Looking for Feedback/Suggestions

Hi,

At the beginning of the week we announced the exciting news that the Developer Shed network had been purchased by Jim Boykin. For those that don't know, Jim is a long-time fan of the communities that compromise the network (he was literally the second member of SEO Chat) and wants to make these communities great once more.

We can't do that without you guys though, so we are looking for any suggestions or feedback you guys might have to help the process along. That is what this thread is for. We want to know the best way that we can serve you, the community.

Are there any features you would like to see here in the forums? How about on the publishing site (www.devshed.com)?

Anything you hate about the forums? Anything you can't live without or want more of?

How about removing the Search Engine Optimization forum, as there is an entire website (SEOchat) on this topic, that is already part of the devshed network and this one is redundant. Besides, 99% of the posts on our SEO forum are from people who want to increase their post counts and post links to their own websites. Most of the posts are one of the following types:
(a) A question whose answer can be looked up by a simple google search (and I ask, which SEO can't search google? Especially since they spend so much time trying to rank on it). Mostly done to try and stimulate a discussion to increase post counts with replies and possibly do a link drop or two.
(b) A useless me-too type reply (e.g. "I agree with XXX's post")

I think we should remove the SEO forum or make it like the Outhouse forum, where the posts don't increment the poster's count.

It used to be that way at one time. But I agree with removing it. It's not really necessary when there's a dedicated community.

My short wish list:
* one-click subscribe for threads (currently it takes 4 clicks and I have to leave the thread page; plus it rarely works on mobile browsers)
* on the WYSIWYG editor the insert code/php option is totally broken; it strips all newlines out of the inserted code which makes it impossible to read

We're looking at whether we need all of the forums or whether we should consolidate and cross-link some of them between sites (maybe a Languages site, Open Source site, Microsoft Site, and SEO site?) but we're not rushing to make these changes - plus we plan on passing our ideas by the community first for comment. So... please suggest away as to what would be good! (i.e. you should blow out these 12 forums on devshed, consolidate these, link to seochat, etc.)

I'm hopeful that once we convert to vBulletin 4.x that a lot of the forum issues will be resolved.. things like the one click subscribe can be coded in (if it's not standard)... and they have a completely new WYSIWG editor (they are now using CKEditor). But keep the ideas coming!

Chris

What WYSIWYG? You see the code don't you?

Anyway, those two things are on my list too. I expect that the forum upgrade will take care of them.

I'm also hoping we can remove the ability to underline text that isn't a link.


So we won't be using bbcode/vbcode anymore? I'll miss it.

You still can. Just like now, you can disable the "simple" interface in the user options.

Reply and Quick Reply both the same as Reply, (ie no quick reply) - guessing forum upgrade will look after this?

Quick reply was disabled. I can't remember the reason why now, but I do know that the functionality was intentionally removed.

BBCode will be there... and vB4 has a much nicer editor. With regards to Quick Reply... there are about 1,000 options we have to review in the new version. I know there are pros and cons to enabling and disabling each one. Once we get a handle on it, I'm sure we'll be passing a lot of the options by people here. You're the users

Hey,

Just checking in to say thanks for the suggestions everyone submitted thus far. We set up some tracking for ideas today to make sure we don't lose anything.

The Dev Shed gang and I spoke to Chris and tech today and seems like things are plugging along nicely. As Chris said above, the new VBull has a ton of options - I've used it before and its a pretty sweet system with some really nice features - I think you guys will be pleased with it.

Anyway, if you have any more thoughts or ideas, please keep sending em along as you think of them - appreciate it!

A playpen / test area to allow mods come up to speed before deployment of either vB4 or rolling out new functionality

Thanks, added these to the tracking board (also using this as a marker for myself).

The most annoying thing more than anything else is the limited column size on posted code, making it a nightmare to read and in fact puts me off replying to threads as it's too dificult to read the code in its entirerity.

Being a techy forum but not being able to read the posted code is rather counter productive.

I would use this forum more and Tek-Tips less, if stupid annoyances like this were resolved.

At least this forum has an edit function which drives me nuts not having one on TT!

I could see that... I think someone has mentioned this in the past also...I will pop it up on the board. Thanks for the suggestion!