Forum Features Wish List
Forum Features Wish List
Edition: 2018-10-10
Testing status for UIC pages
This is no longer in priority order, so as to keep
topic number stable (which now have more obvious
permalinks).
01.
Search
Status: Problems (things not found, mainly)
appear to be fixed in a developmental version of forum Search,
but are not yet deployed.
[ Return to Summary ]
02.
My Replies
Status: UIC forum so far unchanged from Cureality
Shows only one page of the most recent replies.
This plus defective Search made it all but impossible to
locate that reply on salt, by the way, which content I
needed for a recent WB Blog reply. The fix would be
to support multiple pages of results, as normal forum topic view does:
Page [ 1] of 82
Next» Last»
Workaround that works: HH suggests
“…you could also do a search of
Topics and Replies by author with no search terms.
This produces a complete list of everything you
ever posted without limit. This can be further
limited to Topics only to remove Replies.”[ Return to Summary ]
03.
Missing Topics
Status: UIC restructed, has General
There are topics people want to discuss that have no obvious home,
so they tend to end up anywhere (as off-topic usually), and often
can’t be found later due to weak search. Also, news items often result
in duplicate postings as a result.
Here’s a list of candidate new forums:
- allergies
- cancer
- children’s issues
- circadian / sleep
- cooking / recipe chat
- dental / oral
- digestive {revise description of this existing forum to cover microbiome}
- eye / vision
- forum-related
- gender-related
- general health (no obvious forum)
- methylation
- muscle / cramps / RLS
- neurological
- news: research, regulatory, policy (unrelated to any obvious forum)
- sandbox / test
- supplements
- toxins
03g.
If only one new forum is created, make it General Health.
Status: present in UIC forum
On Cureality, there are forums only for topics that have
Tracks. That 1:1 relationship has been relaxed
for UIC, which has no Tracks.
Deliberately omitted from the list above was
Off-Topic. I doubt the forum wants
to go there. That’s what the whole
rest of the internet is for.[ Return to Summary ]
04.
Recent Topics
Status: UIC forum so far unchanged from Cureality
- Has no user control, and needs one or both of:
+ adjustable time window (within last ## days)
+ new since last visit
- Fixed
So far as I’ve been
able to notice, Recent Topics
does not show new/updated traffic in: Announcements,
Help Desk, Report Bugs, Suggestion Box,
New Products
- New responses to [some?] very old threads don’t show up in
Recent Topics. If I can reproduce
this behavior, I’ll post a Bug.
Indeed, the Member Page menu has no real forum
controls other than some privacy settings.[ Return to Summary ]
05.
Serial Posting (or Substitute)
Status: fixed in UIC forum and Cureality
[ Return to Summary ]
06.
Private Message Diode Defeater
Status: fixed in UIC and Cureality
Users can still send a PM even though they can’t receive one,
but they now get a warning, with a link to their account settings
to change it.
A user can disable incoming PMs. New users often
do this (it’s the default on a new account).
It is possible to send an outgoing PM even if
incoming PM disabled. No warning is apparently
given if one makes that error.
There are no obvious, easy-to-contact moderators who might
be engaged to assist.
This means the sender cannot receive a reply, with two common outcomes:
- the recipient posts a plea in some forum asking
the sender to enable PM, or
- no reply is ever sent, and the sender (often a new user)
begins to wonder what sort of community they have joined.
The simple fix for this is to issue a warning upon
composing an outgoing PM if the user has incoming disabled.[ Return to Summary ]
07.
Unicode, and Preview Doesn’t, Necessarily
Status: UIC forum behavior so far unchanged
I’ve often posted various Unicode characters. They preview with the
desired glyph, then post as "?". This needs to be
completely fixed (Unicode support), partially fixed (Preview correctly),
or at the very least be documented. Emoticons for extra credit.
I have separately posted an article on characters known to work.
Here are some examples that render correctly in Design and Preview,
whether entered as characters or [as HTML Entity &name;],
then convert to ? on post:
U+042F [?] CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER YA (and probably the entire Cyrillic script)
U+2153 [?] VULGAR FRACTION ONE THIRD
U+25BA [no entity] BLACK RIGHT-POINTING POINTER
U+263A [no entity] WHITE SMILING FACE
See also item
#15 below. See also work-around I’m using at: Edit
Aide: Special Characters Supported.
This doesn’t seem to be a font problem. Over-riding to Arial,
in which those glyph code points are now populated, doesn’t fix it.
The blog engine apparently supports only ASCII and HTML named entities
defined for XHTML 1.0. Even &1234; and &x1234; notation
gets converted to ‘?’.[ Return to Summary ]
08.
Return to Thread on Post
Status: Does not go to last Reply
Posting or editing a basenote or reply
results in the display of a page saying:
Topic Edited Successfully
Click Here To Return To The Thread
Going directly to what was just posted would
encourage people to proof-read what they just wrote, and, for example,
discover differences between Preview and reality.
I would like to suggest automatically returning to the basenote or
reply just [re]posted, and in the case of replies, showing a permalink
in the browser page address line (more below).[ Return to Summary ]
09.
Make Permalinks Visible
Status: no permalink
in sight yet on UIC forum
It is often useful to have a link to a specific response
in a thread. These “deep” links exist, but
are not easy to discover for users not fluent
in browser display modes and HTML.
The Cureality home page takes advantage of these deep links to show the
recent responses under
Current Community Discussions.
I know how to discover reply links, and hand-craft URLs to point to
them (and did so in the salt link example above). Most users don’t.
Most forums that support deep links provide a visible "permalink" icon
or short URL text at each reply for this purpose. Please make it so.
See also #17,
broken multi-page permalinks from front page
summary.[ Return to Summary ]
10.
Please fix the ’’’’’’’’ bug
Status: Problem resolved site-wide
(what this was about here)[ Return to Summary ]
11.
Ground the Header Fly-Outs
Status: Now
click-to-show in both Cr and UIC forum [ Return to Summary ]
12.
No FAQ
Status: no sign of FAQ for UIC forum
The
site has an FAQ, but the Forum doesn’t. It could be just
posted as a topic in Help Desk,
but even there, using the Sticky feature would be
useful.[ Return to Summary ]
13.
Forum* has No Help
Status: UIC forum unchanged from Cureality
Forum Help* is deficient. This could be just posted as a topic in Help Desk,
but even there, using the Sticky feature would be useful.
* The (?) at the top right of every page is
just a Quick Question shortcut. The (?) in the forum edit
window is woefully incomplete.[ Return to Summary ]
14.
UID Page Needs to Show Links
Status: UIC forum enhanced
If we click on a user name (other than our own)
in a discussion thread, it takes us a page showing
recent traffic from that user, none of which
which now has URLs to the source of
those snippets, nor is there any forum name or
now with topic subject line to provide
a clue as to the source.[ Return to Summary ]
15.
Enable Special Character Menu
Status: UIC forum unchanged from Cureality
The RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX used here documents an item for
"Insert Special Character dropdown - Inserts
a special character (€ ®, ©,
±, etc.)",
but that icon is not found.
See also item #07 above. Work-around here.[ Return to Summary ]
16.
Email Subscriptions
Status: choice of PM or email notification
added [ Return to Summary ]
17.
Thread Navigation
Status: UIC forum behaves like Cureality
Links from front page Inner Circle Discussions panel are broken for
multi-page threads. The page# in the generated URL is randomly
too high, and results in loading the first page basenote. I have
also seen the Next» and Last» links at page bottom also
generate defective &PAGE= values. Subscribe notifications are also broken
for mulit-page threads, as the link included omits the &PAGE entirely.
17e.
In-thread Nav Enhancements
Status: UIC forum behaves like Cureality
Forum has Next Last Previous page have, but only if you scroll to page
bottom to find them. It needs, for both single- and multi-page threads,
at top and bottom:
• Jump to newest (last) reply
• Jump to bottom of page
• Back to top
• Go to Page #[ Return to Summary ]
18.
Custom Tags Clumsy
Status: UIC forum behaves same as Cureality.
Note: this was completely broken on both sites for early May, but
appears to have been restored to legacy behavior
on 2017-05-17.
Getting Custom Tags to appear is not straightforward.
It appears that one must enter one at a time, wait
for a drop-down list to populate showing that (and
other possible tag)s, then click on the tag desired.
The first drop-down instance takes some time, and
most people probably don’t wait for, and assume
that what they’ve typed in suffices - it doesn’t -
it just vanishes.
If this code is revisited, please verify that updating
the field re-indexes that entire posting and tags for
search.[ Return to Summary ]
19.
Show Profile Signature?
Status: UIC forum behaves same as Cureality.
This optional box, checked on by default when
posting, doesn’t seem to do anything, nor is there
anywhere in My Account where the content for it
might be defined.
As I now use a signature block in raw HTML, which I have
to remember to add manually, it would be nice
if the forum had a working .SIG capability.
If this gets fixed (rather than removed), please make the
option sticky, and probably not on by default.[ Return to Summary ]
20.
Miscellaneous Please Don’t Break (PDB)
Status: Still Not Broken
In addition to specific PDBs #23 & #24:
- Revision non-promotion - basenote and responses can be revised
at any time, and do not re-promote the the article or thread
to the top of the sub-forum’s list, nor cause it to re-appear on
the front page summary. This is ideal as is. Anyone who
wants to trigger a re-promotion can post a new reply.[ Return to Summary ]
21.
Add SVG to uploadable image formats supported
Status: UIC forum has same behavior as Cureality
Scalable Vector Graphics is the ideal format for images
that are principally non-raster, such as vector graphics
and stroked/outlined text (i.e. normal fonts).
SVG is also inherently XML, so it “should”
be a simple matter of validating it and merely flowing it
into the served XHTML. MML also for extra credit.[ Return to Summary ]
22.
Ditch the blue color scheme
Status: fixed in UIC forum
Blue light at night is a circadian hazard; and it’s also when
many users are active. Yes, the white background is also full
blue, but the point is that if the user is using blue-blockers,
or f.lux or similar sofware, blue becomes black or gray, whereas
colors lower in the spectrum survive.[ Return to Summary ]
23.
Retain public basenote visibility
Status: UIC forum is enabled for this
The TYP/Cureality behavior of allowing non-members to
view entire forum basenotes allows this feature to also be
used for FAQ reference articles linked from the blogs.
If basenotes ever go hidden, provide some other way to host
this content (dedicated subforum, etc.)[ Return to Summary ]
24.
Don’t lock basenote edits
Status: UIC forum is enabled for this
Being able to edit a basenote at any later time allows the
creation and maintenance of articles like this one.
If it is decided to lock basenotes or replies at some
time after posting, please make it an option (or have
a dedicated subforum that supports reference
articles).[ Return to Summary ]
25.
Empty Marketplace
Status: Feature restored and
working [ Return to Summary ]
26.
Members-Only Option
Status: Works on UIC & Cureality,
but is not sticky.
The forum engine does now honor this tic-box item in
the forum editor, but the tic box reverts to clear (not M.O.)
if the article or reply is edited and re-submitted.[ Return to Summary ]
27.
Front Page Discussions: Stand Out New Basenotes
Status: Fixed in Cureality and UIC
Discussion titles need to be bolded for new basenotes,
and not bolded for responses.[ Return to Summary ]
28.
More than 4 Recipes per Screen
Status: Pending
The main section Recipes is fine, but each topic
subsection shows only 4 recipes per page. This might
be fine for mobile, but is annoying for
desktop.[ Return to Summary ]
29.
Abbrevations page final tweaks
Status: 3 still open; 11 closed
Issues for this site feature are tracked at in
a
response on the former Abbreviation forum article.[ Return to Summary ]
30.
Useful old threads in UnKnown UIC sub-forum
Status: Pending
Some legacy TYP and Cureality subforums do not have UIC
equivalents, but Search can find their content. They show up as:
Inner Circle Member Forum
» UnKnown »
Thread Topic.
Here’s an example:
ACCORD
Eye Study - an ophthalmologist’s perspective
It was in Heart Health Forum on Cureality, but is UnKnown
on UIC. It’s not clear on what options might exist for bulk or
by-thread reclassification to UIC fora, and whether specified
forum users might be empowered to perform reclass as cases arise.
An obvious work-around is to simply use the forum in Cureality view.[ Return to Summary ]
___________
Bob Niland
[disclosures]
[topics]
[abbreviations]