Game Development Community

paged forums

by Kyle Carter · in Site Feedback · 04/25/2002 (10:01 pm) · 5 replies

As the forums become more and more popular, they get longer and longer. It's getting unpleasant to scroll alllll the way down just to see a short comment on an interesting thread. Probably been said before, but...

I think we need paged threads, where messages are broken up into groups of 10 or 20. It would be even better if the unread posts links took you to the page of the first unread message when you clicked 'em.

Thanks

Edit: The last ten sounds good, too - anything that makes it so I don't have to scroll past 50 already-read posts would be awesome. Maybe a "onlyshownew" option?

#1
04/25/2002 (10:02 pm)
Or maybe they would show the ten most recent post in the thread. Hey, it might save GG some bandwidth as well.
#2
04/26/2002 (9:29 am)
Our forum use has increased exponentially and many of the assumptions we made early on just don’t hold now. We have been discussing many things that would make the forums more useful as a resource and easier to browse. Here is an example of a few things we have talked about…

1) Optimized Full text search
2) Ability to subscribe to just the topics you are interested in
3) Hierarchical topic tree (not the fixed area->forum->thread we have now)
4) Ability to have multiple topic trees (ie GG tree, Realm Wars tree, Game trees, etc)
5) Maybe have moderators (haven’t needed them yet because our community ROCKS!)
6) Sticky posts or notices
7) ???

At the moment I am up to eye balls working on the Task/bug tracking system for Realm Wars and the Torque. When that project is done I will be moving onto the Play Games site for a while. But I would like to gather any well thought out ideas for the uber forums wish list.

Post your ideas here.

--Rick
#3
04/26/2002 (9:38 am)
Full-text search would help a lot - I understand searches only look in the subject right now?

If it was proving to be too much of a CPU hog, you could restrict it to licensees only. I know that wouldn't be popular with some people, but I'd hazard a guess that the licensees are the people who would benefit most from full-text searching.

Of course, for all I know the licensees might already make up the majority of forum users anyway..
#4
04/26/2002 (9:46 am)
MySQL just added Full Text search in version 3.23 and are providing boolean full text searches in 4.0.1. The 4.0.1 boolean full text searches are similiar to how Google works. I would kind of like to wait to add the search feature until MySQL 4.0.1 is production stable.

for more information MySQL Full-text Search

--Rick
#5
04/26/2002 (9:55 am)
The #1 most helpful thing would be a link on each thread's page that would take you to the first unread post in that thread. UBB has this (Tribalwar.com is a good example, just click on the little triangles next to threads)

Josh