Things that would improve this site

dannygcp

Many of us have had a good moan about the site, lets see if we can come up with some suggestions for improving it. Here's a few for starters.

1. Make the type size bigger, and make sure the whole site conforms to good web design standards (e.g. http://www.w3.org/WAI/). Incidently I think there may be a specific problem with viewing the site in Firefox. All the text seems smaller when viewed through the (default) Firefox settings than if viewed through Internet Explorer.

2. Enable users to easily filter out the forums they are not interested in, or at least make it easier to go to the ones you are interested in. One of the big gripes for old C+ members is that we have to scroll through a long list of MTB stuff we are not interested in to get to the Road forums.

3. Start tackling some of the annoying bugs on the site - e.g. the quotes feature just sticks in the word "/quote" rather than displaying text in some form of quotes as it did on the old C+ forum. And why not publish a list of known bugs so at least we know you know about them and might be planning to do something.

4. See if you can have some clearer icons along the side of each forum. A lot of them look pretty much the same to me, whereas the ones on the old C+ forum were much clearer.

5. In future consult forum users before you make changes - a lot of the fuss we have seen might have been avoided if you had set up a proper Beta site in parallel with the existing forums and then got some feedback before you went live!

dannygcp

And another thing...can we have our spell checker back?

Big Red S

dannygcp wrote:

Incidently I think there may be a specific problem with viewing the site in Firefox. All the text seems smaller when viewed through the (default) Firefox settings than if viewed through Internet Explorer.

I think that's more a problem for the IE and/or FF dev teams than for the forum admins. But both have text zoom functions...


I think most of the problems have already been rendered irrelevant - most of the people they're likely to lose through doing this badly have already gone. Anyone they gain in the meantime clearly likes this form of 'design'.

Sheepish

Some sort of democracy would be nice...

vermooten

Looks like they're using the old version of phpBB which doesn't really work very well. Another sign that the forum is being run by 3rd rate amateurs.

Sheepish

yeah, ive found somehwere else

John Stevenson

dannygcp - thanks for the constructive criticism.

Bigger type size is happening, though if you're using Firefox you can use this interim fix:

http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtop ... t=12535564

Organisation that helps people find just the areas they're interested in will happen too. Not immediately as it's not trivial, but it will happen.

The 'quote' bug is a consequence of BB code being turned off. That too, will be fixed. This week, I hope.

Spell checking. I don't know how the old forums handled this but IE users can install IEspell - www.iespell.com - while Firefox users have spell checking built in.

vermooten - we're using phpBB 2. That's the current stable release version.

Big Red S

Now, this might sound rude (it argualbly is) but what /are/ you doing?

From where I'm standing, to be blunt, it looks like we have a quickly hacked together forum released a while before it was really ready and with no news of what's being fixed and when. This could be a piece of psychological research into what happens when you dissapoint people.

Now, I'm fairly certain it will be fixed, and don't honestly think it will take that much time, but I can't see any progress, and can't help but see the reasons why so many people are leaving.

John Stevenson

Big Red S

I'm doing the only thing I can do, as an *editor* on this site, which is to bombard the development and design teams with change requests.

As in all large companies, there's a process for these things, which means that change isn't as quick as it would be if, say, I was a hobbyist running this site

As I've said elsewhere, our dev & design guys are mortified at the reaction to the new forums, and things will be fixed. I'm as impatient as you to see that happen.

Big Red S

Ah, fair enough.

I don't suppose it would be possible to get out of the dev team what they think they might have managed by the end of tomorrow, would it?

More important than the feeling of no progression is the feeling of no commitment. Sure, I've only really been on here since midday yesterday, but this evening it seems much the same as yesterday evening, despite the droves of members leaving and it generally looking unfinished and unready. I think the hottest topic on the forum is probably alternative forums.

I'm sure what the dev guys are doing is frightfully important, but as long as it's not the forums, the members are going to feel abandoned and go somewhere else - forums only work when there's a feeling of community.

No-one's even said how this thing's going to end up working once it's been fixed. It's clearly not going to be anything like it was first claimed to be when this merger was announced, and it's looking less and less like there's any kind of coherent plan.

Yorkshireman

john_stevenson wrote:

dannygcp - thanks for the constructive criticism.

Bigger type size is happening, though if you're using Firefox you can use this interim fix:

http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtop ... t=12535564

Organisation that helps people find just the areas they're interested in will happen too. Not immediately as it's not trivial, but it will happen.

The 'quote' bug is a consequence of BB code being turned off. That too, will be fixed. This week, I hope.

Spell checking. I don't know how the old forums handled this but IE users can install IEspell - www.iespell.com - while Firefox users have spell checking built in.

vermooten - we're using phpBB 2. That's the current stable release version.

I use Google toolbar. This has spell checker (UK dictionary), Search, Pop up Blocker, Auto link, Auto form fill and loads of other options. It doesnt seem to cause any problems - just sits there below the address bar in IE. I`m sure everything will get sorted in time. Are my eyes playing tricks, or does the background colour now alternate white /blue between posts? If so, that must be an improvement (or was it always so?). Anyway - Keep up the good work lads, and thanks for your efforts.
Ah! I see there is no alternating background - but I`m sure there was just before I did this edit (I went into preview to check what other posts were there) :? .

fishyweb

There doesn't seem to be a Search facility for this forum. Can one be added please?

John Stevenson

Fishyweb - That too has been requested.

Big Red S - I'm hoping to find out this morning what they're planning on giving us over the next few days.

Yorkshireman - thanks. I don't think we have alternating colours yet though. Unless they're not showing in my browser. They alternate in the 'Topic Review' window that you get when you post a message though.

Yorkshireman

fishyweb wrote:

There doesn't seem to be a Search facility for this forum. Can one be added please?

Top r/h corner (or see my post ^ re Google toolbar).

Yorkshireman

john_stevenson wrote:

Yorkshireman - thanks. I don't think we have alternating colours yet though. Unless they're not showing in my browser. They alternate in the 'Topic Review' window that you get when you post a message though.

Just spotted it (during my last post) :oops: :roll: . Time for a mug of tea I reckon .

dannygcp

And some more annoyances...

1. Internet Explorer doesn't seem to remember my logon details, although it did with the old C+ forum, so I have to enter my logon name and password every time I want to post on the site.

2. If you are in a forum, or thread, then have to enter your logon details you are then taken to the BikeRadar home page, and not returned to the point you started from. Given the number of forums and threads on this site it can take a while to get back to where you started from.

Big Red S

Yorkshireman wrote:

fishyweb wrote:

There doesn't seem to be a Search facility for this forum. Can one be added please?

Top r/h corner (or see my post ^ re Google toolbar).

No, the top right corner searches the whole site - I've not yet managed a search that finds any of what's in the forum.
I've tried using google's site:bikeradar.com/forum but that doesnt yield much either.

'course, it's entirely likely that I'm just searching for topics that got deleted in the changeover.

Hairy Jock

john_stevenson wrote:

dannygcp - thanks for the constructive criticism.

Spell checking. I don't know how the old forums handled this but IE users can install IEspell - www.iespell.com - while Firefox users have spell checking built in.

For those who are using Firefox, dictionaries are here.[/url]