[Fool's design]

Some thoughts about...

...member signatures.
Even though you can have a signature in your profile, it will not be visible below your posts. This is because signatures attached to each post can be very distracting and repetitive when reading a topic. Upon reading a post, the signature looks almost like the next post or even a commercial banner depending on the type of the signature. Unwillingly the brain will start reading it and it can be very tiring and distractive from the main subject after a while.

There are some thoughts to put the signatures in the right side of each post below the posters' names. Perhaps it will be added in the future. Meanwhile, feel free to add your signatures in your profiles if you wish. They are still visible in the profile page.

...topic subscriptions.
Being able to subscribe to a topic or an entire forum is great! Well, at first. The more the forums grow, the more useless this function becomes. Lots of old users and/or dead emails start to clog up the system. Subscription works fine if you have for example a podcast where the "content" is not on the main site, although even there an RSS feed is a lot better.

Another issue with this function is that because"users" are inherently "lazy" (those who build software know what it means), this function will help keeping them away from the website and not visiting it often. We have nothing against such users, we do not mind them at all but these kinds of "remote" users are not something we actively seek or care about. That's why the subscription function is disabled. If you care about this place, you should be actively visiting it and not "remotely".


...private messaging.
This too will start to clog up the system after a while. Lots of junk gathers in the database. For private talk between members, they can just visit each other's profiles and use whatever is there like a website or an instant messaging address. For a group chat? Just start a thread!


...it is not possible to edit your posts.
This is to prevent "rogue elements" to delete data or in case someone's account gets hacked. There is also the issue of quotes where if someone quotes someone else and the original post gets edited, the quote could suddenly become wrong. Unlike 1984, the past cannot be changed here!

Addendum:
If our Web site seems to not be working properly due to you using an old version of the browser of your choice, we do not care. At all. For example, if you feel that it is prudent of you to stay in an old Internet Explorer version, say 6.x, don't come nagging to us that this Web site is not working in it. Update your browser. In such cases, it is not the Web site which is broken but it is you that are breaking the Web. Seriously.

[Drugwash]

I see mail notifications could be a problem generally, but still, there might be a way to limit this function as opposed to not allowing it at all.

Allow only one notification per topic, for the first reply posted in that topic after the user logged out and only for registered users (obviously).

Or, if that's still too much for you, then only send one single notification when a reply has been posted in any of the subscribed topics. I mean, just remind the user "you should go back there, there's news".

I already said I have a very bad memory and usually forget about this place for weeks. May as well be Alzheimer's, for what I know. So at least a kick would help remind me this place exists.

Thank you for considering my suggestions.

[Fool's design]

You have some interesting ideas there and we do understand your situation but sadly, they are impossible for us to implement at this time. We use phpBB ready-made forum software and we have not developed this software in-house. Therefore, such alterations are almost impossible or it would take weeks.

[!]

@Drugwash:

Can't you just use a reminder in your calendar software? I mean, for example Outlook has this thing which can remind you of stuff "Once every day, week, month etc." with no "end date" to it. I suppose most other calendar softwares also have this functionality. Perhaps just a reminder in there would solve your issue?

As for me, I use FireFox so I have this Web site as an opened tab all the time. I do this with many Web sites which I visit regularly.

I'm unsure which OS you use but you could also pin a Web site in the taskbar and/or quick launch section.

[Drugwash]

"Almost impossible" means it can be done. Haven't you started yet...?
Just kiddin'. Don't waste your time for me, unless other users would want this as well.

@ "!": I'm not using any kind of calendar, although I probably should. Used to run one built my myself but it has bugs and limitations and never got around fixing them.

Moreover, I've already explained in another thread that my connection is mostly limited in speed and when it's not, constantly refreshing web pages (that may contain large graphics) would negatively impact my monthly download quota.

Therefore an (unread) e-mail would remind me of having to check back here, since the e-mail application (POP Peeper) is running all day long and I would then choose the appropriate moment to visit the forums.

As much as I dislike anything other than my old Win98SE which is still up and running, current Internet hastily "upgraded" to HTML5 which simply kills IE6 and other 9x-compatible browsers are nowhere to be found, while those that may work with the help of additional modules such as KernelEx are extremely resource hungry and bring a 9x system to its knees. For that reason alone I am forced to use Firefox on a XP system.

Few years ago I used to have about 15-20 open tabs with all kinds of pages in SlimBrowser under 98SE on the old 667MHz Pentium III and that was no problem whatsoever. Now, if I open 10 tabs in Firefox and leave it running over night, I'd have to wait 15 minutes to completely shut it down and it would usually require a reboot. And this is a 1500MHz AMD Sempron.

[!]

Cool, I too, had built a nice cool calendar program. It looked really cool but I was too lazy to continue developing it. Now I just use Outlook.

I'm on a one year old PC, 8 threaded 3.6GHz CPU and 32GB RAM and STILL hate all these "modern and new" Web sites frankly. This HTML5 is very nice but everyone is now using it without knowing WHEN to use it. Like using a massive hammer to kill a mosquito. Then they use all kinds of completely moronic JavaScript frameworks (jquery for example) and implement a ton of 95% completely useless unnecessary functions for regular sites just to show some text!

I had to kill them all with fire in FireFox! Now I use noscript and some other Adobe Flash killer extension to be able to surf the Web and have more than just a few tabs open. I mean, I don't want 40 tabs to max my CPUs all the time. These fucking morons who call themselves "webmasters" don't know jack shit. I actually ranted about "webmasters" SOMEWHERE here but I can't find it right now. *lol*

HTML5 is nice and all but using it just to show some text is moronic. Some Web sites mix content with all sorts of fucked'up shit too, like this one: http://www.theverge.com. Just visit it with full JavaScript enabled, scroll down and your eyes will puke. They do their utmost to mess with the visitors' minds. To completely distract you from the actual content you are trying to read.

Sad thing is, sites like "The Verge" have huge amount of visitors. It just shows the state of mind for most people. Complete, utter fools.

Anyway, long story short, I kill JavaScript for ALL Web sites and enable it mostly only for shopping sites. If a news site requires me to have JavaScript enabled just to read it, I simply don't visit it, well, unless the JavaScript it uses doesn't do auto reloads and show me a ton of crap. Very few Web sites actually use JavaScript in a good way.

[Fool's design]

Speaking of JavaScript, we are working on a news section which will only work well with JavaScript enabled. Oh, the irony!

[!]

*lol* yeah yeah, I KNOW... I AM THE ONE MAKING IT. Don't worry, this section will NOT keep eating your CPU automatically. I use JavaScript to load the news from an external module and to alter the looks of the forum section for the news a little. Nothing too fancy. I'm unsure when it will be done, however. I'm lazy and slow.

[Drugwash]

I got a truckload of add-ons in Firefox (NoScript, Ghostery, Cool Java, RIP - to name a few) just to get to the functionality natively provided some time ago by SlimBrowser. But that one also got crazy, broke 9x compatibility (and I stopped maintaining the Romanian translation for it, in return). It's IE-based anyway, so even with IE8 in XP one cannot see UTF-16/UTF-32 characters properly and lots of other rendering issues. Had to ditch SB on all my machines, after many years of being faithful to it.

I hate JavaScript just the same, but most of all I hate Flash. Actually, it's always disabled through Cool Java, but goddamn HTML5 sometimes still pops up embedded Flash and it drives me crazy because usually I only go to YouTube to download certain videos (through some nice add-ons and a Greasemonkey js script ) since my connection is usually crappy as mentioned before and that Flash starting on a 14kB/s connection slows down the machine dramatically.
And when bandwidth is not capped, I hate to waste it by the page automatically downloading part or all of the video before I manage to add the right link to the download manager.

Anyway, these new "features" of HTML5 have been designed specially to be able to force advertising (and virii?) down our throats. And machines are being slowed down by all these add-ons that try to clean up the code before it's rendered, when all that crap shouldn't have been there in the first place.

[!]

...Anyway, these new "features" of HTML5 have been designed specially to be able to force advertising (and virii?) down our throats. And machines are being slowed down by all these add-ons that try to clean up the code before it's rendered, when all that crap shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Very true. I especially hate the HTML5 video tag where it can auto start and at least for now, I have not found a way to "kill it" like I kill flash. As you say, it's all about advertising and not about the users at all in my humble opinion. All about the big money as usual.