apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Heheh, love the irony of the fact that the only person taking offense to criticizm of forum *software* is an urban baby regular. They also find the need to then criticize the design of a blog that is largely outside of the control of a non-techie blogger whereas the urban baby forum was designed and programmed by techies (one of the founding techies I happen to know BTW) so should be better.

Anyway, more on what I think would be useful. I and others have said before thzat you need the previous/next page buttons because posts that are only a day old can scroll off the first page and it is much easier to see the post you want to read within the context of the other posts surrounding it rather than have to go to archives, sort by date and then do a text search.

Not sure what meta taggin in each post means but I like the sound of it! Bring it on ;)

One thing that may keep the feel of AT going is something like a good question, open thread or even any post that links to a specific thread in the forum so that all comments are stored in the forum format. This way, when you click on the comments link you still see a list of comments within the post but because they are stored in the forum software, anyone clicking through from the forum can view the most active threads because the forum software will sort by most active dynamically.

Each specific comment thread linked through from the blog would have a heirachical link at the top something like this:

AT>AT forum>OpenThreads>OpenThread199

so that ppl who come to the forum thread via a comment link from the blog can explore the forum via the above links if they so wish. This way you cater for the two distinct communities that typcially arise from a blog and forum site. Forum ppl tend to stay in the forums and rarely visit the blog whereas blog/comment ppl tend not to bother with the forum. I have seen this on other blogs.

I hope what I am saying makes sense!
Dailyheights kinda does this but their blog page is not really kept up to date with fresh material. They tend to post on the front page based on what is in the forum rather than what I am suggesting which is to populate the forum based on regular blog posts.

I have been posting at Video Fitness for years now and think it is a good model. They are using vBulletin.

What makes the UrbanBaby boards so good is:

* All their boards (more than three BTW) stream into the same browser window

* Anonymity on the frontend

* Traffic -- there are always people on them and it's snarky

My mention of Invision wasn't so much a recommendation as a reference point, as their interface is so commonly used and I know it well (moderator elsewhere).

I just took a look at Urbanbaby -- their messageboards are HELL on a laptop, absolutely the worst I've seen. Because it's framed, a noticeable amount of screen real estate is given over to "register" and logo junk that can't be made to go away.

Their threading method seems to encourage dinky short messages that don't say much, the opposite of what makes the community here so valuable. (Does having a baby kill one's ability to capitalize, punctuate, and finish a sentence? Or is it the board format? Yikes!)

The way it threads makes it very difficult to read a longer conversation because the entire screen is a blur of text. Setting my browser to magnify the dinky-poo text didn't help -- it's the layout, not the text size. Messages do need some kind of visual divider and some white space, especially as reading on a screen causes more eye strain than reading printed text.

I would loudly hint that someone take a look at Jakob Nielsen's work on GOOD DESIGN in Web sites before committing to a board format. I see why you don't want the middlebrow look of the typical Invision board... but a good messageboard is first and foremost easy to read.

I love the forums at www.televisionwithoutpity.com

I am sure they are too structured for this environment, but the structure makes it very easy to find what you are looking for. There are "meet market" threads for general, off-topic discussion, topic threads pop to the the top when they have new comments and the icon next to the threads change colors when someone has posted in a topic since I last went into the thread.

I don't frequent that many message boards / forums, so this may be standard stuff.

Whoa ho! TWOP's a good example of a cleaner-looking interface on the Invision engine. The board "owner" decides how much structure is wanted, by the way.

One more Invision-esque factoid. It's possible to have at least three levels of categories:

--Visible to unregistered guests, to give them a taste before registering.
--Visible to registered members and not guests.
--Visible to moderators only. If you're going to have staff scattered across the country, a conversation area for "staff only" could be very handy. (For all I know, other board engines offer this...)

I seem to be turning into an Invision promoter. Oops.

The UrbanBaby forums are AWFUL! Please please please please do not go with that format! Completely illegible. :(

Also looked at Yayhooray -- that's a beautifully clean interface, and the feature to see all forums load to one page is very nice, too. The interface does a lot more to accommodate long posts than Urbanbaby's does.

That buddy thing looks potentially interesting. (Sorry to keep mouthing off -- I've spent a *lot* of time on messageboards over the past... um... far too many years... and I'm kind of a geekette...)

Urban Baby certainly has its limitations. For example, if you would rather search the archives than ask a popular question, the internal search engine must have a word with at least four letters - and you can't use " " to tighten up the search. Too, as far as debating with total strangers on a message board, momswhothink.com is a much better forum. But for quick questions and NYC info, it's great.

Love apt. therapy - I live in a studio with a baby and get wonderful ideas for handling it gracefully.

I like www.thefashionspot.com and Yayhooray. They're both easy to navigate and easy on the eyes.

Wow, wende articulated my problems with the urban baby forum software much better than I could.

I now see why ppl like them. I guess if you are a stepped thread person, then any of the ubb, phpbb, infopoop, that others like (the majority) will not work for you because each thread is self contained in its own section. You cannot see the thread until you enter it, and even then it is not stepped, and you cannot address individual posts because each new post simply gets tacked onto the end much like these open threads. However, each thread can be very specific so you can have many threads going on at the same time.

The craigslist forums are another example of stepped threads where you can reply to a specific post within a thread and everyone can see who you are responding to based on the indentation of your reply. The biggest problem with the CL forum is that no matter how recent a post is, the original post that started that thread stays in chronological order with all the other original posts so an active thread can still get pushed back a few pages as newer topics are started.

The big advantages I see with the more popular forum styles as listed by others above is that they do keep the most recent posts at the top and typically have features such as being able to click on a user's name to see all their posts in any thread, ability to private message them without revealing email, and they generally have very powerful search capabilities.

I hate hate hate stepped threads. vBulletin and phpBB are both functional, easily organized and easily administrated. I've used both and either one works fine.

I really don't do that much with other forums, but I have to say right this minute that one of things that I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE about AT is the look of it. Call me a fascist or a looks-ist, or whatever you like, but I say that all the white space surrounding each post, and everything about the look that of it contributes a LOT to why my eyes just relish being here. It also sets up all the photos, whether art- or commerce-related to live up to their potential.

Often, when something is posted on here, and you click on the link to it, often (NOT ALWAYS, but often) the site it comes from originally doesn't complement the look of it nearly as well as it looks here, and it's usually the exact same picture.

I just had to add that in.

Speaking of urban baby:

[Toddler] bored. what decorating/renovating/ny real estate sites can I look at now?
Toddler - Feb 21st, 2006 5:06pm

apartmenttherapy.com
- Feb 21st, 2006 5:07pm

Speaking of bookmarks in general, I just recently found a cool site to stash all your bookmarks and code them by keyword so you can find them again. You can also look at your bookmarks anywhere you are, since they're on a website. There's other things you can do on this site too, but that's how far I've gotten:
http://del.icio.us/

I found this on one of my other fave sites, 43 folders. It's not really a forum but each blog post allows for comments. They do remove off-topic posts. One of the things I like about this site is that the threads can meander pretty much anywhere and there's little interference. Each thread really cooks up its own soup.

To clarify, when I say what I like about this site, I'm referring to AT, not 43F.

I didn't have time earlier, but I was going to suggest 43folders, which also has a separate board that is a bit like TWOP.

For God's sake, please don't have smileys and glitter signatures and blinking avatars and ... well...

Click on my name to see a sight that is often *excessive* in this regard. They don't post much these days, but they're often ready to talk about their board points and avatars and junk like that.

Wende In SF - As a regular UrbanBaby board user, I think you are so far off base with your comments. The worst you've ever seen? I can point you to dozens of bad boards. While the UrbanBaby boards have their frame issues, overall they work very well. And the community there is amazingly active, so they must work on some levels.

BTW, I checked out your blog and what's up with the hideous layout there? the color choices and clunky ads are horrific. Just a bit of feedback

Easy, Louise, it's just us cowpokes out here and the wide open praire, so's you don't want to go getting too personal. You might need Wende to pull you out of a ditch later on. ;-)

Oh, and i forgot to say that this thread has been incredibly helpful, so thank you all.

Please. Please!
Don't change a hair for me...stay, little AT, stay.

I rarely have trouble finding a post and when I do a question to the ATers and I get my answer. I've been posting at diff. bulletin boards for years but none have floated my boat as much as the AT format.

I like this format too - It would be nice if AT could stay the same, but modify itself slightly with some forum-like features:

- meta tagging each post
- perhaps an option to log in and read from an interface so you can create a personal tag or memory link to each post you like (like the livejournal blog system does)
- ip logging could be nice, maybe I'm a little anal, but I get really annoyed by people who seem to create mulitple personalities to have conversations with themselves. I am also highly suspicious, so while that appears to me to be something I've seen here, I am probably totally off base.
- previous/next page buttons. The archives are difficult, especially when there are nested links in some posts.

But I really like how AT has kept a blog format, because I like how the discussion can be focused on a certain topic, posted at the top - to switch from blog to forum, I think AT would lose a lot of it's appeal.