True. This board is going away, in favor of a more forum-like experience...but not exactly a forum, either. Your feedback will be indispensible in making it useful. The board is presently organized message by individual message, but the new approach will be much more thread-oriented. In coming days, I'll explain in more detail just what that means, but it should become a lot easier to see at a glance which threads in any given category contain new posts, and then--best of all--it should be a lot easier to navigate through threads!
We will also have the option to use more topic categories if we want. Instead of just one for all Lomgwave posts and one for all HiFER stuff, we could (for instance) subdivide each of them into reception reports and hardware related topics.
Everyone will still be able to read all posts, and guests will continue to have basic posting privileges as always. From the registered writer's standpoint, I hope we'll be able to make it easier to attach files again (something that hasn't worked right since GoDaddy "upgraded" our Linux operating system last spring). And, our Authenticated Authors should also have new, nearly unlimited ability to edit and revise all their recent posts.
From an administrative standpoint, I hope to never have to render the entire board read-only ever again in order to safely fix a problem in a single thread. Moderators will have more flexible maintenance tools to work with. And, I'm hopeful the new thread format will be self-archiving, so that we will never get behind on that chore again.
So, my first requests for your assistance!
1. What do we call it? It's no longer going to be just a message board; but it's not going to exactly be a full-complexity, high-maintenance forum, so it won't be anything like "Community Forum" again either.
2. What sort of message categories do you feel we need?
3. What forum-like features would you consider most important, and which might be nice but maybe optional? Not everything may be in the first iteration, but the earlier I can put together a big picture, the less likely I am to code myself into a corner.
Eagerly awaiting your comments,
John
