Blog/Forum Issues

Avatars are not being displayed.:woohoo:

There is no facility to delete an erroneous comment. I accidentally started a thread “Antigravity” when I was trying to comment on an article and can find no way to delete that thread, although I guess it could be a fun thread.

Over at the old site, it has a link pointing to this new site front-page, but the link is getting 404 error

edit to add that in the Lifeboat section, the folders are missing for Education and Security.

The “read more” has nothing more to read. It just flips to a different layout.

How do I include the smileys into the text?

What is “bbCode help – Tip: bbCode can be used on selected text”?

Why don’t I have a Karma + or – like you?

clicking on “last post” only brings me to ashvin answer on bbcode.

This post should increase the counter on “answer”

hombre,

I had that same “not everones here together” feeling at first.

I find that going into the forum and then clicking on “Recent Topics” gives the feel of a one homogenous blog, but just with several conversations more focussed on a given topic.

The “Recent Topics” list orders the commented threads chronologically, most recently commented thread being on top, so it sort of gives you a “what topic is hot” report as well.

You can also start your own thread on any given topic( within reason ).

In general, the more I use it the better it looks. Well done TAE team.

Even working perfectly a bunch of comment threads on specific topics is less attractive to me than the old comment threads. The obvious reason for me is that it is impossible to summarize a bunch of concurrent threads. That difficulty aside I still prefer a single thread. The old site felt like a community because I could go there and easily see all the comments. I might skip some I was less interested in but overall it was like going to Cheers; We were all in it together, there was a great cast of characters and everybody knew my name. Where does one now go to see what El G or Greenpa or Gravity has to say today possibly related to none of the current articles? Breaking things up by topic is great for information retrival but that is not the primary reason I went to TAE. If I just wanted the info I would go to Wikipedia, CNN and ZeroHedge. But if I wanted thoughtful analysis with community I went to TAE (BTW, try reading the ZH comments some time. Heaven forbid TAE comments should devolve to that brawl).

My suggestion is that the forums be turned into a Wiki where people don’t comment but rather contribute so that over time meaningful articles on things like water storage develop (This seems more useful to me than a comment thread about water storage anyway). This would develop a truly valuable resource and given the expertise of the board would probably be of high quality. For comments I suggest that TAE return to a single, easily accessible comment thread for feature articles and maybe none for commentary articles. This would recapture the sense of community that I enjoy and more importantly, this would support my addiction to compulsive summarization.

Thanks.

I agree with TAE Summary. having just a single comment thread is of paramount importance IMO. fragmentation bad, claustrophobic family spats good. technically, navigating between several threads, particularly on a phone, doesn’t compare to just refreshing the page. the thread doesn’t even need to be attached to the feature articles and commentary; those could just be announced with a comment in the unified comment section, and the thread rolled over every, say, 200 comments. lifeboat comments could be copied by the author to the main thread as a courtesy, or summarized if they are too long.

thanks for all the hard work 🙂

Is there a way to get an email for a new commentary or feature? This would save unnecessary visits.

Maybe server limitations on the number of emails that can be sent out prevent this being possible, but it would be a nice feature.

The page numbering feature for the forums is not working properly for me at least. Safari Mac 10.6.8.

Smilies not working for me.

Ash

Thanks for hard work – its not easy setting up these blogs

2 questions

1. it is still not possible to edit – User Profile
2. How do you revert the page format to the “original” once you have the “read more” format.

When I click on the “Karma -/+” or the “Thank You” button, the screen jumps to the top of the page.

And, I find that the articles have 2 page formats. When I click on “read more” on the “nice looking” page format, it sends me to the same article formatted as a forum post. So I wait for that to load but there isn’t any more infomation, just a different layout.

As for BBcode, I don’t care for it. I’ve seen it used in forums before, and I suppose you have to choose between that and trying to filter any strange html. (because users will post really crazy stuff if you don’t)

The thank you button works, but after I click it I must scroll down to find the post I was clicking on. It looks like the whole page is reloading after clicking ‘thank you’.

I don’t know how it they do it, but over on ZH, if you click one of the up/down arrows, the page does not move.

This thread is still not working properly.

The only way I can get to see the last posts is to load “reply to topic”

I tried to post an answer to the front page and got warned that ” I tried to post spam’ and the post did not show up.

What did I do that was rejected.

Jal – regarding refreshing the comments, why not just click the refresh icon on your browser tool bar. Or maybe I don’t understand the problem properly. There are comment pages that don’t give one a full standard browser page with upper tool bar. But there is usually a directory scheme with links somewhere on that type of page, and one can refresh by clicking the last level directory.

Re BBCode – Wikipedia has a useful article under that heading. However, I regard not having the emoticon bar not functioning on an automatic click insert after selection as ridiculous if Joomla designed it that way. That is what computers are for. Hopefully something is not “turned on.” Same goes for the attachments. I consider them “broken” as they are with a somewhat tedious workaround.

The Open Comments box in the main forum has been reduced to only permitting one thread in hopes that this will replace the old Blogger style comment format for the nostalgic 🙂 I would suggest that everyone comment against features very much on topic, and use The Official Thread for Open Comments for everything else. The cats must herd themselves to some degree to make the comment sections work.

Reconstructing the site is a huge project and will take time to improve, so patience is warranted. And Ash is doing a yeoman’s job, trouble shooting and currently writing the majority of features with Ilargi and Nicole in OZ. I think having absolutely all the comments on one thread like with the old format would be a mistake as TAE gets more commenters. It would really become a mess if it grows to say 500 comments a day. But shedding your old skin is painful – ask your neighborhood snake.