On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
So, even though I wanted to get away with using
stackoverflow.com
A bunch of us are on stackoverflow too, and it could use some
more stuff. I like SO for archiving too, even if you get an
answer here, SO is a lot easier to search so copying the answer
to there to be a clean reference for later might be worthwhile.
phpBB
I used to be a pretty heavy phpbb user and the #1 feature I
wished it had was a better email interface. You can turn on
subscriptions and get some notifications, but I wanted it to just
include the text of the post in the email too!
The reason is that I like to keep up on basically all posts. I
don't necessarily read them all, but I do skim everything posted
on the learn, general, and announce groups. Everything.
On a web forum, the time spent clicking and loading links would
actually make that pretty painful (I do still do it on some low
traffic phpbb sites tho), and getting the notifications can have
lag between responding.
With email, I know within a few minutes of a post that it was
there, and I can skim it in a matter of seconds from any location
that I'm online.
I understand though that the casual user isn't interested in
following everything so this isn't as important to everyone
else... but it is a major plus for me.
1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that
you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post
anymore.
I think you meant "editing" ;)
But I didn't like edits on phpbb either because they are really
hard to see. There's no notification of an edit and finding the
before and after difference is just really painful.
So I prefer the follow-up post anyway, unless perhaps it is
within a few minutes and the post hasn't actually been read by
anyone yet. On phpbb, I would proofread stuff with preview before
sending. Here... well, I don't do that, and I think we should
just encourage that by making the "Send" button actually be
"Preview" - force them to see it before hitting the final send.
2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to
read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
Yeah, this is terrible, but it is bad form to over quote anyway,
including on phpbb. You should quote just enough to jog the
reader's memory of the topic, and cut the rest out. If you need
the parent, the "in reply to" link on the side (or in the email)
can pull it back up in full.
So I generally just ignore most quoted things in posts.
3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support.
You can always write *this*. Or [b]this[/b]. It might not be
automatically rendered, but the reader will know what you meant.
4. No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to
post more than 5 lines of code.
So for this, I almost always use ddoc style:
---
code here
---
And again, it isn't automatically rendered, but we know what it
means.
5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be
helpful to communicate problems.
yeah. links to images are ok though.
6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for
threads so we can locate related threads easily.
and I'm meh on this just because I don't think a forum is really
useful for referencing later anyway. There's some value in the
archive if you really want to see people's old arguments, but for
stuff like Q&A, I'd rather copy/paste that end result over to
Stack Overflow.
I would like to enjoy a full joy of using the forum, like you
are having.
So I use the emails for most reading. Only go on the web
interface to post (the email reply thing is buggy. I'd really
rather use it though), or to navigate old stuff/share existing
links.
