereading OC2PS’s link, and looking at the link referenced in the post cloudforest.com, it seems like this is an excellent integration of WordPress and a forum. Cloudforest uses phpBB for its forum.

I wonder if there is any way to create a similar “forum front page” with Mingle Forum, since that is what my client is using.