Switched to SMF from Snitz, some comments

[dno]

I recently switched from Snitz to SMF and have some comments or wishes. I should say first I love SMF, there is so much about it that makes my life so much easier so from my perspective this was a great move, but my perspective does is not what earns the money.

As many of those that use SMF will likely understand,  traffic equal gold, no traffic no gold. Keeping those who use your site as happy as can be is paramount to a successful forum.  As near as I'm able to tell most of the site members are reasonably happy with SMF and much of what they were not happy about we have found solutions for. Still there is a group that still would prefer we didn't switch. I can't keep everyone happy and overall I think the improvement will help more than hurt. The most consistant complaint is the lack a similar "Active topics" feature. While we have found some similar functionality it's not really the same or as easy as it was for people to hit the most active topics and move on. On the SMF forum the way we get to that now is the "view the most recent posts on the forum" link. This is better than nothing but not quite as nice as the snitz "Active topics", The complaint is that people are having to work harder to get to the content they want, more work is bad.  If anyone that is familiar with snitz knows a better way I would love to hear about it. If there is no better way then I think it might be good to take a look at how "Active Topic" works and incorporate this either into a modification or future revision of SMF.

Another issue that came up was the time stamp, while we have this issue resolved for members, it appears the lurkers also miss this feature, it appears you can only get a time stamp if you are a member. For my site, being able to set the default site-wide vs via the profile would be valuable. A minor issue with the time stamp is the members miss the creation date timestamp and topic created by name that used to be posted in the topic listing. I may be able to figure out how to add these into SMF for myself but thought if someone else already had these things or perhaps it may be considered in a future version.

I know that some may feel that lurkers are not that important and they should just join. The reality is I can't make people join and it's not uncommon to have over 5x the guests vs the members logged in. We have almost 14,000 registered members and during camping season our traffic numbers can get quite high, much of that traffic are the lurkers. While I'm thrilled everytime we get a new member and we want people to participate the lurkers are equally important to me, more lurkers is more traffic, more traffic is more impressions, more impressions is more money. I find myself trying not just to keep the members happy but to keep the lurkers happy as well.

We have other issues but these two I've tried to find satisfactory solutions for but have not come up with anything yet. I will look to see if I can find solutions to other issues before I bring those up as well.

I'm not posting to complain, just simply suggesting enhancements if they don't already exist based on what people liked about my old site. My hat is off to those that created this forum software, especially from the management side, it's nice to have the level of control vs what I had before.

[H]

Thanks for using SMF and the feedback

Have you enabled recent posts? I'm not sure if this would be a good alternative to Active Topics or not. Does it go based on time or time+activity combined?

[SleePy]

Thanks for the feedback.

I think the second one is more of a bug here, If you could add more details in a support post to the correct support board then I am sure we can try to sort our the problem here.

[Bancherd]

What is "Active topics"?  It does sound very interesting.

[evil-angelist]

You should probably run tinyportal SIMPLEPORTAL on the site as well, using SMF alone to reply on all the functions you wish to have on a forum basically isnt enough.

(or start making mod requests for things which are missed out and viable for integrating to SMF)

[Deprecated]

Active topics:

How do you determine which topics to show here? It seems to me it must be some combination of the topics being recent and the number of replies. You know how Snitz works and considering that most of us don't (me) and it would be difficult to figure out for a Snitz novice, perhaps you can explain it.

Time stamp:

I don't quite understand what you mean. I see the time topics were posted all over SMF. Again, explain?

Lurkers:

I didn't see any point here. I agree lurkers are important for sites with advertising. Do you have any suggestions that would make SMF more lurker friendly?


I'm a mod package author and I find topics such as yours are good places for me to get new ideas. If you explain what you mean perhaps myself or other mod authors may write the mod package to add the features you request. Please communicate what you want changed.

And like Eve said, post it in our Mod Requests board. There is also a Feature Request board. Post in either or both.

[Oldiesmann]

Which theme are you using?

The time and date are displayed for guests in all three of the themes that come with SMF:

Default theme - right below the SMF logo in the upper right-hand corner of the forum.
Classic theme - right next to the SMF logo, below the welcome text
Babylon theme - right below the welcome text in the user info box in the upper left-hand corner of the forum.

The only difference is that the date/time for members can be formatted to their liking (Profile -> Look and Layout) and can be changed to match their timezone (also under Look and Layout).

[dno]

It's sort of like the recent posts feature on SMF except for the way the information is organized and the "active topics" feature also has a drop down allowing you to select if you want active topics from your last visit, within 15 minutes, etc. I took a screen shot of one of my forums that has not switched over yet so you can see how it's organized and the dropdown for how far back to display the topics.



This was a very popular feature since many of my members log in at work and just want to quickly keep up on things. This format makes it very easy to go to the topics that interst you without having to sort through everything that was posted first. I know my members would love to see this feature on the SFM software, it seems like everyday I get comments on how much the old "active topic" feature is missed.

Reguarding the time stamps which shows the last poster and time for each topic. we have figured out how to turn them on for members but not for guests. I'm now hearing from a few guests/lurkers  that they liked the time stamps as well. Additionally I'm also hearing that people are missing the date stamp for when the topic was originally posted. See links below, the first is an example of how we had things laid out in the snitz software, the second image is how things are laid out  in SMF, they are very similar (for members) the difference is the time stamp for when the topic was created and in Snitz the time stamp was viewable by everyone.

http://www.hybridexplorer.com/forum/forum.asp?H_FORUM_ID=2 [nofollow]

http://www.popupexplorer.com/forum/index.php?board=2.0 [nofollow]

H- If "Enable recent posts" is unrelated to the "veiw recent posts" Then I have not seen this feature.

SleePy- I will see what I can find out from support  (once I figure out the correct support board)

Ancherd- Hopefully my above description and image answers your question

evil-angelist- My site is a portal of sorts, I don't run any portal software as the rest of the content has built up organically over the past several years. I do however, have some new projects and am looking at using some portal integration with those, just to hopefully make things easier on me.

Depreciated- Did I answer your questions, if you need to contact me directly feel free. I do have some ideas about some other mods dealing with the way karma works, time related ranking and permissions, if your intersted. It's not something I'm inclined to work on but if someone were to do these things I might get excited.

Oldiesmann- It sounds like what you are talking about deals with displaying the current date on the forum which as far as I know is not too much of an issue. Our concern is the time/date stamps on the topics and posts themselves. As far as our theme it's mostly a variation of the defualt theme mostly recolored and put in a wrapper to fit within the existing site. In the not too distant future (I hope) I'm planning a redesign to a wider format for the entire site, but right now I'm going to be happy just to get all the forums changed over to SMF. I have already moved the largest most active one, but I still have two other sister sites to move as well.

Thanks everyone for your comments I hope I have explained things a little bit better now.

[Deprecated]

Dno, thank you for filling us in. That active topics thing interests me. I see no reason why Snitz should get a free ride having good stuff that SMF doesn't have, so I'll take a serious look at how it works and see if I can work that to SMF's advantage.

You know that's one of SMF's great strengths, that even if the developers don't want to add a feature we mod package authors can add whatever we like, and we've got quite a few authors and more every day. Writing mod packages is the next big thing!

I hope I can encourage you in posting any of your mod package ideas in our Mod Requests board where mod package authors go shopping for ideas. More than a few of those ideas have been hatched in that board.

[dno]

Dno, thank you for filling us in. That active topics thing interests me. I see no reason why Snitz should get a free ride having good stuff that SMF doesn't have, so I'll take a serious look at how it works and see if I can work that to SMF's advantage.

You know that's one of SMF's great strengths, that even if the developers don't want to add a feature we mod package authors can add whatever we like, and we've got quite a few authors and more every day. Writing mod packages is the next big thing!

I hope I can encourage you in posting any of your mod package ideas in our Mod Requests board where mod package authors go shopping for ideas. More than a few of those ideas have been hatched in that board.

From what I can see there is not much that snitz has on SMF but this is one feature that is hands down much better, and I can't say enough how popular this feature was so if you can get that working My members will be thrilled.

I found the mod request forum, I spelled out how I thought karma could work better. If I had to guess it's a more complex than this active topic mod but if you look at the permissions section even that might be an improvement:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=267153.0

I will try to post some other mod requests later, this last one took some time to write out and that was quick and dirty.

Let me know if you come up with anyting on the Active Topics, I think that one is a can't miss feature.

[Oldiesmann]

The time should be there for guests as well.

Try Admin -> Forum Maintenance -> Recount all totals and statistics and see if that helps any. It could be an issue with the conversion.

[Deprecated]

One of the sad facts of life is that with open source software and particularly with mod package authors, volunteers are unpaid so they are difficult to enlist on projects they aren't interested in. Myself, I'm very annoyed with what some forums and their members do with negative karma. I operate my own handicraft forum of about 75 members with only positive karma and it's nice, but I admin on another forum with several hundred members and sometimes they get in karma wars giving negs in retaliation. I have become weary of petty negative karma and I've just lost interest in the subject. However I've been on some great forums ( http://city-data.com [custom] & http://www.globalaffairs.org/forum/ [vBulletin] ) where positive-only karma has worked out well for the forum operators and members. To sum it up, if I ever see a way to create a positive-only karma system I might, but I have no interest when you can smite. That just leads to hard feelings.

Now what if to smite somebody you also had to lose a point?

I'm more interested in the Active Topics feature. That is a win-win for everybody. Don't be surprised if you hear from me. I've bookmarked this topic in my future mod packages ideas category.

I hope you will become enthused enough to become more involved in SMF. It might not be the best forum software but it is becoming the best, and one day it may become indisputably the best. I think SMF already has a place in the top 3-4.

[dno]

The time should be there for guests as well.

Try Admin -> Forum Maintenance -> Recount all totals and statistics and see if that helps any. It could be an issue with the conversion.

Thanks Oldiesman, I did give that a try, but no luck. I had actually run that routine when I moved the data over to recover the last poster information.

I did start thinking that it may be an issue with my hosting environment. Since Snitz is ASP based the rest of my site is also written in ASP, I didn't really want to go through all the work of rewritting the rest of the site in PHP, besides I'm much better with visual basic than I am with PHP. When I was working on converting the data I had set up a test environment on one of my linux hosting services. I just looked at that as a guest and the time stamp does show up as guest. For some reason I never thought to look on my local server and it shows up as guest there too. It only seems to be the live server where I'm having the issue.

This is likely an issue I will need to take to support, not being a server setup expert I can only guess that there may be some kind of setting that might be incorrect that contributes to the problem. Whatever the case between my loacl windows server and the live windows server things do tend to work better on my local server, this includes mod installs.

Deprecated- I agree with you about the negative karma, that is why I though permissions for who could grant either positive  or negative karma seperately would allow a select group to voice disapproval like the moderators or nobody at all. I have to say I do love your solution of costing karma to smite, that might do wonders for the karma abuse.

I'm far more interested in the active topics as well, this may even win over some of the naysayers. On one of the sister sites several of the members have voiced that they would prefer to stay on the snitz software.

I was pretty impressed with SMF when I was looking for something new. Initally I was looking for another ASP solution, I think it was one of my members who mentioned it. To test it out I quickly setup another site which at the moment gets little activity but I was able to see that I liked it. At the time I was comparing it to MegaBBS which seemd nice to me as well, but had some awkward things about it that kept it from being a front runner. I decided since one can run PHP and MySQL on a windows server I could work around that problem.

In a way SMF being a PHP based forum worked to my advantage. I could create a default.asp, topic.asp and forum.asp page for people comeing from search engines and redirect them to the correct topic in the SMF forum so we don't loose any clickthroughs except for the 40,000 posts I deleted to slim things down for the data conversion. If I had moved to another ASP based system there may have already been files with those names and I would have had to make a more complicated redirection routine.

So far I really like SMF all those options really boggle the mind when compared to what I had with snitz. Don't get me wrong, I think snitz was a nice forum but in today's climate we needed some big improvements over what it offered for managing member accounts, moderators ( We have a 6 month volunteer moderator term system) banning, registrations and as it turns out resetting passwords.

I'm excited to see what you come up with on the Active Topics, if you need my input don't hesitate to call on me.

[Deprecated]

I hope you will stay on our site Dno. I'd like to see SMF triumph, and I'd like to have a better forum software for my own forums too. You're even getting me interested in going for-profit. (The only forum I own is a small handicraft forum.)

I just really hate that ASP because I don't want to suckle MSFT's tit. And don't get me wrong, I'm a VC++ developer so I'm just as close to Gate's titty, but my heart is in open source: Linux, Apache, PHP. You don't need to buy any software for your server, just pay for the metal and silicon. I really love that Linux-Apache-PHP is (IMO) better than ASP and Win2k3 etc.

I hope we can win you over and seduce your Snitz forums to come join us. We will see if I can get to your Active Topics, or perhaps one of our other 292 mod package authors will tackle the job.

I believe you mentioned camping. I'm a veteran camper and backroads 4x4 explorer so perhaps I should check out your site. Perhaps you can PM me the URL.

[dno]

Thanks Deprecated, I'm not a huge fan of "MSFT" either but I do work toward the goal of making things easier on myself. It does not matter to me who has the best solution. I admit I prefer free, but I will pay for something if I feel it works better than a free solution. There is quite a bit to love about Lunux-Apache-PHP and I should add MySQL. The more I find tools that help me work with that environment the more I like it. I have to say my favorite tool is SQLyog. I'm not sure how well known it is or how familar everyone is with Microsoft's Enterprise manager and Query Analyzer, finding SQLyog sure made my transition from the dark side much easier 

In fact switching from an MS SQL database to a MySQL database was about 97% seemless for me. The biggest issue I'm having to deal with is the difference in the way the different database work with time. I think working with time is much more flexible in PHP so a MySQL database is less of an issue there, ASP... not as much.

For you or anyone else that may be intersted the site I just moved is PopUp Explorer or PUX as we like to call it which is a tent-trailer enthusiest site, http://www.popupexplorer.com [nofollow], there are a couple of sister sites which are pretty much clones of PUX. You can visit Hybrid Explorer, http://www.hybridexplorer.com [nofollow] to see the old software in action. You should be able to find the active topics link near the bottom of the forum page.

Eventually I will be moving over the sister sites as well, but I'm trying to figure out the best strategy for merging the membership database and how I'm going to address the the member that is associated with any given reply since the member id for everyone will almost certainly be different which changes who is associated with a reply.

[Deprecated]

It was my own stupid oversight for leaving out MySQL, and also let's not forget phpMyAdmin. Those 5 packages are totally amazing, and totally free! Viva la open source!



<off-topic> I had intended to buy a pickup tow vehicle and 5th wheeler with the rooms that expand out, but after this historic rise in gas prices I've found myself unable to afford the huge investment and operating costs, so now I'm considering getting a tent trailer to tow behind my 4x4. I'll check out your site.</off-topic>

[dno]

I like PHPadmin, I even added it to my local server, I've always had trouble moving a large amount of data via PHPadmin though. It may be operator error and I've always managed to get it done, by moving things in smaller chunks. I feel things work so much better when you can simply just copy from one place to the other and not have to worry as much about how much data you are moving. But on the other hand, I'm certainly no expert. By trade I'm a graphic designer and a closet geek who was frustrated trying to get people to give me the functionality in web sites that I felt a site should have, so learning these things was self defense.

[青山 素子]

SQLyog is okay, but I really wish that MySQL AB hadn't killed off MySQL Control Center. It was perhaps the nicest client interface I had used for MySQL, and was very much like the old Enterprise Manager for MS SQL Server.

[H]

H- If "Enable recent posts" is unrelated to the "veiw recent posts" Then I have not seen this feature.

Admin area > Current Theme > Number of recent posts to display on board index this will also add a link to display more recent posts.

Like this: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=recent

[dno]

H- Thank you that did help a little bit, I like being able to just scan through the topics quickly like in that list.