Forum improvement  

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SECTIONS
"Perhaps the new forum structure should be: ID and valuations - Everything else
To make more divisions might be counter productive"
Heath
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P&A: Our intention is to keep an entry page where all the threads are mixed. A sub-menu would simply allow those who wish, to access specific sections (about four or five).
General discussions (design related) - ID (no valuation) - Restoration - Everything else (off topic). Some other ideas?
The "Off topic" section could be read by everyone, but perhaps there would be limitations on the posters linked to the length of time being on the forum.
The purpose of the opening of this section is not to confine certain members in one place! It's to allow regulars to discuss various topics that are not directly related to design (music, food, travel, clothes ... anything except politic and religion). Good idea or bad idea?
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Your suggestions on this matter and other issues mentioned above are very welcome of course!

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P&A: Rockland and Heath, you can expect a clean design without any unnecessary gimmicks like cartoonist avatars or emoticons on the forum's pages. But by clicking on the name of a member of the forum, one will be able to access his personal profile (location, short presentation and portrait). Optional, of course, except for the country which is often an essential information to properly answer certain questions.
Sorry no PM! The reason is simple. We can not let this forum become an informal marketplace because it would completely change the spirit of the forum and because we already offer these services on the radar where the sellers are paying to showcase their items for sale. It would not be correct towards them to allow to develop a free parallel market.
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POST EDIT
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P&A: It is natural to be able to edit a post. If one notices an error or if one regrets certain comments made. But however this possibility should be limited in time because modifying or deleting some posts makes the reading of some threads unclear. What should be this delay for you?
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IMAGES POSTING
"For me design is a strongly visual subject, and making it so that uploading photos is easier is the biggest positive change that could happen. That would probably mean the photos are stored on designaddict itself. And I have a few ideas about how that could be done inexpensively."
Leif Ericson
"Image hosting could be offered to members willing to pay a nominal fee to help defray associated costs, but the current system seems to mostly work."
tktoo
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P&A: Simplifying the process would certainly be welcome. We lose a lot of time correcting urls posted by newcomers.
If we could store the pictures on DA, it would allow us not to lose the content and to find it again in old interesting threads.
tktoo, thanks for the suggestion but you will never have to pay to use the forum! Our approach to this subject is simple. If there are services that generate money, they are logically charged. But all that is exchange of information must remain free.
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Hi
Patrick and Alix
My only suggestion is perhaps quite a simple one.
would it be possible to be able to see what one is replying to, unlike the present system that takes one away from the thread?

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My two centimes,
an edit feature is essential to correct typos, etc., for maybe an hour or so after posting. After that, the edit feature is used solely by those who've gotten their panties in a wad and want to delete their entire string of responses. It does indeed make the thread confusing.
I've seen other fora deal with this by allowing a complete deletion only if no one else has replied yet. Once a reply has been posted, all bets are off. Of course, if a user wants to completely disengage from the forum and delete their account, they should have the option of deleting all of their old posts, as well.
As for pictures, I, for one, would be delighted if I could copy and paste them directly from my own cache rather than having to use Photobucket or the like.

Re:sectioning
P&A: I think your solution to this is really good. I greatly like that the main entry to the site will show all the content, un-sectioned. This idea of sectioning is very compatible with your idea of tagging. Essentially any tag is potentially a section.

Re tagging
On the other hand I am not sure how to make this idea of tagging work well.
For instance: First time poster adds a new thread asking for his chair to be identified, with tags: danish, chair, unidentified. Bad apple responds that it is a lousy piece of furniture and tags it: junk. Good egg responds with the id and tags it france and søn, in house design. And smarty pants responds with a new designer, and tags it grete jalk.
Obviously a somewhat contrived example, but not entirely far-fetched. And now we have this morass of tags:
Danish, chair, unidentified, junk, france and søn, in house design, grete jalk.
How in the world do we make sense of that tag mess? We can't rely on first time poster to edit out his unidentified tag, so that tag will persist We need moderator intervention to delete the junk tag. And how do we adjudicate the tag fight between good egg and smarty pants?
I really want to like the idea. But I am seeing all sorts of deeply insoluble problems with how it will work.

Maybe borrow a few idea from stack overflow
Stack overflow is a highly successful forum in an entirely different domain (software development). It is so successful that it is nearly always the case that stack overflow has better information than the official documentation.
It "gamifies" the whole concept of the forum in order to allow self-moderation and self-policing. (Gamification is not something I usually go for in any way shape or form, but the results of it in this case are inspiring).
The Wikipedia article lays some of this out. Perhaps there is something useful there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow

On editing:
This is a slow-moving forum but still, if you allow an hour for edits (which could included a total delete), someone else could well be in the process of replying to that message only to find that it has disappeared or changed enough that the reply doesn't apply. I say more like 10 minutes, which is plenty of time to re-read, fix typos, or even reconsider and delete. Or how about a "preview" function?
I would also like to see an "message edited" line automatically added when the message is edited, along with a time stamp. One for every edit, not just the most recent.
And a suggestion for users: it'd be nice if it became a custom here among users to use the line "edited to add: typo [grammar, spelling, whatever] fixed" as is done on many other sites, when editing.

Robert.
Thanks for your...
Robert.
Thanks for your suggestion.
We will make sure that this is the case.
Tom.
We will see if it is possible for each user to choose to see the last post at the top of the page or at the bottom if they prefer.
We will also consider the possibility of using the 'infinite scroll' technique that can help to better manage long pages.
But we still need to weigh all the pros and cons of this option.
Riki and Spanky
Thanks for your opinion about the time laps needed for editing a message. Maybe half an hour or twenty minutes could do the trick?
The preview option is interesting too.
Leif.
Yes, this is not perfect but we have some ideas to try to get round this problem of tags.
The concept of Stack Overflow is really interesting. But we are not quite sure that it applies to DA. Still there is certainly some inspiration to find there. Thanks!

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It all sounds like an improvement to me, will the entire page be a bit larger, its still 800x600 isn't it?
Thats handy sometimes but I'm always zooming the screen.
Just a thought about sharing all the right clicked images probably every forum member has gathered gigs worth over the years, is there any way all these could be tagged and uploaded (ftp, dropbox?) and made searchable? Any real copyright problems there? Of course theres google, but this would be cool I think.

Threads with thumbnails
I have just found the identity of an chair in an id request from months back, but I can't find the thread. I have the image of the chair in my head, and SDR commenting that it would be uncomfortable: good luck finding that thread. Because id thread titles just aren't memorable. But a thumbnail image of the piece in question would be.
So: can we have the first image in the first post in a thread displayed as a thumbnail along with the title in the thread list?
This would also help identify the different editions of the endless "last thing you acquired" thread, as the number of the edition just isn't memorable (was it #13 or #11, hmmm....)
This is a design forum, so a " visual subtitle" seems conceptually appropriate.
Any thread without a pic could have a blank picture icon so it takes up the same amount of vertical space in the thread list.
Also, listing the name of the OP in the thread list would be helpful. Simeon's recent id request would be easy find with his name by the title. Good luck finding it right now.

Good ideas as always,...
Good ideas as always, Leif.
No problem to add the OP name in the threads list. Regarding the thumbnails, we must do some tests. We have no doubts about their usefulness, but the quality of the images posted in the forum is very variable. The bad pictures are not annoying when you're in a thread, but one must see how it would affect the overall perception of the website if one would put these pictures on an entry page. So, we really need to try this before we can give a positive answer.
The different editions of recurrent threads like "The last thing you Acquired" should no longer have any reason to exist, if we add a pagination for long threads. Hopefully we will be able to merge the several existing editions.

Moderation
Assign moderators. That's my number one request.