Forum features

Andrew:

I think a “don’t show me posts from this user” feature would’ve helped a lot

No, it really wouldn’t. It might have helped some people avoid seeing some of the rubbish, but it wouldn’t have stopped the forum being full of rubbish. Anyone coming to the forum looking for help or info on RISC OS would still have to wade through the effluent to find the nuggets of gold! (In fact that is another problem, the forum contents are now badly tainted)

So I agree with everything Rick said. Hopefully he and the others who have wandered off will return in a month or two if/when things have been straightened out.

I agree about the top posting, but there’s no reasonable alternative – not that I can think of, anyway.

effluent to find the nuggets of gold!

Or just, y’know, not read Aldershot, where all of this happened.

where all of this happened

Sadly it wasn’t just Aldershot. Most of the forum is tainted by tripe.

Meanwhile, if you want moderation, be careful what you wish for. I may for example choose to suspend accounts of people who routinely post things that are off-topic for a thread, derailing the conversation therein. Both this thread and the topics thread are already being thus derailed.

If you really want me to go ahead with such suspensions, I will. Otherwise, let’s ignore accidental off-topic posts – people make mistakes, it happens – and please focus on discussing requested features. If you want to pursue other threads of conversation, then by all means start a new thread under a more appropriate topic.

Most of the forum is tainted by tripe.

This is off topic. Please practice what you preach. Move your discussion immediately to another thread in a more appropriate topic.

Oh yeah! That’s another one…

• “at-mentions” would be nice. People are already using them, but only informally. The forum software doesn’t recognise them as anything special and users aren’t notified about “mentions”.

An attempt to collate the things so far…

I think we’re kind of agreed on these?

• Short-term hack that filters Aldershot out of ’"Recent posts" (but keep an unfiltered list for people, too)
• Longer-term goal to provide a user settings page that lets a forum member choose which things appear in “Recent posts”
• Longer-term goal to extend the user settings (however the UI might work) to hide posts from a particular user
• Better search which lets you choose/exclude a specific topic, and/or specific user, and (maybe optionally) obeys blocked users

Discussion ongoing on:

• Adding some kind of charter or community standards document
• Marking something as “the answer”, and/or some kind of editable FAQ solution
• Some kind of “mark as spam” / review process to augment existing moderation facilities

Suggested but no traction yet:

• Equivalent of a “reply to” for certain topics, principally Announcements
• “at-mentions” with some sort of related notification going to mentioned users (e.g. highlights on the topic index – I doubt anyone wants more e-mail notification spam)

Given that the examples of that feature I’ve seen out on the net frequently have a marked “answer” that is anything but correct, I don’t think the feature is really worth the effort Andrew would need to put in.

One of the sites I’m thinking of allows anyone¹ to mark a post as an answer, and also to clear the answer flag from an inappropriate post. This allows answers to be “self-moderating”.

¹ Where “anyone” has a narrower definition than usual. I think you need to have 100 posts before you can flag/unflag answers.

where all of this happened

Was what I had meant to put alongside my remark.

Yes, some way to remove Aldershot from Recent Posts would be welcome.

Move your discussion immediately to another thread in a more appropriate topic.

It would be great to be able to move a discussion to a new thread, beginning with a point in the past.

Would it be possible for the forum to not present current content to search engines, but to only yield content that’s at least 24 hours old, to allow for timely moderation?

Would it be possible for the forum to not present current content to search engines, but to only yield content that’s at least 24 hours old, to allow for timely moderation?

As I understand it, in a word, no. A search engine is effectively just a ‘browser’, albeit a very strange one. There is such a thing as a ‘robots’ file that lets you exclude URLs, but that doesn’t really work when each post doesn’t have its own URL.

However, this may be fairly moot. Search engines probably don’t trawl the ROOL site multiple times a day in the first place.

OK, so we can add:

• Direct to a new thread to relocate the discussion there.

Moving posts or similar is difficult because you can’t be sure if part or all of a post should be moved and which, if any, followups ought to move too. I think instead the “move” button would just do something like posting a link back to the original message within the new thread, and perhaps add a referencing post into the originating thread that directs people to the new one.

From https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/16527?page=5#posts-128160:

Aldershot for chat, relaxed, and restraint in the nine RISC OS forums, focused. The catch is the current recent posts, most but not all do not want Aldershot in recent posts. How about this, two recent posts links and RSS feeds, one with only the RISC OS forums and the other the present version with everything in it for Aldershot users.
In the forum front page put Aldershot and Test in a separate box with a space between it and the main box. In the space, immediately below the nine main forums box, put the RISC OS only recent posts link. The current all recent posts link stays where is is at the bottom underneath the Aldershot and Tests box.

This falls under “topics” a bit, but the feature part of this is a way to visually differentiate different ‘categories’ of topics (without getting too over-categorised into hierarchies that will inevitably make sense to some, while confusing others).

One of the sites I’m thinking of allows anyone1 to mark a post as an answer, and also to clear the answer flag from an inappropriate post.

Maybe I’m being “filtered”, but I did suggest that the main Forum page have a big, obvious link to the wiki FAQs and that useful replies/answers should be additions to those FAQs.
It saves on work Andrew doesn’t need to do trying to implement features that this Forum software can’t do or won’t do well.

On that, I’d suggest that:

Bryan doesn’t use it.¹
Concentrating on Recent posts won’t affect some people, because

As for not renaming, well from various contributions people see overlap of forum basis and find the existing names less than clear cut labelling.

¹ Nice one Bryan

but the feature part of this is a way to visually differentiate different ‘categories’ of topics

For example :-

Afterthought Maybe move the “Everything with nothing particularly or remotely to do with ROOL” up a bit into the new space.

As I understand it, in a word, no. A search engine is effectively just a ‘browser’, albeit a very strange one. There is such a thing as a ‘robots’ file that lets you exclude URLs, but that doesn’t really work when each post doesn’t have its own URL.

You most certainly can, Chris. Kosher search engines don’t impersonate boggo user User Agents, and you can sense in htaccess whether the site is being visited by something bot-ish and set a flag that your serving scripts can look at. I use this on one site to mildly redact certain pages when presented to the very limited number of bots that I do allow through htaccess, usually removing links where bots have shown themselves to disrespect the ‘nofollow’ attribute. The robots.txt file can be of use to say to bots ’don’t look in this trap directory’ and if they do, they get kicked off. [Yes, I would consider this to be on topic as it is a feature that the forum could implement if wished.]

[Edit: Just noticed this ‘online users’ list on stardot: …, Bing [Bot], …, Google [Bot], …, Majestic-12 [Bot], …, …, SKS1 so it would appear that they are actively detecting bot accesses.]

Can I request some mobile-friendly CSS? The current site is usable on mobile, but you still have to do various zooming around because it tries to fit the entire page on your mobile screen. And while I can read the text OK, I imagine it’s too small for some people.

For example, losing the right-hand bar when the screen is less than NNN pixels (or inches) would allow the full screen width to be used. And maybe folding up the top bar (the links are too small.

For example, this is iOS Safari:

EDIT: argh, Textile won’t allow me to resize this. Imagine this as about 70mm across and you get the idea.

Can I request some mobile-friendly CSS? The current site is usable on mobile, but you still have to do various zooming around because it tries to fit the entire page on your mobile screen.

Curious. My mobile phone and tablet have Samsung Internet Browser as their default browser. The ROOL site works fine. The only oddity is noticeable on the mobile phone. If I open the page in portrait mode, the central column is only a few words wide; if I swap it to landscape mode, the font size increases so as to keep the same number of words. I have to refresh the screen to get sensible proportions again.

This is typically on the “Recent Posts” page – I don’t normally open the home page on either device.

CSS would be useful to just drop the RHS sidebar to the bottom of the page. I do this on one of the sites I look after.

That’s been requested.

In the mean time, on iOS you can just double-tap on part of a page to zoom in. For example, double-tap on the table header for the topics list to just see that, or double-tap on the rightmost column to see only that part, scaled up to fit the screen nicely.

Maybe I’m being “filtered”, but I did suggest that the main Forum page have a big, obvious link to the wiki FAQs and that useful replies/answers should be additions to those FAQs.

The way I’d interpreted that led to the second bullet point in the “Discussion ongoing on” part of a prior summary post:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/16871?page=2#posts-128189

…I’ll redo an updated summary now, with a couple of new feature requests included.

Updated summary.

Generally agreed

• Short-term hack that filters Aldershot out of ’"Recent posts" (but keep an unfiltered list for people, too)
• Longer-term goal to provide a user settings page that lets a forum member choose which things appear in “Recent posts”
• Longer-term goal to extend the user settings (however the UI might work) to hide posts from a particular user
• Better search which lets you choose/exclude a specific topic, and/or specific user, and (maybe optionally) obeys blocked users
• Direct to a new thread to relocate the discussion there.
• (Site-wide) better mobile behaviour – this was historically always lowered in priority as RISC OS users weren’t known for being mobile-first! Times have changed! :-)
• We know there are categorisation or other things to consider for topics; please direct those to https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/16872

Discussion ongoing

• Adding some kind of charter or community standards document
• Marking something as “the answer”, and/or some kind of editable FAQ solution
• Some kind of “mark as spam” / review process to augment existing moderation facilities

Suggested but no traction yet

• Equivalent of a “reply to” for certain topics, principally Announcements
• “at-mentions” with some sort of related notification going to mentioned users (e.g. highlights on the topic index – I doubt anyone wants more e-mail notification spam)

On the ongoing stuff, here are my votes:

Equivalent of a “reply to” for certain topics, principally Announcements

+1, the “@” or “reply to” would be very useful. Thanks

Adding some kind of charter or community standards document

+1, I did it for the community on GitHub, so people have a clear Code Of Conduct, it helps, but doesn’t solve certain issues, however it would be better to have one. IMHO it helps to make things clear before one decide to join.

Marking something as “the answer”, and/or some kind of editable FAQ solution

+1, That would indeed be helpful for me, especially given I have very little time for RISC OS during the week, so definitely helpful to me, thanks.

Some kind of “mark as spam” / review process to augment existing moderation facilities

+1, I think this would help the moderators, if multiple people report a post as a spam, it may create a report and make it easier and quicker for a moderator to find the “offender” post.

Adding some kind of charter or community standards document

It might help, maybe have it linked to setting up a new users account as well as standalone

Marking something as “the answer”, and/or some kind of editable FAQ solution

Not so sure about this one since the “answer” might become out of date.

Some kind of “mark as spam” / review process to augment existing moderation facilities

I have suggested in the other section – the possibility of having a downvote button as well

Equivalent of a “reply to” for certain topics, principally Announcements

This would be very good idea especially for announcements i.e. follow-ups directed to another forum section.

“at-mentions” with some sort of related notification going to mentioned users (e.g. highlights on the topic index – I doubt anyone wants more e-mail notification spam)

Do not think this is a good idea to be honest

I have suggested in the other section – the possibility of having a downvote button as well

I will +1 that. The simple presence of such a button might engender restraint.