Camper's comments reflect my opinion much better than my inarticulate post above. But the fact that I had to say "above" is another reason I don't care for this format. With the "tree" format, one could post a reply to a particular post. Now it's just a list in chronological order. The last post might add some important point to a previous post somewhere up the list, or just to throw a good-natured zinger on somebody, but you might not recall that, and you may not care to re-read the previous posts to find the thread. (BTW, I think Camper might be talking about Kurt also, along with some other of my favorites.)
Jim L
Jim L: Yes, Maurer was one of them. But don’t tell him. He’s already somewhat vain about his 11 lb. kayak. If he thinks he can write, too, he’ll become unbearable.
Good point about the need for the “tree view” to know who was responding to what. I hope the tree view can be restored, eventually.
But apparently others don’t miss it as much as a couple of us do, so that’s good.
I think the new Forum is an improvement however...still way behind in the world of online forums. One of the best is vBulletin.
http://www.vbulletin.com/
Not very difficult to manage either. It also has ablog feature allwoing registered users to feature build logs and such. Here is an example of the forum in use.
www.rcgroups.com
Has everything and then some.
-Rocko
I agree that the new Forum isn't "state of the art". However, having been a webmaster for a sail club, I think I know why off-the-shelf forum/bulletin-board software isn't being used.
The free or commercially available software that I've looked at tends to want to run the whole show. It takes work to integrate it into a larger web site. It takes an even larger amount of work if your overall web site wants to do it's own authentication. Since CLC wants to manage accounts to keep track of things like order history, builder's club, etc.., it's quite hard to get the forum software to "play nice" with this. It can be done, but it means modifying the forum software. With some software, this would be a violation of it's license. Even if allowed, it would mean manually merging edits in every time a newer version of the forum software became available. The only viable way to use 3rd party forum software here is to fork off a free software forum package and then forevermore maintain it. This works great for a while, but then it slowly becomes obsolete and no longer "state of the art". Eventually your users complain about it and you have to go through the whole process again.
Sorry for the spewage. This was a sore point during my time as a volunteer web developer.
-Steve
Mr. Kim, as far as text size, if you use FireFox instead of Internet explorer, you can do control + to make the text larger. I use it all the time for my poor eyes. Just a thought.
by the way...............hitting ctrl+ works in internet explorer too....
Do you know how many boatbuilders it takes to change a light bulb?
Seven. One to change the bulb, and six to talk about how they liked the old bulb better. (<g>...........and ducking and running.)
Julie K.
>>>>>>The free or commercially available software that I've looked at tends to want to run the whole show. It takes work to integrate it into a larger web site. It takes an even larger amount of work if your overall web site wants to do it's own authentication. Since CLC wants to manage accounts to keep track of things like order history, builder's club, etc.., it's quite hard to get the forum software to "play nice" with this. >>>>>>
Well, all that, yes. Plus: Matt, CLC's webmaster, VP, ShopCam operator, and indispensable jack-of-all-trades, just added another title: proud father. Congrats from all of us, Matt, and the CLC Forum can wait just a little until Madeline settles in...
Nice job Matt. You might want to loosen your bungees a tad. You gotta be careful on how hard you squeeze babies.
Kim
Congrats Matt....now the fun begins..
http://www.bluegary.com/Dory1.htm
...maybe a similar product for CLC to consider in the near future in honour of the new addition.
Take care
Chris
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