What? New forums?!

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#1 Wed, 07/06/2016 - 02:24
Joe
Joe's picture

What? New forums?!

Hey all,

I finally got frustrated enough with the forums here to take a day and a half away from most other stuff to fix some things. I got some great feedback and design help from Virtualmin user unborn on IRC, and from Eric (and, of course lots of feedback since we launched the new site).

So, things look really different in a few area; I think better, for the most part, though there's more information on the screen and might be more intimidating the first time you see it...but, there's a lot of additional useful functionality. My favorite feature is the Active Topics, Unanswered Topics, *New & Updated Topics" tabs at the top of the forums page, but some other improvements include nicer layout of the forum topics and post/comment pages, buttons for skipping to the first unread post, and a quick reply button that jumps directly to the comment field. All of these features come from the Advanced Forum and Advanced Forum Bootstrap modules, plus some theme and module changes to suit our website theme. Big changes here,

I've also rolled in Better Formats, which gets rid of some of the stupid boilerplate that appears when commenting. Since we use Markdown, a very common markup language that I think most moderately technical users will have some familiarity with it, I don't think we need that noisy mess on every page, so it's gone. You can get markup help by clicking the "More information about text formats" link.

Also, last night, I enabled the Comment Notify plugin. I hate this plugin (it encourages behavior that's counter productive to meaningful participation, like "posting to subscribe"), but subscriptions and notifications are so horribly broken on Drupal, that it's the best I can do for now. I do plan to re-visit this problem again, but it was apparent we really needed some kind of solution to this problem. I think with this plugin and the "New & Updated" tab will make it pretty easy to stay on top of things.

As always, holler if you run into problems with the new forums. I'm particularly interested in hearing about any problems anyone has with accessibility for the site.

Cheers,

Joe

Mon, 07/18/2016 - 18:03
bigwombat

Hey Joe

Great work. Is there anywhere on the Forums where you can just get a list of security announcements for Virtualmin? Ideally, with an RSS feed?

It would help us and I expect many others who are keen on security. A single RSS feed is ideal.

Best wishes!

Tue, 07/19/2016 - 12:46 (Reply to #2)
Joe
Joe's picture

There's an RSS feed of each forum (including this one). I post update announcements here in the News forum, but there probably should be a dedicated security announcement forum.

The RSS feed for News is here: https://www.virtualmin.com/taxonomy/term/277/feed

And you can get an RSS feed of any forum by clicking the little RSS icon at the very bottom of the page for that forum (this is a silly location for it, but Drupal sticks it there and it's not easy to move it to somewhere more reasonable).

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Tue, 07/19/2016 - 19:16
bigwombat

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the reply.

I post update announcements here in the News forum, but there probably should be a dedicated security announcement forum.

This is exactly what I would like to see: a dedicated security announcement forum with RSS feed

Thanks Joe!

Sat, 07/23/2016 - 00:15
unborn
unborn's picture

I really like this new forums! it have now everything in its place. thanks Joe!

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Mon, 07/25/2016 - 01:49
bigwombat

Joe, last comment is forum spam.

Mon, 07/25/2016 - 02:19 (Reply to #6)
Joe
Joe's picture

Actually, unborn (George) is legit. He's been very helpful in the community and IRC lately (and even helped me design some of the changes I put in place in the forum!). A single link in a signature like that is fine. We don't mind folks politely marketing their Virtualmin-related services.

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Mon, 07/25/2016 - 05:07 (Reply to #7)
unborn
unborn's picture

Hi Joe, thanks for kind words :)

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Mon, 07/25/2016 - 02:23
bigwombat

All good then Joe :-)

I'm used to seeing all the Drupal.org forum spam. Hence my post. Apologies, unborn (George) - my mistake.

Mon, 07/25/2016 - 13:43 (Reply to #9)
unborn
unborn's picture

Hi bigwombat, don't need to apology - I understand. I can remove my link from signature, I did not want anyone to think I am spambot or do spam around or to be 'selling stuff'. I am actually glad that there is more folks who do care about spam and other stuff in this great forums

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

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