Hello all,
I've been having a look at the "Site improvements I'd love to see" threads and I think this is what we are going to do:
- Buy a third-party forum package.
- Customize the layout pretty radically to keep it really simple and not lose "Active converstations" and all that stuff and also not end up with one of those "boxy" layouts that most forum software uses by default, and which mean it can be hard to follow threads. A lot of forums (fora? - surely not these days) do things like only display five messages per page, which I find really aggravating.
The main drawback with Talk the way it is now is that I wrote it and so I have to programme any improvements. This made sense when we first started and the available forum packages weren't great (and all ended up looking the same) but the latest ones seem quite good. We in fact started with a third-party package then replaced it with this one when we started to run up against limitations.
I think the one we are going to get will be vBulletin (have a look at www.vbulletin.com ) if you are interested.
Once we are up and running with the new one, we'll more easily be able to support things like private messages in place of contact another talker - we have to forward those emails at present - and little extras like youse being able to set up proper profile pages with pictures and so on if you wish.
vBulletin also lets you have those avatars and all that jazz, but I think we might leave all that switched off (it's the puritan in me). All the messages are stored in an openly-specified database struture, so we can still add in things it doesn't do out of the box - like the ebay-style "threads I'm watching" stuff that a few people have asked for. Not sure about displaying "who's online" either. A lot of people seem to find that a bit creepy.
Anyway, I'll give you plenty of notice before we go ahead and make any changes. It will probably mean taking talk down for a few hours - probably overnight one night.
Love,
Tech xxx