Forum Moderators: rogerd
I'll start the list of misjudgements with the obvious one
Avatars - I shudder, and so does my bandwidth!
Titles for each post
Memberlists
;)
Basically, I can't buy Brett's BestBB, so I'm making mine look and perform like it *_*
Worse is yet to come ..I have heard of work being done on "video bites" and "sound bites" ...for when we all ( who is all? ) got multi meg broadband ....
Just imagine ..sifting through fora with moving images talking heads and "ringtones" type sig files ....
And pron spam and trolls and ........in technicolor ...
Emails going this route too just as soon as they can shove it through the pipe fast enough...
And some of you dont like flash ....wow
Signature files are okay. Just limit the number of characters, and maybe have them display in a different color or something so that it's easy to pick them out from the actual content of the user's message.
I don't generally like forums where you have a lot of font and color options. Used tastefully, it's okay. But too many people use them ransom-note style and it distracts from the content.
I also do not like silly user names (sorry to those of you that use them!). I require real names on my site. I let people choose their own password, but not their user ID. So, "Bob Smith" might have a user ID of "bsmith", and his posts would show up as "bsmith (Bob Smith)".
I also find that a fair way of dealing with people that request questionable user IDS; you know, the ones that are or sound similar to offensive words. By creating user IDs based on their name, you eliminate the hassle of explaining to people why some IDs are allowed and others are not, especially helpful when you have situations where words in one region or country do not have the same meaning as they do in another.
It never ceases to amaze me all those message board owners who don't take the time to install a new design template, or at least play around with the default color scheme in the control panel.
If avatars or signatures were allowed, I'd disable gifs just to keep people from making them move.
Anything that MOVES!
When I got around to it, I've been planning on adding animated avatars to my site. :-)
Perhaps it's not whether avatars are good or bad, but rather whether they are appropriate for your board.
If you have a professional forum, something like WebmasterWorld for example, avatars are maybe not a necessity.
But, if your forum is more recreational, why not have avatars? It makes the site more fun!
Perhaps the discussion should be around the appropriateness of certain bells and whistles for the type of forum you are running rather than their appropriateness in general.
I've seen phpBB boards that have this fixed, but they're by far the minority. And its such a minor glitch, I can't for the life of me figure out why the developpers haven't gotten around to fixing it.
The "I'll never return to this board again" peeve has got to be the boards that use too many colors/ The rainbow effect makes me ill.
Hmmm, oh, and there's an effect out there that's new and badly used. Message body backgrounds that change color when the mouse pointer goes over them. That's another "I'll never return to this board again" offense.
I also do not like silly user names (sorry to those of you that use them!). I require real names on my site.
ccDan, I think your comment a few posts later about avatars being appropriate, possibly, on recreational boards has to apply to usernames, too, doesn't it?
I'm assuming your board is a professional community. One of my more popular boards is hobby/recreational, and I could never imagine requiring real names.
As you say, it all depends on the board on some of these issues we're discussing.
Better Forum software will allow a user to turn off Avatars and smileys.
My policy is not to allow any animated avatars...I feel that is a bit too busy and distracting.
However, Avatars and signature files and custom user rankings are some of the things that give a forum it's own 'personality'.
Just like a website, we need to design our forums for our visitors and target audience.
A forum for database software and a forum for magic would have two very different themes.
Some forums are purely to be functinal and impart support/knowledge. People can use the deafult themes for those sorts. For others, it's best to customize it via CSS and small graphics IMO.
Regards,
WB
ccDan, I think your comment a few posts later about avatars being appropriate, possibly, on recreational boards has to apply to usernames, too, doesn't it?I'm assuming your board is a professional community. One of my more popular boards is hobby/recreational, and I could never imagine requiring real names.
Actually, mine would be more professional/recreational. I can describe it better, but my description is also one of the URLs so I can't do that here.
To an extent, I suppose you're right. I mean, I could go into a place calling myself "Bob Smith", and it's not illegal, unless I'm doing so for some illegal purpose. So, why not the same in a message forum?
If you have some sort of patient or crime victim support board, I can see the need for some degree of anonymity. I don't have such forums, but I do have (er, will have) forums where people can ask questions anonymously.
Requiring real names has another benefit in dealing with troublesome members. If "Bob Smith" causes problems and you boot him from the forums, but he signs up again as "Rob Grumbles", you have grounds for termination of the account because that's not his real name.
Granted, it's not an easy thing to enforce and you're not going to achieve 100% compliance. But I think it does help to weed out some of the potential troublemakers early on.
I also require a valid mailing address, so if their welcome letter comes back as undeliverable, poof!, there goes their account.
Then too, my forums are not open to the general public and only registered users have access. So, people may be more comfortable using their real names in such an environment than they might elsewhere.
But, yes, it can be an appropriateness issue. If you run a forum that allows kids, for example, you may have to have pseudonyms to comply with children's privacy laws. Myself, I used to allow kids, but since the new laws were passed a few years back, I now restrict it to persons 18 or older.
It's somewhat unfortunate, since I do not allow offensive language or have adult content, so my forums were always pretty kid-safe, but the costs in time and money of compliance necessitate keeping kids out now.
* Avatars (debatable!)
* Sig files (particularly graphic ones!) (In some cases short text only ones can be acceptable)
* Undated messages.
* Titles for each post
* Memberlists
* Smilies ;)
* Subjects and Topics which have cute/trendy names e.g. "If you build it, will they come?"
* Scroll past headers, banner ads, more headers, "sticky threads", announcements, etc
* Join just to READ a post
* Moving images, talking heads and "ringtones", basically any pointless extras that distract from the content!
* "Ransom-note" style font use for posts.
* Default phpbb subSilver design
* The rainbow effect (otherwise known as the 'techicolour yawn' ;) ) ergo: Too many colors
Looks like it's generally not functions or formatting of the forum sites, but the garish and the distracting that are getting the votes.
Ta
Limbo
Perhaps the discussion should be around the appropriateness of certain bells and whistles for the type of forum you are running rather than their appropriateness in general.
I mostly agree but I consider my dislike of movement in forums universal. It has nothing to do with lack of professionalism or not fitting a theme. I just find it annoying to see lots of things moving on the screen at once in annoying repeating patterns that never end while I'm trying to read. I can see how it can be completely appropriate if you own, say, www.animatedgiflovers.com though.
My pet peeve is the all the phpbb message boards out there that never change from the default phpbb subSilver design. That combination of blue and orange leaves a lot to be desired!
Implementing a css solution on the basic tpl components of phpbb is difficult, to put it mildly, I've done two just to see and it was not easy, I was tempted to create a new template for them with all items having css id and classes so they would be easy to change, currently you have to try to work around the html, which is also pretty bad, but then I lost interest in the idea, somebody is probably working on a real css template now, or it's already done.
However, there are some pretty basic things you can do, for the forum width, just make the main container table have say 90% width, or fixed width, that helps a lot, very simple css too.
As for people not changing the default, there's not much you can do about that of course, most people just take the default installation of any software they get, windows, office, msie and never change until they are forced to, this of course gives users who do change an edge up, since their stuff looks less generic.
I don't like these for two reasons. First, if there are too many, it pushes the "real" threads even farther down the page. Second, 99+% of the viewers of the page will be regulars - forcing them to hunt for the new posts is bad policy, IMO. Even though they no doubt tune out the sticky threads, they must visually scan them each time to locate the good stuff. Why make your members work?
