Important: Help shape your Canadian Content

[karrie]

:lol:

Yeah, I appreciated the anniversary e mail, but the friends thing, I don't need, and was
suggesting that we don't have such a thing, it seems childish and silly, sort like something
we would have done in elementary school. I've not asked anyone to 'be my friend', I even
feel silly saying it, so I will remain the resident 'snob', (just kidding);-),) but I love it
here anyway.
Begging for a friend, or even accepting someone asking to be my friend, after I whined
about the 'concept' is something I don't want, you'll all have to just accept me the way
I am, persnickety/yippity/snobbidy/tothepointedly/femaleably/and happytobealiveably:lol:

lol. I found it to be more of a nice way to keep harassing forces from being able to bother you. There are people on here that I don't want to have access to the personal things that can be written on my wall, and who I don't really want to be able to PM me and harp at me. It doesn't feel 'school'ish' to me, more like the difference between opening my front door to the next door neighbor who sent over a casserole when my uncle died, or talking through the screen to the religious zealot who keeps coming round on Saturday mornings to try to convert me.

edited to add... but I fully respect every person's right to choose who comes and goes from their list/wall/etc.

 

[talloola]

lol. I found it to be more of a nice way to keep harassing forces from being able to bother you. There are people on here that I don't want to have access to the personal things that can be written on my wall, and who I don't really want to be able to PM me and harp at me. It doesn't feel 'school'ish' to me, more like the difference between opening my front door to the next door neighbor who sent over a casserole when my uncle died, or talking through the screen to the religious zealot who keeps coming round on Saturday mornings to try to convert me.

That's an interesting way to look at it.

 

[Andem]

The wall and friends features, the enhanced profile pages were not meant to convert CC from a mainly political & news forum to a social network like friendster or facebook, merely as enhancements to improve the connectivity between people and the adhesivity of the community.

 

[Praxius]

What community-driven site(s) do you find extremely well designed and easy to use?
For me, I like facebook without the annoying applications. I also like the design and setup of Digg.

I personally rarely visit Facebook anymore (The fad wore out on me) and only use it in case someone needs to get ahold of me for something.

As it goes for which ones I feel are designed well and easy to use..... None.

What type of layout would you like to see on Canadian Content?

Do you like more a more graphical interface like (CC Forums used to be) or something more simple and fast-loading like Digg or The New Netscape or something big and blocky web 2.0-ish like Newsgator?

Visual Apperance helps attract people to any site, and helps keep most people active in interest. I feel that if it was plain and simple for fast loading, it would be boring as hell and eventually the overall site might wear on me. Something that looks new, edgy, current day styles in design help... pretty is good. But not over powering like Cindy Lopper

It doesn't actually have any great effect on someone's ability to post what they think I guess, but it doesn't hurt.

What extra type of features would you like to see?

More integration with the video site, perhaps or bringing user-submitted commentary listings to the main page? Other ideas have been brought up: A social bookmarking system like digg; "Badges" on profile pages; A political party icon for your profile and also on your posts (optional); Prominant thread rating;

I come for the forums and the threads, so a whole bunch of other stuff just gets in my way personally, but one thing I would like to see changed/added, is a better Post % count meter.

For example:

Total posts:
2,466 (13.57 posts per day)

^ Exactly how does this count? When does it start it's tally? At the begining of the registration of the user and carries on day after day hince forth or does it only count during the times one is logged in?

What I would like to see is perhaps something along the lines of a Top poster of the day by % counted through the posts in a 24 hour period, as well as one for each month and perhaps per year.

13.57 posts per day doesn't sound right for me

Thread Pages: Do you prefer having the user info on the left like it used to be or on top of the post content like it is now?

Before and After (this page, for example).

Doesn't matter for me.

User Groups: Is anybody interested in Yahoo! or Facebook style publicor private usergroups?

Not I.

What kind of navigation system would you like to see?

The black menu bar isn't working for us. There are far too many features and pages to have such a simple system. What about drop down menus? What other comparibly-sized sites do you know of which you find extremely easy to navigate?

The forums I used to dabble in before coming into here:
http://www.volconvo.com/forums/

What I feel should be done is perhaps remove the majority of the various sections, as most of them could be placed all into one section with ease.

For example, the news section I feel doesn't require a CTV, a CBC, an odd section and the main section all seperated and I feel reduces the amount of people posting in news articles, due to having to dig around in so many sections. In fact I feel just about every main section doesn't require all those various sub sections.... that to me seems redundant and sometimes hard to track back threads I previously posted in with quick ease.

To be honest, I hardly ever bother to look into most of the sub-sections except the CTV/CBC ones to make sure I don't repost something already existing, but with all the others, I just can't be bothered to hunt around and just view the main sections.

Other web sites you find extremely useful, handy or otherwise easy to use.

Please provide any examples you would like me to consider while drawing up a design.

None right off hand comes to mind.

The only main two issues I have with the forums since I came onto these forums is that there are way too many sub sections and places members (esspecially new members) have to remember where to post things, and I feel would help over all if they were condensed into one main section if and when possible.

The other issue is the Search feature.... it just plain sucks as it has never worked for me since I joined. I try and type in something I wanted to find and it keeps telling me I didn't enter enough words for it to properly search with..... even when I enter several words in the search (I put in up to around 10 words once just to see if it would work) it still tells me it needs more.

The Search Feature is the main problem with the site in my view, since it just doesn't seem to work..... if it does work, it certainly doesn't work as well and easily as other's I have used in the past.

The graphical layout of the site isn't a major priority for me, but would still be nice.

 

[Andem]

Too many forums: So a couple of people have mentioned having less forum topics, and more specially merging CBC, CTV and Odd News categories into the main "In The News" forum. Does it bug anybody that the bots posting for each subforum would move to the main news forum once a day.... or is it preferrable to simply remove the bots and let members post breaking news and the odd tidbits from Reuters?

Removing the reputation system: Some people are for and some people are against. I need more feedback to completely ditch the system.

More graphical with smoother lines: It seems people prefer smoother lines and a more graphical user interface. I'm taking this into consideration and will come up with multiple designs for members to choose from. Unfortunately, unlike many of the Internet powerhouses, we don't have a multi-million dollar budget just to design a new favicon (Not to mention the overall design). I would guess the back and white design we're recently updated to is not very popular? How about back to a blue-ish look?

Navigation: Well, I get questions all of the time via PM regarding where to find certain things. I'm definately taken this into mind when redesigning the navigation system.

Other features/missing features: The mod team has been gracious enough to help me keep track of features requested and other enhancements to current features. I've actually got them written down on regular paper but it's much easier to keep track of them through a staff thread Enough of that, we're keeping track of this thread and making sure all suggestions are noted and taken care of.

A separate "recent topics" page: I've thought of this and it certainly is a great idea. This would be different from the "New posts since you last visited". As I've decided to reintroduce the recent topics section with tabs such as News, Politics and Everything, I could create a separate page which is very similar to the current front page layout, but not to include everything else on the front page but the recent topics and limit each to to something like 25 or 30 posts? In order to design it, I need input on how many posts to include and what categories hold the most interest.

_____________________________________________________________________

Contribution of articles: A few members have shown interest in participation of "Canadian Content eNews" but unfortunately it's not enough to put as much time into as I'd have liked. What this system is, is a news publishing system linked to the main homepage and CC eNews. These stories are picked up by the major news aggregators on the net including Google News. A few times in CC's history, we've had an article receive over 10,000 pageviews in a matter of 5 minutes and continue in popularity.

The eNews system is not designed as a commercially profitable news site, but it is part of the reason Canadian Content was founded, a place where anybody or anyone from any side of the political spectrum can publish their opinion on current news and events or -- if they'd like -- publish an overview or analysis of a news event.

Articles are to be in the correct format and thoroughly checked for spelling and proper punctuation.

I would open this up as a close beta until we have enough members and a stable enough system. If you can PM me and I get enough responses, I will open up a new usergroup and give those members access to the publishing system when its ready (70% done at the moment).
_____________________________________________________________________

Recent Videos: I didn't tackle this in my original post, but would you prefer having "videos currently being watched, which is an (almost) realtime list of the latest video pages to receive hits or would you prefer an at-the-moment not-very-often-updated list of the most recently submitted videos?

 

[karrie]

Andem, if it's not too irritating for me to be nosy.... how hard would it be to give users 'skin controls' on the forum, so that they can choose their own colors?

 

[Praxius]

Andem, if it's not too irritating for me to be nosy.... how hard would it be to give users 'skin controls' on the forum, so that they can choose their own colors?

From my experience with my little forum, I have to setup different templates and set them as active for members to pick from. For my site, that would include creating a new title bar, changing the colors of the links, text, backgrounds, sizes of text and modifying any other graphics which might relate. Each template would take some time, as the current one on my site took a few different tries and some time to make it look close to something I like.

In a nut shell, each skin (or template) usually means creating an entirly new site from scratch, so to speak. But once created, all a member would have to do is go into their control panel and select the available one they want.

 

[karrie]

From my experience with my little forum, I have to setup different templates and set them as active for members to pick from. For my site, that would include creating a new title bar, changing the colors of the links, text, backgrounds, sizes of text and modifying any other graphics which might relate. Each template would take some time, as the current one on my site took a few different tries and some time to make it look close to something I like.

In a nut shell, each skin (or template) usually means creating an entirly new site from scratch, so to speak. But once created, all a member would have to do is go into their control panel and select the available one they want.

the site I'd belonged to ages ago didn't actually change format from one person to another, but, the title bar, background, and shading colors could be personalized.

 

[eh1eh]

Ooo. Skins. That is so Firefoxy. I love it.

 

[Praxius]

Too many forums: So a couple of people have mentioned having less forum topics, and more specially merging CBC, CTV and Odd News categories into the main "In The News" forum. Does it bug anybody that the bots posting for each subforum would move to the main news forum once a day.... or is it preferrable to simply remove the bots and let members post breaking news and the odd tidbits from Reuters?

The Reuters I don't mind, as every so often there's something interesting that passes by I haven't seen before.

I wouldn't mind the CTV or CBC bots posting in the news section, since I usually post the news from those sites they usually miss, it would still save myself some time and I could just quote certain parts and continue on with the topic.

But then again, I also post more articles from their sites then the bots normally do, so, so long as I'm here in the forums, they might not be required ;-)

Removing the reputation system: Some people are for and some people are against. I need more feedback to completely ditch the system.

The people complaining are probably the ones getting all the negatives, lol. I normally don't notice the reps, but every so often I'll check them out just to see if anybody was actually reading..... and they do..... Fancy that!

I don't mind them personally, but it wouldn't be a complete loss if they were removed.

More graphical with smoother lines: It seems people prefer smoother lines and a more graphical user interface. I'm taking this into consideration and will come up with multiple designs for members to choose from. Unfortunately, unlike many of the Internet powerhouses, we don't have a multi-million dollar budget just to design a new favicon (Not to mention the overall design). I would guess the back and white design we're recently updated to is not very popular? How about back to a blue-ish look?

Or you could also ask for some help from your nearby members to see if you can snag some free work. I could offer my assistance on certain parts, given available free time and all (With all the posting I do.... free time? what's that??)

Navigation: Well, I get questions all of the time via PM regarding where to find certain things. I'm definately taken this into mind when redesigning the navigation system.

I responded to this in another thread I believe.

Other features/missing features: The mod team has been gracious enough to help me keep track of features requested and other enhancements to current features. I've actually got them written down on regular paper but it's much easier to keep track of them through a staff thread Enough of that, we're keeping track of this thread and making sure all suggestions are noted and taken care of.

There was another idea that came into my head that was moderately important to the forum's design and I thought could help improve things a bit, but I forgot. When I remember, I'll post.

A separate "recent topics" page: I've thought of this and it certainly is a great idea. This would be different from the "New posts since you last visited". As I've decided to reintroduce the recent topics section with tabs such as News, Politics and Everything, I could create a separate page which is very similar to the current front page layout, but not to include everything else on the front page but the recent topics and limit each to to something like 25 or 30 posts? In order to design it, I need input on how many posts to include and what categories hold the most interest.

Well the categories which hold the most interest could vary from member to member and that could become kinda difficult to accomidate. I would recommend 30-50 posts of all the recent from all the sections, that way it would hold more recent posts then just the front page as it currently is and still might make it enough to make sure someone doesn't miss something throughout the day, as perhaps the last 5-10 or so threads would gradually be dropped off.

Contribution of articles: A few members have shown interest in participation of "Canadian Content eNews" but unfortunately it's not enough to put as much time into as I'd have liked. What this system is, is a news publishing system linked to the main homepage and CC eNews. These stories are picked up by the major news aggregators on the net including Google News. A few times in CC's history, we've had an article receive over 10,000 pageviews in a matter of 5 minutes and continue in popularity.

The eNews system is not designed as a commercially profitable news site, but it is part of the reason Canadian Content was founded, a place where anybody or anyone from any side of the political spectrum can publish their opinion on current news and events or -- if they'd like -- publish an overview or analysis of a news event.

Articles are to be in the correct format and thoroughly checked for spelling and proper punctuation.

I would open this up as a close beta until we have enough members and a stable enough system. If you can PM me and I get enough responses, I will open up a new usergroup and give those members access to the publishing system when its ready (70% done at the moment).
_____________________________________________________________________

Recent Videos: I didn't tackle this in my original post, but would you prefer having "videos currently being watched, which is an (almost) realtime list of the latest video pages to receive hits or would you prefer an at-the-moment not-very-often-updated list of the most recently submitted videos?

^ The above I have not dabbled into, so I can not comment at this point in time. I'll have to look into it. (As I mentioned, I usually just come for the threads and to anger people)

 

[Praxius]

the site I'd belonged to ages ago didn't actually change format from one person to another, but, the title bar, background, and shading colors could be personalized.

Well the shading, background and colors wouldn't take too long to setup, so long as the background didn't have a large graphic in it.... it's mostly the graphical things like the title bars and logos, etc. that take the most time.

 

[Andem]

Well the shading, background and colors wouldn't take too long to setup, so long as the background didn't have a large graphic in it.... it's mostly the graphical things like the title bars and logos, etc. that take the most time.

You are certainly correct in that. It's mostly to do with transparencies with gif or png images and especially if I go back to softer lines and corners, this would be difficult to accomidate but with a few lines of PHP code is doable (maybe a function and a couple of variables).. the probably is that creating several different templates would also include create many different corners and backgrounds for each DIV. Not to mention every improvement and feature would have to be implemented for each and every single style.

The other option is with javascript, but certainly not preferable.. and would still involve creating several duplicate images with correct transparencies.

 

[karrie]

You are certainly correct in that. It's mostly to do with transparencies with gif or png images and especially if I go back to softer lines and corners, this would be difficult to accomidate but with a few lines of PHP code is doable (maybe a function and a couple of variables).. the probably is that creating several different templates would also include create many different corners and backgrounds for each DIV. Not to mention every improvement and feature would have to be implemented for each and every single style.

The other option is with javascript, but certainly not preferable.. and would still involve creating several duplicate images with correct transparencies.

Well, I have a whim that it be done, so, I guess you'd better get cracking huh? :lol:

 

[Andem]

Well of course it can be done ;-) I can't and won't promise anything, but I might be able to come up with something _after_ I'm done with this survey and a new design with the features everybody wants.

 

[karrie]

really Andem, only if you have time and inclination. It sounds like a ridiculous amount of work. But, it would stop you from having to listen to one person whine about wanting square corners while another wants rounded.

As for the rep system, I say open a poll. It seems to be a 'squeaky wheel' issue most of the time. One person or two who complain. But, if it's a constant source of griping at you, toss it.

 

[shadowshiv]

How about "thanks" button? I like the rep thing too ... until you get some bushwhacker using it as anonymous means to fire off nasty comments....

Easiest way to solve that problem would be to make it impossible for the comments to be "anonymous". If you give rep(whether green or red) it should post the name of the person giving the rep automatically.

I personally like the reputation system. I do not want it to go, and I do not want any renovations made to it except for the point I mentioned above.

One thing to remember is that most(if not all) of the Mods have been regular members before and that could be the reason why they have so much rather than a bunch of sycophants just mindlessly giving greenies to the Mods.;-):lol:

If the rep system goes.....I will be very.....angry. *does best Marvin the Martian impression*:lol:

 

[Praxius]

You are certainly correct in that. It's mostly to do with transparencies with gif or png images and especially if I go back to softer lines and corners, this would be difficult to accomidate but with a few lines of PHP code is doable (maybe a function and a couple of variables).. the probably is that creating several different templates would also include create many different corners and backgrounds for each DIV. Not to mention every improvement and feature would have to be implemented for each and every single style.

The other option is with javascript, but certainly not preferable.. and would still involve creating several duplicate images with correct transparencies.

Have you ever dabbled in Adobe Dreamweaver? (Or Macromedia Dreamweaver if you're familiar with that name before Adobe bought them out) I haven't played much around with designing forums or forms, etc in it, but I find it does make things a lot easier to work with.

As it goes for Png, Gif or other files, I could do those no prob in Photoshop, prep them for the web and size them up to fit the site no prob.... (Sorta my profession and all)

 

[Kreskin]

Have you ever dabbled in Adobe Dreamweaver? (Or Macromedia Dreamweaver if you're familiar with that name before Adobe bought them out) I haven't played much around with designing forums or forms, etc in it, but I find it does make things a lot easier to work with.

As it goes for Png, Gif or other files, I could do those no prob in Photoshop, prep them for the web and size them up to fit the site no prob.... (Sorta my profession and all)

You know Prax I might come looking for your help one of these days. I have a site created strictly from notepad, and it needs to be seriously jazzed up.

 

[sanctus]

I am not a computer "whiz", so my comments probably are out of line. But frankly, I very much find this current format very cumbersome and difficult to navigate around.Much preferred the previous format to this one.

 

[karrie]

I am not a computer "whiz", so my comments probably are out of line. But frankly, I very much find this current format very cumbersome and difficult to navigate around.Much preferred the previous format to this one.

I never really got how it was different. Small image things, but, it didn't really strike me as different enough to be of concern. But I guess that's why I never left 8O