Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Dear Webmaster

I have a couple of suggestions that I think will improve the BYAP forums. I will list them below along with my reasonings;

-- Remove URL Masking

URL Masking causes alot of problems. Example. Reading a thread & then refreshing (to see if there is a new reply) will return you to the BYAP homepage because the browser sees http://www.backyardaquaponics.com.au in the address bar only and not the full thread URL. Additionally, mobile device browsers dont hold previous pages in memory like a computer does (only the previous URL) and pressing back simply reloads the previous URL - again, returning you to BYAP homepage each time.

People are used to seeing paramaters in URL's these days (gone are the days of static content, everything is dynamic) - take for example any netbanking system, that URL is plain scary

-- Set Cookies

The reason I believe URL masking has been enabled is to hide the user tracking SID in the Address bar (It does look pretty ugly). If you hover over a URL you will see something similar appended to the end of each URL - sid=0814eb5034a5d7df3103ee2027XXXXX This is used for purposes of user tracking. There are two options, 1) to set a Cookie, 2) track the session in the address bar. If you fix / enable cookie setting (can be tricky to get the paths correct) you will remove the user tracking information from the URLs, actually have a functioning "Remember me" setting (so that I dont have to login everytime I visit BYAP) and you can remove URL masking

-- Append thread title in the page title attribute

This will help (along with removing URL masking) google to index BYAP better. Ultimately, the better google indexes BYAP the more people you will have stumbling across this wonderful resource.

Google only has 198 pages indexed http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=site%3Abackyardaquaponics.com&meta= It should basically have every single thread indexed (ie. thousands).

ie. Page title for this thread should be Backyard Aquaponics - Recommendations for Forum

-- Remove the confirmation page after posting a new thread

This page is redundant. Ive never seen a forum actually leave it turned on heh. Most people are used to returning to the end of the thread / their post, if they did want to return to the forum index they can simply click the required link in the breadcrumb on the page etc.

-- Allow editing of posts

IIRC I read somewhere this was disabled due to a irate member going back and removing all of their many posts etc. Sure this is a valid point, but it would be really really useful if we could edit posts for even 5 minutes afterwards.


I'm a moderator on a large forum, operate a number of websites, have setup forums (including custom mods etc) & write PHP; so while these are just my observations, I think if implemented could help make BYAP forums an even better place.

FWIW - PHPBB is open source, it has a MASSIVE community - extremely extendable. Anything that can't be done in the standard installation has almost certainly already been thought of and someone has written a mod for it

I'm happy to help if needed.

Cheers,
James

I should also say, I LOVE this forum

haha oh god (my mistake) - I just realised http://www.backyardaquaponics.com.au is using FRAMES to display http://www.backyardaquaponics.com

I've just tried using backyardaquaponics.com and everything works much better!

Can I suggest a different way of doing things then?

Replace the index page on http://www.backyardaquaponics.com.au with something like this;


Or a more google friendly way;

Use .htaccess in the www root of backyardaquaponics.com.au

That makes more sense! I was thinking, never had masking here!
but you're right. Frames are so antiquated, easy fix, don't go to the au site we're an international forum.
Editing of posts was removed due to some ppl cracking the sh1ts and editing all their posts to 0 characters. This made reading some threads nigh on impossible. It is possible on most threads to edit a post that hasn't been responded to. - This seems to be set up on a forum by forum basis, so the different categories differ somewhat.
I like the confirmation page, it gives me a chance to hit 'new posts' before it tries reloading the thread, something that can take a while and auto scroll to the bottom (5 seconds is a WHILE ppl and I'm impatient)
Thread title IS in the page title.

Have a good look, edit out the crap that's redundant or unnecessary then post the abbreviated list.

Editing would be nice and I agree it should be to posts that have no responses yet.

I'm sure most people don't see this problem, but there are a ton of Javascript errors on each page. I have Visual Studio installed so my debugger kicks in 3-4 times on each page....I have to keep hitting "no to debug" constantly.

I could always switch to Firefox.

Yeah if you use the .com it is... Infact most of these are non-issues if you use the .com, I've always just used the .com.au and figured someone fiddled with URL masking in cPanel or something



But an Australian company - How are people supposed to know to use .com only? - If the .com.au site was setup to do a 301 redirect rather than use frames it'll all be dandy

I guess the only one left to argue is post editing. I assume in the past people could edit posts any number of days, weeks, months or years old? Reducing this down to 5 minutes (or posts without response) across all forums will remove the ability for people to wipe out historic content but not hinder our ability to make small corrections.

Had me confused for a bit there cause I've never had anything masked here nor been sent back to the home page. But sounds like you got that sorted.

And yes, we all miss the edit button but it had been horribly abused by a few people and therefor the privilege is revoked. If you contact the administrators with the appropriate code and instructions on how to make a temporary edit feature work without danger of crashing the forum (this has happened in the past and there were many suffering horrible withdrawals from their regular AP world wide contacts) then perhaps they will think about it. However, they are busy people and most here are now quite used to the odd mistake in posts or people posting again to make corrections and if the mistake is bad enough, you might be able to talk a moderator into making the edit for you.

The original issue was some members thought that their threads should be their personal property to delete and dispose of as they wished and they went through and deleted all their posts from their threads which left the remainder meaningless. So the delete feature was removed from the general population. So, members who got disgruntled decided to edit their posts to a single character, thus rendering much of those threads meaningless so now no edit button. Sad but that is what happened.

I don't know if they would be willing to try adding the code for a timed edit feature but you can offer the code and ask.

I use Mozilla Firefox and no de-bugging problems here.

Oh yeah dont get me wrong, I understand why you would want to limit post editing because of the abuse, but a few minutes shouldnt hurt

No code needed, it's a configurable option already;

In the Administration Panel, Under Board Configuration > Post Settings > Limit Editing Time

Pic here - http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Boa ... pBB3-4.png

Cheers,
James

thanks for the suggestions James (personally I have NFI how to do any of them, but Joel might )

The other issue with the edit button having a 5 minute time limit, is that sometimes when tempers get a bit heated, someone might say something horrible in the heat of the moment, then come back and delete the "abuse" after a few minutes (once the "victim" has seen it) and this can lead to a few management problems.

I don't think that the edit button will be coming back. We've introduced a little bit of self-control within our members. Posts don't get deleted willy-nilly here. If you type something, be prepared to stand by it.

Ahh yeah - That's what the report a post feature is for (Little exclamation icon bottom right of every post). It allows users to report offending contect to Moderators. A reported post is displayed in the Moderator Control Panel where Moderators can see the offending content and act accordingly.



It'd just be nice to be able to make corrections (spelling etc) to a post, people abusing this should be banned, I'm sure that 99.9% of users here are civilised

FWIW my first post is mostly redundant now. The reason cookie setting isn't working is because the cookie domain is set to backyardaquaponics.com in phpBB - I was accessing the site via backyardaquaponics.com.au. URL Masking, Cookies & Page title all work as expected using the .com address. Implementing the 301 redirect via .htaccess will resolve these issues for people attemtping to access the site via the .com.au domain.

Cheers,
James

no offence james, but I would say by the number of additional complaints on this thread vs the number of members using this forum that there really isnt any problem. And being someone that HAS been banned I would say that everything here is tickety boo

Hey James, thanks for the suggestions..

The .com.au site is actually "parked" via cpanel, it hasn't been set up in any way, and I don;t have a clue how they work it when a domain is "parked".

I tried to set up a 5 minute editing feature a long time ago and it has not worked, I don't know if there's some other over riding setting that is stopping it working, but when I went and looked in the Admin CP just then, the "limit editing time" is actually set to 60 minutes..

Any suggestions as to why Google is not indexing many pages? In the past the site was extensively "googled" but I've noticed that now a days you don't find much in a google search linking to the forum..

Hi Joel,



It does sound like an addon domain, however if it is a parked domain can you please login to cpanel for me and check a couple of things?

Under Domains > Parked Domains > Confirm backyardaquaponics.com.au is listed and that domain root = '/public_html' and Redirects to is 'not redirected'

Under Domains > Addon Domains > is backyardaquaponics.com.au listed? If it is what is the document root path?



Can you remember how you disabled post editing originally? Is it possible it was done in the forums permissions? This will override the "limit editing time" global setting.



That is the million dollar question.

First thing I would recommend doing (if you haven't already) is sign up for a google gmail account then apply for the Webmaster tools. The webmaster tools are great, once you have verified your site (upload an emtpy file with a particular filename) you will be able to access all of the googlebot crawl statistics for your site. You'll be able to see if there's any crawl errors which could explain the lack of indexed pages.

Feel free to email me on my registered email address, this thread could blow out with alot of technical troubleshooting hehe.

Cheers,
James

Alright... Managed to figure it out eventually... had to change permissions for each individual section of the forum.

Everyone now has a 5 minute window of edit availability. This will allow you to fix typos etc in your posts...

Excellent Good work!

Post up when you've had a chance to check in cPanel and I'll help resolve the .com.au issue.