Rethinking the "board index"
The board index has been there unchanged for eons.
But... is it really still a nice solution nowadays?
Last time we added te option to swap the BI with any other controller configured to act as main page, but IMO this is not nearly enough.
In this morning without much sleep I found myself thinking about it.
Apart from the obvious easy way of integrating Simple Portal directly into Elk, I was looking more into what should actually be the home page of the forum.
BTW writing and formatting the text from a mobile is still a pain in the valley of the shining sun.
Looking around at what any site that is not a forum does, you can see a clear trend, and one that should hardly be dismissed as "forums are something else", and I mean dashboards.
The BI works somehow well for guests that need to be guided through the sections, though for a registered user, more than staring at the list of sections the forum is composed of, it would probably be more interesting to see other stuff: who answered my topics? Did anyone countered that argument we are having in that other topic? Did I receive any PM? Did anyone react to my stuff? Was I writing something I did not post yet? Is there anything that needs moderator/admin attention? Ect.
The "busy" life of the user may be made a little simpler and more appealing by providing him/her what is actually important.
Thoughts anyone?
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #1 –
Those are all great ideas. One thing potentially worth considering is a list of recent replies, structured more like social media sites. Perhaps the index might show a few recent posts, topic expandable by ajax, with a quick reply text only box. One major advantage social media sites have is the lack of complex navigation. People are inherently super lazy....
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #2 –
Hi,
all great but,
it's early, isn't it ? there are currently 267 open issues
+ version 2 hasn't arrived yet
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #3 –
a lot of commercial sites are using Disqus. - it gives even less than your mention.
allows no attachments at all
very small ava
no msg or mails at all.
just a comment w up/down votes which may or may not work
pretty scant on any other stats
basicly, bare bones comment blogging.
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #5 –
Flarum and Discourse should be among the latest style and design for forum. Plus we already have an addon for ElkArte home page to look like flarum which could be a good start in redesigning it.
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #7 –
Twitter homepage is somewhat similar.to Facebook in my view and as I recalled, many oppose facebook style when it first become a popular social media while we were SMF, the idea of which is too much different from a traditional forum.
Frankly speaking I liked the opposed idea but it was difficult to achieve by people limited knowledge and skills, plus I also recalled loading of such homepage is said could be very heavy for any shared hosting which many are using.
In any event a draft in a form of an addon like flarum addon wouldn't hurt. Looking forward to see and test one.
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #12 –
Well, yeah.
I'm not entirely sure, though, how you could blend a "messaging" into a forum.
If you have something slack, yeah, basically is already a forum with some more direct messaging and less administration.
But, the downside is: to have such a thing you need something different in terms of reactivity and flexibility, and I mean server-side: I doubt PHP is the right choice for something like an instant messaging app.
Re: Rethinking the "board index"
Reply #14 –
@emanuele
I am not a programmer. I am the admin of my forums. I see how users leave the forums for messengers and I can't offer them anything on the forums.
Therefore, I reported here about a function that could keep users on the forums. You don't have to completely try to embed the messenger in the forum. Maybe there is an opportunity to do something on the forum that will partially satisfy the needs of users.
My opinion: the developer of a modern forum engine should observe the needs of real users, he should understand why and where users go from the forums.
It is a mistake to make forums as social networks, because users go from the forums not in social networks.