Suggestion for this Forum

Although I haven't been here long, I've been involved with hundreds of various discussion forum programs over the years.

I have a small suggestion that might make this forum a lot easier to use.

Change the "nested tree" structure over to "flat chronological". Please.

Every-time somebody responds in a long thread of two pages, I have to practically re-read the entire thread just to find the new comment(s). Flipping through the pages and scanning the posting dates trying to figure out what was newly posted is a pain. And when a new response is added, sometimes an older comment at the end of a page will then get pushed to the top of the next page... only adding to the confusion.

With Flat/Chronological, all new posts are appended to the end of the thread... very easy. And when you reply to somebody, you simply quote them with the quote button.

Some forums give the individual user an option of how to display the threads.

Thank-you.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Phil on January 6, 2011 at 12:58pm

I agree that the nested approach is confusing and leads to unread and double read posts. Also, the new updates list is quite short and you can't go back in time if you haven't looked in for a while.

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Permalink Reply by John K. on January 6, 2011 at 1:03pm

Yes, "nested tree" is very rare... the vast majority of forum programs including the two most popular, phpBB and vBulletin use only flat threads in chronological order.

Also the display of threads along with category headings on the main page seems to lead to everyone just posting everything in the first forum category whether it has to do with pre-1900 houses or not.

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Permalink Reply by John K. on January 13, 2011 at 12:15pm

Another suggestion and this one would be VERY easy for the webmaster to fix. Being a webmaster myself, I'll happily do this for them for free if they can't figure it out...

For gosh sakes, make the external links people post to websites/pictures, by default, OPEN IN A NEW WINDOW!

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Permalink Reply by Lair Tienter on January 13, 2011 at 2:06pm

I agree with everyone. This board needs something changed. I posted something some time ago and wanted to read comments, it took me an hour to find it. I think it was set up by someone who doesn't use it and once they set it up left and never checked back. I agree that the latest response list on the left could be a lot longer. If the board is busy a reply could be gone in an hour or less. My 2 cents. Lair

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Permalink Reply by John K. on January 13, 2011 at 4:25pm

I think I'm going to post a link to this thread in the top-most forum since that's the place everyone goes to first. More eyeballs need to be on this issue.