1) Message boards : Cafe SETI : The format of this forum is... blah (Message 287000) Posted 22 Apr 2006 by Atlas Post: I've only been reading these forums for a few days now, but I find the general layout very annoying. I am somewhat of a forum geek in that whatever I am interested in I will generally look for a forum or two to watch and post in, which is to say that I have seen and used quite a few of them and I find this one to be needlessly bad. First of all, the original post goes on top of the thread. The first thing I want to read in any thread is the one that started the topic, and I want to be able to do that quickly without having to scroll to the very bottom of up to 75 other posts. The fact that the original post is on the bottom is not only troublesome in itself, but one of the side effects of such a format is that if people put graphics such as signatures in their posts the screen will scroll up while they load (a way of compensating for the change in material), making it difficult to read starting at the bottom until all of the graphics have loaded. Putting the first post on the top would correct this in addition to just generally being convenient. 75 posts per page is too many, it should be broken down to a maximum of 20 per page for ease of use. In most other forums I have used I found it very easy to sift through large numbers of posts if there were only 15 or so per page, even if the server retained every post ever made in the thread (the reason is that it is easier to remember which page you left off on than which post). Which brings up another issue, truncation. Truncating the thread to the 75 most recent posts does not have a positive effect on discussion. Although limiting the number of posts in a thread to 75 doesn't matter in some cases, there are other cases where it is nice to be able to easily look back through all of the posts. Text really requires very little hard disk space, so I can't see a reason why it's a good idea to truncate threads in such a way. As an example, my Yahoo! mail account (one which I don't mind getting junk mail on) has over 6,000 emails on it which takes up less than 10 megabytes of the server's disk space. That means a single 200GB hard disk, which is not even very large these days, should be able to hold at least 1.2 million random junk emails, and emails seem generally larger and more graphically intensive than the average forum post. I'm sure there is plenty of decent, free forum code out there for you guys to use. If not, just look around the net for some well-made forums and copy their style. Not only is there no excuse for a poor forum format, but it doesn't really make me want to visit this forum on a regular basis if it is a chore to use it. I'm not one of the vets of these forums, so I'm not sure if anyone really cares about my opinion, but I assure you it is an educated one having used many different forums over the past years. Edit: Perhaps I was too quick to judge about the truncation bit, it appears as though that can be changed through preferences, however there is no way to break it up into smaller pages as far as I can tell and everything else still stands.

 
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