Forum Inspection Report and suggested implementations to correct deficiencies

[wizer]

There are several issues that need to be addressed in order to attract members and increase forum traffic. 

The frustration with getting my old account up and running is detailed in another thread, along with the hoops that a guest must go through in order to make a single post. They won't be covered here other than to repeat that those issues are primarily in regard to 2 ambiguous challenge questions and the invisible text problem (detailed below). Suffice it to say this may discourage old members from returning and discourage guest posting. +1 to DKG for quickly attending to my issue by sending a temporary password although I wonder how it was confirmed that I was the real account holder before providing full access.

< wizer takes out his clipboard and points to item number 1 >

Minimizing the Shout Box doesn't stick, it reappears the next time the home page is loaded. The font in the Shout Box is much larger than the font elsewhere on the forum and is very distracting.

The forum often lags, sometimes taking several seconds to load. Other websites and forums load normally during these time periods, confirming that this is a forum specific internal problem, possibly related to the Shout Box. Consider disabling the Shout Box temporarily as a test, or permanently. It doesn't appear to be used much and Shout Boxes compete with the forum for posts, thus decreasing desirable traffic. The lag problem also occurs on certain links, such as when clicking on a link in the Notifications box, the lag is so bad that one may think that the link is broken.

When you tag a user, rather than their name showing up it's a mini avatar which creates an unwanted double space and interrupts the flow of the words, which makes it more difficult to read the post and depending on the avatar it may be difficult to identify which user is tagged.

Theme specific issues in the default "Evolution" include invisible text in some dialog boxes. When I click on the "Alert" icon" sometimes (not always) the text in the notification is visible but upon a mouse hover it turns into a white box with dashed lines in it. When creating this post, the Subject line appears blank but there is text there, seen only with a mouse click, hold, and drag across the box. This phenomena occurs in other dialog boxes as well. It made posting as a guest and registering nearly impossible. It is not present in most of the other available themes which were also the subject of this inspection (see below).

When you click on the box to choose "more" smileys the box with additional smileys doesn't go away until you reply to the post, nor can it be moved from the center of the screen where it blocks most of it. There doesn't seem to be a way to close it.

<t></t> appears at the bottom of seemingly random posts and does not provide any useful function. It gives one the impression that the forum software has not been properly coded, eroding user confidence.

Many members make use of the "Recent Posts" to view a few pages worth of active threads and consider replying to them. On the home screen there are only 10 recent posts which at the time of inspection went back 8-12 hours. It isn't obvious to the casual user that clicking on "Recent Posts" brings up a link to access a more extensive history of active posts. It should read Recent Posts (more..) with the underline so it's clear that it's a clickable link.

Themes:

Lunarfall Dark theme: When clicking "view most recent posts on this forum" to bring up pages, replies are light text on a light background and difficult to read.

SMF Default Curve 2: occasional invisible text in while boxes such as profile settings. Quick edit boxes are blank unless the text is highlighted by sweeping the mouse over it making editing extremely difficult.

Dark Caramel- seems ok except, well, it's BROWN.

Repulse: The white background is too stark and combined with the large amount of blank space between items requiring excessive scrolling plus the overlapping text on top of icons it's difficult to read. It should really be named "Repulsive".

Boru_RC4: Broken. Only 1 board visible, no recent posts, lots of information not displayed.

Fusion: dark black theme with stark horizontal lines dividing each of the most recent replies. Lots of orange boxes makes it about right if every day is Halloween. When reading a thread, random replies have a light yellow background making the light text difficult to read.

SociWT: Style 1 (dark): dark text in dark boxes difficult to read without highlighting. Style 2 (light). Same issue with text appearing to be invisible and must be highlighted to see it. In both style 1 and 2 icons such as subforum headers and avatars of users who last replied are doubled giving a chaotic disorganized look.

Styele-V4. Dark theme. User avatars are doubled in the "last replied" list. Notably the text does not seem to be invisible which is seen with other dark themes however due to the small number of sub forums the list of recent posts on the right side extends way past the forum subcategories list leaving a huge black area in the center of the screen when the recent posts list is scrolled.

[DKG]

There are several issues that need to be addressed in order to attract members and increase forum traffic. 

The frustration with getting my old account up and running is detailed in another thread, along with the hoops that a guest must go through in order to make a single post. They won't be covered here other than to repeat that those issues are primarily in regard to 2 ambiguous challenge questions and the invisible text problem (detailed below). Suffice it to say this may discourage old members from returning and discourage guest posting. +1 to DKG for quickly attending to my issue by sending a temporary password although I wonder how it was confirmed that I was the real account holder before providing full access.

< wizer takes out his clipboard and points to item number 1 >

Minimizing the Shout Box doesn't stick, it reappears the next time the home page is loaded. The font in the Shout Box is much larger than the font elsewhere on the forum and is very distracting.

The forum often lags, sometimes taking several seconds to load. Other websites and forums load normally during these time periods, confirming that this is a forum specific internal problem, possibly related to the Shout Box. Consider disabling the Shout Box temporarily as a test, or permanently. It doesn't appear to be used much and Shout Boxes compete with the forum for posts, thus decreasing desirable traffic. The lag problem also occurs on certain links, such as when clicking on a link in the Notifications box, the lag is so bad that one may think that the link is broken.

When you tag a user, rather than their name showing up it's a mini avatar which creates an unwanted double space and interrupts the flow of the words, which makes it more difficult to read the post and depending on the avatar it may be difficult to identify which user is tagged.

Theme specific issues in the default "Evolution" include invisible text in some dialog boxes. When I click on the "Alert" icon" sometimes (not always) the text in the notification is visible but upon a mouse hover it turns into a white box with dashed lines in it. When creating this post, the Subject line appears blank but there is text there, seen only with a mouse click, hold, and drag across the box. This phenomena occurs in other dialog boxes as well. It made posting as a guest and registering nearly impossible. It is not present in most of the other available themes which were also the subject of this inspection (see below).

When you click on the box to choose "more" smileys the box with additional smileys doesn't go away until you reply to the post, nor can it be moved from the center of the screen where it blocks most of it. There doesn't seem to be a way to close it.

<t></t> appears at the bottom of seemingly random posts and does not provide any useful function. It gives one the impression that the forum software has not been properly coded, eroding user confidence.

Many members make use of the "Recent Posts" to view a few pages worth of active threads and consider replying to them. On the home screen there are only 10 recent posts which at the time of inspection went back 8-12 hours. It isn't obvious to the casual user that clicking on "Recent Posts" brings up a link to access a more extensive history of active posts. It should read Recent Posts (more..) with the underline so it's clear that it's a clickable link.

Themes:

Lunarfall Dark theme: When clicking "view most recent posts on this forum" to bring up pages, replies are light text on a light background and difficult to read.

SMF Default Curve 2: occasional invisible text in while boxes such as profile settings. Quick edit boxes are blank unless the text is highlighted by sweeping the mouse over it making editing extremely difficult.

Dark Caramel- seems ok except, well, it's BROWN.

Repulse: The white background is too stark and combined with the large amount of blank space between items requiring excessive scrolling plus the overlapping text on top of icons it's difficult to read. It should really be named "Repulsive".

Boru_RC4: Broken. Only 1 board visible, no recent posts, lots of information not displayed.

Fusion: dark black theme with stark horizontal lines dividing each of the most recent replies. Lots of orange boxes makes it about right if every day is Halloween. When reading a thread, random replies have a light yellow background making the light text difficult to read.

SociWT: Style 1 (dark): dark text in dark boxes difficult to read without highlighting. Style 2 (light). Same issue with text appearing to be invisible and must be highlighted to see it. In both style 1 and 2 icons such as subforum headers and avatars of users who last replied are doubled giving a chaotic disorganized look.

Styele-V4. Dark theme. User avatars are doubled in the "last replied" list. Notably the text does not seem to be invisible which is seen with other dark themes however due to the small number of sub forums the list of recent posts on the right side extends way past the forum subcategories list leaving a huge black area in the center of the screen when the recent posts list is scrolled.

Too many items to respond to at this time.

I will address a couple of them though.

Our speed has actually improved slightly from where it was a month ago.

And we are the last forum that still has guest posting at all. There are no plans at this time to make it easier so one particular cognitively challenged septugenarian in Costa Rica can spam it with everybody is fat and broke. Basically we only keep it around for one person who does not want to use his handle.

[wizer]

Our speed has actually improved slightly from where it was a month ago.

And we are the last forum that still has guest posting at all. There are no plans at this time to make it easier so one particular cognitively challenged septugenarian in Costa Rica can spam it with everybody is fat and broke. Basically we only keep it around for one person who does not want to use his handle.

The speed increase from a month ago is a curiosity but not a solution. It makes me wonder how slow it was before and how much that would have discouraged members from posting.

Without viewing forum data stats my guess at the culprit being the ShoutBox seems reinforced as I spend time on the forum and notice it's the last thing to load each time the forum is refreshed.

I can't even begin to wrap my head around that last statement in your quote.

You keep the guest posting around... for ONE member? Who could easily just register an anonymous account and log on?

[DKG]

The speed increase from a month ago is a curiosity but not a solution. It makes me wonder how slow it was before and how much that would have discouraged members from posting.

Without viewing forum data stats my guess at the culprit being the ShoutBox seems reinforced as I spend time on the forum and notice it's the last thing to load each time the forum is refreshed.

I can't even begin to wrap my head around that last statement in your quote.

You keep the guest posting around... for ONE member? Who could easily just register an anonymous account and log on?

Yes, we keep guest posting around for one person who has a mod handle here. I know it seems a bit odd.Most guest posters are East European spammers or a couple of people posting gross images.

I suggested before I owned this forum going to an all guest posting format with no handles, but it was not a popular opinion.

[wizer]

Yes, we keep guest posting around for one person who has a mod handle here. I know it seems a bit odd.Most guest posters are East European spammers or a couple of people posting gross images.

I suggested before I owned this forum going to an all guest posting format with no handles, but it was not a popular opinion.

Yes you clearly stated that you keep the guest posting around for one person who wishes to remain anonymous and not have their posts connected to their other user ID.

I replied that I can't wrap my head around why you'd keep such a (useless and spam promoting) system in place for ONE member when the easiest (and obvious) solution would be to have that member simply register an alternate user ID from which to post with.

It's like saying "this one person doesn't like to drive in traffic so every day we close the highway for an hour so they can have it all to themselves".

[DKG]

Yes you clearly stated that you keep the guest posting around for one person who wishes to remain anonymous and not have their posts connected to their other user ID.

I replied that I can't wrap my head around why you'd keep such a (useless and spam promoting) system in place for ONE member when the easiest (and obvious) solution would be to have that member simply register an alternate user ID from which to post with.

It's like saying "this one person doesn't like to drive in traffic so every day we close the highway for an hour so they can have it all to themselves".

It's strange. I agree.

[Oliver the Second]

There are several issues that need to be addressed in order to attract members and increase forum traffic. 

Oh great, now Joe has gone from impersonating Wizer to impersonating Martini 

[wizer]

Oh great, now Joe has gone from impersonating Wizer to impersonating Martini 

Have you seen my latest podcast? If not go check it out it's the best podcast. But it may load slowly because I have 50 million followers even though my voice is weird and squeaky. Now that I'm here this forum is going to rock with all the people that follow me wherever I go.

[Biggie Smiles]

The speed thing I had noticed as pages are taking longer than they should to load

this is an issue DKG has to take up with Jaguar as I can see no OS or app issues causing these issues. It's more than likely a disk subsystem issue

The email problem has been traced back to a lack of DNS entries which I must get into the domain registrar to resolve. I currently do not have access there.

[Biggie Smiles]

Yes you clearly stated that you keep the guest posting around for one person who wishes to remain anonymous and not have their posts connected to their other user ID.

I replied that I can't wrap my head around why you'd keep such a (useless and spam promoting) system in place for ONE member when the easiest (and obvious) solution would be to have that member simply register an alternate user ID from which to post with.

It's like saying "this one person doesn't like to drive in traffic so every day we close the highway for an hour so they can have it all to themselves".

Guest posting is currently approval only so we rid ourselves of the junk posting submitted by idiots like Eddie and a few of the dolts slithering through from BowelFunctions Factory

[wizer]

The speed thing I had noticed as pages are taking longer than they should to load

I suspect the Shout Box more and more. I notice it's not only the last thing to load but even right up to the last moment that circular thing is spinning in the upper left corner.

[wizer]

Guest posting is currently approval only so we rid ourselves of the junk posting submitted by idiots like Eddie and a few of the dolts slithering through from BowelFunctions Factory

I was told by a moderator that the guest posting is only active to satisfy the needs of one member, a moderator who doesn't want to post under their regular ID.

[DKG]

The speed thing I had noticed as pages are taking longer than they should to load

this is an issue DKG has to take up with Jaguar as I can see no OS or app issues causing these issues. It's more than likely a disk subsystem issue

The email problem has been traced back to a lack of DNS entries which I must get into the domain registrar to resolve. I currently do not have access there.

I find it is not as slow as it was a month ago. But, if it does get slower, contact Jaguar to find out what is causing it?

I thought you had access to the domain registrar?

[wizer]

The RULES subforum has only 2 threads each with only 1 post. One is the forum terms of service, and the other is about an amended rule in the forum terms of service. Rather than a separate post to amend a rule, just change the rule in the other thread and delete the 2nd thread. 

So in effect, there's an entire sub forum on the home page for 2 threads and 2 posts, that should be 1 thread and 1 post that could easily just be a link at the bottom of the page, it's not like anyone actually reads it anyway. If a link is problematic then just move it to one of the other sub forums and make it a sticky.

[Prof Emeritus at Fawk U]

Is the quality of the porn going to be improved?