Talk to us here!

John Stevenson

Welcome to BikeRadar.

Please post all comments, criticisms and requests regarding the new site and forums here, and not in the other forum areas.

The other 'Office' areas are for their magazines to talk to their readers - this is the best place for you to get our attention.

tihkal

As an interloper from Singletrackworld a couple of observations:

- I like the site as a whole and although I mainly prefer mountain bikes, I like being able to get a mix of stuff on here.

- I don't like not having an overview of all the forums, it means you miss out on stuff because you have been segregated. The best I have come up with is using the "view posts since last visit" option and the refresh button. But this is less than ideal, as getting back to that view after posting is awkward. I'm happy to post into forums by category, as that makes finding posts much easier for people, but reading is a different matter.

Having said that, I shall be hanging around to see what happens as there seems to be promise here, and things seem to be moving :-)

John Stevenson

Hi and welcome, tihkal

I use the 'view posts since last visit' option, and open a new tab for a thread I want to read. Using the 'Reload every...' add-on for Firefox takes care of the need to reload.

Glad you like the mix. You would not believe the discussions we had in the early stages of designing the site about how much people would want to be mixed together or segregated, both in the forums and in the site as a whole. We think we've ended up with a workable middle ground, though no doubt some people disagree.

secondtimeuser

Couple of minor points,

- Having everyone's usernames in all-capitals down the left in threads looks a rubbish and makes some harder to read (eg, DAVESNOTHERE could easily be misread as DaveSnotHere. Which I'm pretty sure he'd object to).

- 255 character limit on signatures. By the time you've got a couple of hyperlinks in there you've only got room for about two words of visible text. Anything that can be done about that or is that a limitation of the forum?

- Quick reply box possible as opposed to having to go to another page to type a response to a thread? Gets to be a bit of a pain rather quickly...

John Stevenson

Hi, secondtimeuser,

I agree, all caps is a bit horrid. I'm campaigning to have the designers reduce their addiction to it, but it sometimes feels like it's easier to kick heroin than for a designer to leave the caps lock key up.

The 255 character limit on sigs is something we can change, I think. That said, you don't need to use BBcode or html to put a link in there, and you could use tinyURL or like that. But I don't see any fundamental objection to longer sigs.

I'll have a look to see if the reply mechanism can be changed, but that may be a fundamental forum feature that we can't change.

Ravenbait

John, why is it that the Terms and Conditions are waived for the MBUK Sandbox only?

That seems a tad unfair.

And in what sense are they waived?

Sam

John Stevenson

That was intended to indicate that the rather raucous behaviour of the MBUK Sandbox was acceptable. However, it was far too broad an exemption, so it's been removed.

snorri

Hi John
It's good to be getting a polite response to our concerns.
I would post a link if I could, but have posted my comments on the "This site is pants", thread(page 2 4down).
Although the last week seems to have been a bit of a PR disaster, I have faith that things will start to improve now.
regards

Big Red S

Couple of bugs/features:

Editing my profile doesn't seem to be saving anything, No error messages either, though, so I could be doing something wrong.

I've got all these IM icons at the bottom of my posts, presumably because I put them into the MBUK forum. Are these now publicly visible? They're not in the boxes in my profile....

yello

Too big and unmanageable for me. I'm finding I have too wade through too many subjects/threads I am not interested in to find the ones I am.

Big Red S

Am I still a mod?

If so, where've you hidden the buttons?

Aunty Rubbish

John Stevenson --> "We think we've ended up with a workable middle ground, though no doubt some people disagree."

Er, beg to differ. As might the many users who have legged it elsewhere or registered their disapproval by other means. You can't afford to pat yourselves on the back until it actually *does* work. And right now, it doesn't.

If you have a common front page for the site then you'll get natural crossover in accordance with what people are interested in. Roadies who ride MTB will pop over to the MTB areas in a way that they wouldn't have before etc. But people like me (100% roadie, ta) have no interest in MTBs. What I want is to be able to click on a 'Road' button on the front page and to be taken to Roadie Land with no sign that MTB World exists. Common page layouts, even common ads but sensible separation between the areas. The current set up just looks as if all the fora have been scraped into a trough together.

Big Red S

The way I'd invisaged it working essentially boiled down to a customised 'active topics' page.

So you pick the forums you're generally interested in, and you then have a home page you go to which, in a similar style to Snitz's Active Topics page, shows you the recent posts in those forums.

Bit of a pain to write, but that's the only way I can see it working. That or merge an awful lot of them and lose members in the process.


I don't have a small screen, but the index page is five screenfulls. That's ginormous.

Aunty Rubbish

S --> "That or merge an awful lot of them and lose members in the process. "

Which is pretty much what has happened.

snorri

Big Red S wrote:

So you pick the forums you're generally interested in, and you then have a home page you go to which, in a similar style to Snitz's Active Topics page, shows you the recent posts in those forums..

Big Red S, I don't know Snitz, but you have described just what i would like to see.

Big Red S

Snitz is a piece of forum software. This is using PHPBB which is another one. There's quite a few - forums are rather difficult to write, and since the vast bulk of the functionality is exactly the same for each one, most sites just run a minor variation of someone else's code.

The old Future sites used Snitz (well, MBUK and WMB certainly did).

On MBUK, you could go to the forum index page at http://mbuk.com/forum/default.asp which presented you with a list of forums. If you went to http://mbuk.com/forum/active.asp It just showed you recently posted in ones. And you could choose the time period and how often it refreshed. You'll still be able to see them there, but they'll have stopped changing since they've locked the forums.

Tw1zzle

john_stevenson wrote:

Hi and welcome, tihkal

I use the 'view posts since last visit' option, and open a new tab for a thread I want to read. Using the 'Reload every...' add-on for Firefox.

Maybe it does in Firefox, but only about 20% of users use that programme

john_stevenson wrote:

That was intended to indicate that the rather raucous behaviour of the MBUK Sandbox was acceptable. However, it was far too broad an exemption, so it's been removed.

If you mean vacuous I'd agree.

I'm sure that given a bit of thought this forum might succeed, but in its present "!I am right, you are wrong" attitude its totally ridiculous.
The punter is always right, regardless if you know they are wrong.

secondtimeuser

Alternating background colours on posts would be nice (a la old forums) to help read things a bit clearer.

=]

John Stevenson

secondtimeuser: "Alternating background colours on posts would be nice (a la old forums) to help read things a bit clearer."

I agree, as it happens (there you go, Twizzle). It's the designers' decision to make, though, not mine. But if I show them a few of the several billion complaints about the colour scheme I think they'll see things our way.

philip99a

The text is too small

snorri

john_stevenson wrote:

But if I show them a few of the several billion complaints about the colour scheme I think they'll see things our way.

On another thread we have a moderator complaining that multiple complaints are not wanted.
Some inconsistency here I am afraid.

blacksun

A search feature that searched the forum and not the site would be handy.

John Stevenson

Blacksun - Agreed. It's on the list,

secondtimeuser

And having General above OT on the main list would seem to make more sense...

Samtheman1k

I think it would be great if we could search the bike routes and filter into on and off road categories.

guilliano

Having Race, Downhill, XC etc forums just extends the forum index and makes it a nightmare to navigate. Why not have a Ride forum, with sub forums in that link for all the different riding styles? I'm getting pretty bored of scrolling down to the middle of a 40 foot long front page all the time. The fact that the majority of the WMB forum members have left for pastures new should say a lot about how we feel

Anonymous

Big Red S wrote:

Am I still a mod?

If so, where've you hidden the buttons?

Same here am I?
I used to be one for the Jumping Forum on MBUK, who do I need to contact about getting this back?

Cab

Well, its worth a shot...

My username on c+ was Cab. I use the name 'cos its what people call me. Simple, I know, but it suits me to go by one name.

Over here for some reason I'm CABCP. I hate that. I don't want to be that.

I can find no posts by anyone else called Cab. So my name has been guzumped by someone who hasn't contributed, presumably from another board.

Simply put, that sucks. I'm not going to change my name, its my own name or the highway; I haven't had a clear answer to stating that over on the old c+ area. Just make it clear; can I have my own name back or is that it?

Big Red S

john_stevenson wrote:

Blacksun - Agreed. It's on the list,

Now, this isn't supposed to be a dig, but I can't help but wonder why so much of the list was left until /after/ the public release?

I'd have presumed that, given the massive vocal resistance (on MBUK certainly) to this change, you'd wait until the forum was exactly perfect and how you wanted it before the release.
I'd have also expected some kind of public 'look and tell us how you thing it works' kind of beta test - so the others are still functioning and you can recieve criticism from users without them wandering off.

But that's probably just my naivete kicking in again,

pabloweaver

really find the way the forum links work , eg : i go to forum button for road cycling ...lists all the RELEVANT forums , beginners , cake stop etc ( just like C+ used to ) and then if i return back to the forums section of " go back " i have to return to the main page and go through the whole subsection thing again . i realise this is multi use cycling site but surely the " linked " pages in partcular the forums should not be such a hassle ( albeit a minor one i agree) to navigate through . also ...and this may be me not looking hard enough ... but is it possible to " bookmark " certain topics with the forums so that they can be accessed a lot quicker .

ta !

Fab Foodie

Sadly BikeRadar, I think this thread/post is too late.

The chance to capture people's ideas/dislikes and constructive criticism was needed on day 1 when we were "dumped"-over here.
I think there would have been more tolerance if there had been more communication prior too and during the change.
Even now, some kind of daily report of what has been noted/captured, what will be done, likely time-scales etc. Then people would be more sympathetic.
Right now it's like being on a station miles from home and not knowing what's happening, people are bound to get irritated.

In the long-run it won't matter a damn, but the bedrock of support which made C+ (and possibly the other forums) so great is/has disappeared.

The main problem here so far has been PR. There was not enough info prior to change or researching opinions, there was not enough warning about when this would occur and there has been little positive information about what's happening since we've moved.

You need some quick-wins to stop further migration, that is if migration is a concern. Maybe it will be for your advertisers.