What I looked at as alternative was the Simple Machines Forum (SMF). During that "evaluation", I once again realised how retarded forums sometimes are, phpBB in particular.
Post subjects
Post subjects allow you to specify a subject for your post when replying to a topic, different from the original topic title.
What's the issue?
As if e-mails with subjects like "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: (no subject)" were not enough.
There is not actually a reason to change the subject within a topic. And if there is, the topic needs to be split into multiple disucssions anyway.
Let me explain that based on some examples: From all 20268 posts in my forum, that actually have a post title (that is, which have been posted after the feature has been introduced by phpBB) less than 2900 have a subject different to the topic title. So less than 15% of all users choose a different subject. Which is not surprising, because thinking of a new subject is more work and users are lazy (me included). But even then, does it actually make sense?
- Users choose subjects, that actually need to be in the body of the post, or are already included in the body.
Post subject Topic title Post text I've donated $10 via PayPal (caogdin@deepwoods.com... Donors sign up here! I'd appreciate access information to the beta and forums No 100% CPU No, with the 3.0.116 it's the same 100% CPU burn o..
- They adress user names.
Post subject Topic title Flo Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha... Re: Flo Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
- They change subjects unnecessarily.
Post subject Topic title Donated Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha... I'm a donor Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha... just donated Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha... Beta access requested Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha... Donor Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
- Completely useless subjects.
Quote:BTW...
whoa
thx
Hey
Well...
yes
Thanks
So in fact, after looking at a couple of hundred from these subject changes, I couldn't find one that makes sense. Again, not surprising. Users don't have any benefit from a subject change (neither have moderators or admins), so they are either not going to do it, or think they have to and then just put in whatever comes to their mind.
And as if that wasn't enough, the subject title is unnecessarily prominent (so you soon will get subject-blind by that):
PMs and why they suck
PMs (private messages) allows you to have - how should I put it - yet another bucket for "e-mails" to your life. If you are registered in ten different forums, you automatically have ten places to look at for new messages. These forums will even be so kind and send you a message notification to your (real) e-mail inbox, so that you have to process two messages when you get one PM. If you further consider the fact that no PM system is as comfortable and powerful to use as a dedicated e-mail application - eg. Gmail - you shouldn't actually like PMs very much.
In any case - I don't. My productivity (I don't have so much free time to spend on my projects) suffers from these, and thankfully phpBB allows you to turn this feature off completely.
Reports
Aww. On the "user-side", this feature allows you to report posts, which are spam or otherwise offending.
On the "admin-side", this new feature of phpBB makes topics light up in red and makes you spend your whole day deleting reports, of which most are spam. Yeah - I really mean that the reports itself are spam and rarely legit, so that you now have to clean up both spam posts and spam reports (unless you are fine with signs of unprocessed reports all over the place).
And worse: You can't simply turn it off. You can only adjust the permissions to disallow reports, but trying to get permissions right with phpBB is pretty futile.
Having users do the work of spam detection may sound nice in theory, but as I have to read all posts anyway, this is not necessary. (And I believe that there are very few forums out there, where posts are not read by at least one admin or moderator.) What is missing here, is an automated removal of spam posts after a certain amount of reports (for example).
BBCode
*Sigh*. I just want to quote some guy from htmlpurifier:
Quote:
BBCode can be boiled down to a “wanna-be” version of HTML. I mean, replacing
the angled brackets with square brackets and omitting the occasional parameter
name? How much more un-original can you get? Somehow, I don't think BBCode
was meant to readable. Wikipedia agrees:
--
BBCode was devised and put to use in order to provide a safer, easier
and more limited way of allowing users to format their messages.
Previously, many message boards allowed the users to include HTML,
which could be used to break/imitate parts of the layout, or run
JavaScript. Some implementations of BBCode have suffered problems related
to the way they translate the BBCode into HTML, which could negate the
security that was intended to be given by BBCode.
--
Or, put more simply:
BBCode came to life when developers where too
lazy to parse HTML correctly and decided to invent their
own markup language. As with all products of laziness, the
result is completely inconsistent, unstandardized, and widely adopted.
"You have..." - "I know!!!"
"This message has been posted successfully."
"You have been successfully logged in."
"You have successfully authenticated and will now be redirected to the Administration Control Panel."
"This message has been deleted successfully."
The most annoying part of phpBB ever: The recurring information that you have done something - and every time you have to either stare at the message for 3 seconds or click on "proceed". Think about it! In my case, with 7000+ posts, I would have spent 6,35 hours staring at my computer! And that's only considering the messages for posts, not yet adding any of the other messages. Or alternatively, 7000 clicks. I've had better choices in my life.
Solution: Just don't tell me. I will see that I posted successfully when I see my post, I will see that I successfully deleted a post when I no longer see it, and I will also see that I got into the admin panel when it appears in front of me. I promise!
Microsoft agrees: Quote:
A modal dialog box is a poor choice for messages that are unlikely to change user behavior. Instead, consider using a notification or a status bar, or even doing nothing.
And before you actually get a bad idea:
Quote:
Sometimes optional modal dialog boxes turn out to be annoying, especially when displayed often. Such dialog
boxes typically strive to inform users about a recurring situation or a feature that addresses such situations. A
common solution to this problem is to provide a Don’t show this <item> again option that suppresses the dialog
box in the future.
Quote:
If you think your dialog box needs a Don’t show this <item> again option, that is a clear sign that it is annoying
and potentially unnecessary. Before adding this option, consider the following alternatives:
- Change the design to eliminate the need for the message.
- Make the hard design decision: do users really need to see this dialog box? Will bad things happen if users don’t know this information? If so, always display it; if not, never display it.
I hate to admit, but Microsoft really hits the nail on the head, even though they often don't follow their own guidelines
Topic icons
Looks like this:
Stumbled upon that in the Simple Machines Forum, after having a test conversion of the phpBB forum (which didn't go very well btw). So you basically have one icon that represents a topic and...a second icon that also represents a topic. More clutter, and no benefit. And as if that wasn't useless enough, you can - at least in SMF - even change the icon per post within a topic!
This this may be convenient for moderators to find topics of a certain type, but it assumes that users actually choose the correct icon for their type of topic, which is not going to happen. So the icons either cause more work for admins (because they have to adjust them) or just make your forum more colourful (just as the reports mentioned earlier. Would like to see that in combination.). Or both. And no, you cannot disable in in SMF (afaics).
I believe that topic icons and the other topic icons can really be displayed as a single icon or a column with a single icon and icon overlays. While I'm at it: Web developers should really make more use of tooltips. Instead of providing those for icons that are not clear on first sight, they rather hide an icon legend at a location which has the greatest possible distance to the actual icons.
Back to fighting spam
Now that I've given some examples when phpBB and the likes make your life harder than necessary and implement features just for the feature's sake, let me quickly show an extreme case of what happens when developers just don't think about users.
Simple situation: A spammer registered at the forum and made some posts.
Action: Delete user and all posts.
Actual steps required in phpBB:
- Click on user name
- Click "Administrate user"
- Enter password for admin panel
- Click "Login"
- Click "Proceed..." or wait 3 seconds
- Two clicks for combo box selection "Delete posts" (@developers: Use radio buttons, or better yet a checkbox "Delete posts". Once click less).
- Click "Submit"
- Click "Yes" (I really want to delete this user.)
- Done!
This way, it's almost less work for human spammers to post spam, than to delete it.
That said, I don't want to offend anyone with this post, it just makes me feel a little relieved. And actually, there are forums, like punBB that seem to be a little more thoughtful regarding its feature set. This forum though is not able to store the "unread" messages, after a couple of hours?/days? it just assumes you have read them even if you didn't. That wouldn't work for me and the CDBurnerXP forum.
So now that I've poured out my grief to you, what about SMF? I'm not even sure yet
There's more...
There are certainly a couple of additional issues with phpBB that tend to annoy. There is no "quick reply" option that would save me from clicking on "reply", moving topics requires a whole lot of clicks (especially the unchecking the checkbox for "ghost topics") and after moving a topic it's shown as unread which doesn't make any sense at all. With no use of nowadays rather common Ajax technology, phpBB3 really just feels like phpBB2 with more features to justify the version bump.]]>
