yeah, some posts are sooooo long and take forever to load.

Yes, I think updating the forum would be a good idea!

Maybe each forum topic could be listed in a separate box on a Forums ‘home’ page.

Each topic could have a clickable ‘link’. If there was a new post in that forum, that forum topic would be highlighted, indicating how long ago the new post was posted. (Any posts over a few days old would lose their ‘highlighted’ status.)

You would click on each link that takes you to all that forum topic’s posts listed in chronological order

That way everything would be more organized, and all related forum posts would be in one area- instead of scattered all down the page in mish-mash style.

…great idea Paul. And I think this has already been mentioned but if I had the opportunity to throw my wishlist out there I would love to be able to list a person’s name and see their latest posts.

It would also be a great feature for administrators from networks to be able to email the group members updates (as opposed to emailing each person individually). I get emails from people saying, “I didn’t see the posting for that meeting, etc”.

…just a wishlist, thank you!
Heidi

It’s gonna be hard to invent a better bulletin board than vBulletin………[shrug] http://www.vbulletin.com/

I agree!

Kevin, thanks for the link. Scratch my wishlist!

Hi Everybody,
I posted about upcoming features in the forums a couple of days ago in Louis’ Q&A forum. Here’s part of the post:

begin quote…

We’re in the process of implementing a few new features to the forums including:
- Ability to search across all forums
- Paging (which will speed up loading of long topics)
- Ability to change sort order so the newest posts appear at the top (this was the original setting but most people voted to see them ordered the way they are now – we want to give everybody the choice to select their preference)

Finally, don’t forget about the “Email Me Updates!” feature on each topic. If you post a question to a topic in the forums and want to make sure you don’t miss the answer, just click that link (it’s in the brown topic bar at the top of the page) and you will receive an email with all replies. Once you’ve seen your answer, you can always click it again to stop following the topic.

…end quote

There are a few other features we’re working on as well. I’m looking into a “new post” type feature as well. The problem is that the definition of new changes from one person to the next but I think we’ll have a good solution for you guys.

Also, don’t forget that you can click on the cookie trail on each topic to filter only by topics (click “Web Design & Development” at the top of this page). In addition, you can use the dropdown menu in that same space on the forums index page to filter by category.

Interestingly, our original design looked and functioned very similar to vBulletin Kevin. It lasted about a week before we got so many complaints that we blew it up and started over. People felt that the actual posts felt buried and that it was over-engineered. Not everybody on the site is a hard core forum poster or “Web 2.0” user so we try to blend everything we do with innovation but not at the expense of being too “techy.”

Thank you all for your feedback. I may not reply to every post out there but we’re always listening and taking notes. Our current list of new features that we’re working on has about 25 items on it – many with dozens of subset features – so keep watching and you’ll see great new changes to the site and new features just about every day.

Oh, and if that isn’t enough work for us to handle, we’re also totally redesigning the site from a look and feel perspective and a organization perspective. We’ve added so many new features that we’re afraid some have become buried. The new design is going to take a while to complete but I bet you’ll discover a lot of great features that you never knew existed when it launches. Stay tuned for more on that one :-)

“but we’re always listening and taking notes”.

Uh-oh! ;)

Man…I wish I didn’t have to work for a living.