SNOWEST FORUMS: The official "What's gone wrong with this site" thread

[Good to Go]

I think people sometimes happen upon a thread that interests them in which they know the answer or are able to help find the solution. I doubt many people go out there looking for ways to help other people, especially if it was something they USED to be interested in.

Bingo.... the way the pages load (most WON'T change it) makes the inter-mingling almost non-existent.

i.e. everyone knows I can't stand politics, but I'd chime in once in awhile on a thread. I never go looking for the Political sub now..think of the education many are missing now?

Well put Ruff. For an old married guy, you still come up with cognitive thoughts...

 

[jsledder]

The purpose of the bars is two fold.

1) To show you how active a person is in the forums
2) To show you how "respected" a person is in the forums.

Or, put another way.. The first one shows you the quantity of their work, and the second shows you the quality of their work. In any online community, understanding who you can trust and who you can't is a valuable tool. The best online communities on the internet all have similar systems (slashdot, digg, etc.)

I agree, but who is determining the "quality", I would imagine that is some sort of automated process but how can you effectively judge the quality of every ones post, there would be too much personal judgement involved in that wouldn't there. Unless I'm missing a function that is there that allows each of us the ability to judge someone post?, I suppose it's tied into the thanks and green dots and all that and they are all used with such respect by everyone on here.....You don't like Obama.... bam here's a thousand red dots for you.
I, for one, don't put a lot of stock in any online personal rating system unless it is tied to sales or personal dealings where you can see actual comments by actual people and their dealing.

Now..... Get working on that snow request....

 

[LiveAlaska]

Why don't you simply turn both features off?

Click UserCP on the top, then click Forum Options, scroll down to the bottom and disable both of them. Voila!

you can even just close it up by clickin on the down arrow on the upper right hand corner and. Voila! it's gone

 

[KSH]

Edit, This problem is with Firefox on my computer. I'm having problems on PhotoBucket also.

Ok, what got changed last night? FireFox won't let do any thing other than a basic post. Clicking "quick link" takes me to the same page I was on. The other buttons don"t do any thing. But, if I go back to IE. NO PROBLEMS

KSH

 

[94fordguy]

Ok, what got changed last night? FireFox won't let do any thing other than a basic post. Clicking "quick link" takes me to the same page I was on. The other buttons don"t do any thing. But, if I go back to IE. NO PROBLEMS KSH

Weird, I m not experiencing any difficulty with Firefox this morning... everything seems to be operating normally on my end...

 

[powdersledder]

I've always thought the chat box or shout box whatever you want to call it is a good thing to have on a forum. But I really don' like how its at the top of every page. Every time I'd try to scroll down I'd hit the chat and start scrolling through there, and before you ask, yes I disabled it now. But I think it'd be nice to either have it on its own page, ie and firefox have page tabs for a reason, you can keep one tab open for the chat if you need to keep a constant eye on it. Or at least put it at the bottom of each page.

 

[Adrenaline Revolution]

Well looky here!
I wake up, log on, and I see that much of the look of my favorite online hangout has returned to it's former glory!
The Rep boxes are back, and while I know how badly we abused this it is a necessary element to warn others of a potential scam artist or rip off type person.
Ex.. Team 2, the guy who ripped off Scott, the guy who ripped off Remember me, and so on.

I would not buy from or deal with someone who shows massive red.

With the "Shout box and those dang rainbow gauges shut off it looks like home again!

Thank you for that.

Please keep in mind that this is not facebook or some other pre teen hang-out. Many of the older members seem to have disappeared when all these changes happened.
I think we lost a lot of useful experience when they vanished.
Hopefully they will return when they hear this place is getting fixed.

Thank you Brian.

 

[Rob1334]

Is it possible to set the chatbox up to refresh itself? On a lot of the other vbulletin sites I am on they have much better built chatboxes, is that just a different installment? It is also only on the main page of the forums, not on ALL loaded pages. Take sledjunkie.com/forum and snowandmud.com how they are setup; bigger, self-refreshing, and cosmetically better.

All I can think of for now, give me time I can have a lot more...

Anything on this???

 

[KSH]

Edit, This problem is with Firefox on my computer. I'm having problems on PhotoBucket also.

Ok, what got changed last night? FireFox won't let do any thing other than a basic post. Clicking "quick link" takes me to the same page I was on. The other buttons don"t do any thing. But, if I go back to IE. NO PROBLEMS

KSH

I downloaded a Java Plugin for FireFox and it seems to have cured the problem.


KSH

 

[Brian]

How about reducing the time delay between posts to 10 or 15 seconds instead of 30? That would be great!

that's easy... it's on the list. I'll get to it shortly.

 

[Brian]

Protip: Since you're all using firefox because it's a better browser, get the "ReloadEvery" plugin. Adds a dropdown to the Reload button to automatically refresh the page every x minutes/seconds.

Yeah.. THAT won't cause the server to slow down at all once we get everyone doing that.

 

[Brian]

I agree, but who is determining the "quality", I would imagine that is some sort of automated process but how can you effectively judge the quality of every ones post, there would be too much personal judgement involved in that wouldn't there. Unless I'm missing a function that is there that allows each of us the ability to judge someone post?, I suppose it's tied into the thanks and green dots and all that and they are all used with such respect by everyone on here.....You don't like Obama.... bam here's a thousand red dots for you.
I, for one, don't put a lot of stock in any online personal rating system unless it is tied to sales or personal dealings where you can see actual comments by actual people and their dealing.

Now..... Get working on that snow request....

Ratings are based on how many people read posts/threads you start, how many people reply to them, how many people thank you, how highly-rated your threads are, etc.

Post good content, and your "quality" rating WILL go up. There's no way around it.

 

[Brian]

Anything on this???

I'd love to set the shoutbox to auto-refresh (like a real chat-room) but it would destroy what's left of our server.

It's on the list.

 

[Polar Express]

raising $$

I belong to another forum that is diesel truck focused, and they have a way to accept paypal, either as a one-time donation or as a repeating payment, in order to raise funds to support the forum. I don't want to try to speak for everyone, but I suspect that most of us would be willing to kick in $10 each year to cover the cost of adding whatever computer crap is required to make it faster. I don't know if Harris would be open to that, and I also don't know if they would require a 'general fund', or if we can make sure that our donations/contributions are used for our forum only. The other forum I belong to has a moniker by our avatar/screenname that identifies us as a 'contributor' if you have donated. Is this possible, or has the forum taken a different direction where that is not an option?

Thanks for the work you do. I have no idea what the he11 it is that you do, but thanks for doing it.

 

[Brian]

Okay, by popular request, you can now choose THREE options for the Chat Box.

- Top of the Screen
- Bottom of the screen
- Disabled.

Click the UserCP menu on the top-left, choose "Forum Options", and scroll down to the very bottom to see this setting.

 

[Brian]

How about reducing the time delay between posts to 10 or 15 seconds instead of 30? That would be great!

I set it to 10. Enjoy.

 

[AKSNOWRIDER]

I set it to 10. Enjoy.

brian..you are the man...thank you very much for listening to us....:beer;:beer;

 

[AK-Rider]

This is a nasty thing that vBulletin does. I've been fighting this one for a long time and have YET to come up with a good work-around for this. Nevertheless it's now on my list and will stay there until we come up with SOMETHING!

Here's an example of a vBulletin forum that doesn't have this issue. Maybe you can talk with the site owner, Mike Strahan, and see what he did to make it work.
EDIT: Upon further investigation, there are actually similar issues on the site I mentioned above. Not exactly the same, but close. And, all the sites I've seen that don't have these issues aren't vBulletin forums. So, I stand corrected.

amen on this one.. vBulletin marks a thread as "unread" even if it's YOUR reply to the thread that was the most recent. VERY annoying. Also on the list now.

Again, the forum I mentioned above doesn't have issues with marking threads as unread... See edit above...

suggestion. This is now completed!!!!!

Hmmm.... I haven't seen any change here. Did I miss something? (Checked in IE, Firefox, and Chrome)

I don't believe for a minute that having IE "not work right" is acceptable. 70+ % of internet users are on IE, thus we need to address it. The suggestion to use Firefox is more of a short-term workaround than a long-term solution.

I know it's a long shot, but any progress on the IE front?

This is a good suggestion. Are you volunteering to help us create this? =)

Great idea. Is this something you want to help us tackle? =)

Well, I would be glad to help where I can, but I don't know if I'm the most qualified. Besides the list that I posted, I wouldn't know where to begin.

The "Thanks" system was initially meant to help with this -- but it falls short because you can't vote negatively on a post. This weekend, I intend to rip out the thanks system and replace it with something more similar to what sites like slashdot and digg use for voting on posts.

I see you've reinstated some form of the old rep system. Does the new "thumbs up/down" post review system count toward the individuals' reputation, or just toward their overall experience points? I guess what I'm asking is, can somebody offset (earned) bad rep simply by posting a bunch of pictures?


Again, thanks for trying to fix some of the problems here.

 

[Brian]

Okay.. for those of you complaining about all the sub-forums.. you're gonna like this..

You can now create your own PERSONALIZED view of the Snowest forums based on the forums YOU like to visit.

Here's how it works:

---[ Step 1 -- Subscribe to all your favorite forums ]----
A. Go to the Main Forum Index (http://www.snowest.com/forum/index.php) and click on your favorite forum(s) to open them.

B. Find the menu labeled "Forum Tools" (it's on the top-right of the actual list of threads in the forum). Click the menu, and choose "Subscribe to this forum".

C. You probably don't want email alerts.. so choose "No email notification" and click "Add subscription

D. Repeat until you've done this to EACH of the forums you want to keep track of.

---[ Step 2 -- Enjoy ]---------------------

On the top-left corner of your screen, you'll see the drop-down menu for "Forum" (on the main navigation bar). Click this, and then choose "My Forum".

The result will be a SINGLE VIEW with ALL The posts from ALL the forums you've subscribed to. YOU MAY WANT TO BOOKMARK THIS PAGE!!!

(Note: ALL Snowest members have automatically been subscribed to the "Announcements" forum).

ENJOY!

 

[Idaho Slim]

Make the Shout Box refresh automatically, every 5 seconds.