[kde-community] Forum improvements

Mon Sep 28 14:48:02 BST 2015

Thanks to the community effort, the KDE Forum's structure is clearly
much natural now!

Since good investments have been made here, next how about taking
steps towards two things. Posting here so perhaps people accustomed
with web services read this. Excuse me if this is already on someone's
desk.

1. Making forum notifications useful
2. Making forums mobile-friendly
3. Solution to avoid mixing local and archived forums with the global ones

Issues I see at least:
Ad 1.
1) Actually it's like <<New topic notification - "Calligra">> mail
subject and there's no clear idea that it's from KDE. No user name
assigned to forum-admin at kde.org or a [KDE Forum] in the subject. It
grabs a few seconds more from every attempt of scanning my
mailboxes...

2) Notifications somehow form a true login-walled Internet -- more
than github notifications I'd say - clicking on the link for the
subject brings me to a login page - quite unexpected on mobile device.
So what I do when I expect answer to an important topic is: navigating
(nightmare on mobile device) to the topic and click via subsequent
pages to find the answer

3)  Actually the notifications would decrease the traffic _if_ the
content was injected in the notification screen if that's my wish; the
forum engine we're using seems to be optimised to boost the visit
count to get more from ads... something we totally don't need.

Ad 2. The layout is like a single word in width in a phone browser;
someone who knows how to apply html screen parameters correctly might
be able to fix it (in the style sheets?) for most cases or by googling
"phpBB-Mobile".

Ad 3. Localized KDE forums (many Persian for example) and archived
forums account for quite a few of the entire forum list. [1]
Would it be possible to have a filter (ON or OFF by default?) e.g. in
the account settings, so actual search results and browsing hierarchy
is a bit simpler for many users?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/xAEukdF.png

-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
: A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators
: and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org
Calligra Suite:
: A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org
Kexi:
: A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi
Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek