I think this site is great and has some awesome conent.
Having said that, I think the forums can benefit from a remodelling. They should be structured more like Reddit where the better quality posts rise to the top by being "upvoted" for all monkeys to see. All too often does CompBanker or another reputable users post a comment deep on the 1st page or 2nd and it gets lost.
Also when users comment on posts by others, they should be grouped so you can follow the argument/rebuttals more easily. Responses should be indented under the main post, again, like Reddit.
Thoughts?
(posted on IB for visibility)
i think the search function should be updated to weight more active threads higher in the search results
When you say "active" you mean ones with more comments or ones that have been more recently updated. I can tweak this...
Agree 100% with the search tweaking. Indentation sucks (the spacing gets ruined and some comments end up looking ridiculous).
Seconded soooo hard. Not sure if that change is possible without losing the massive amounts of data already on this site, but if it can be done I guarantee I would spend 2x as much time on this site.
I actually like the 90's feel...
Hey, thanks for the suggestion...to date we've stayed away from indenting because I felt (maybe wrongly) that the uniform width of the comments looks much cleaner and it's usually very obvious who the commenter is responding to. That being said, I'm not opposed to changing the design there...I could talk to my web developer in a few weeks about it (next week is crazy for other reasons).
As far as floating the comments with the most silver bananas (ie up votes) to the top, I think we could also do this...I've always wondered if that would make things more confusing, however, for the flow of the discussion...
I guess my question is let's say you have a comment with 5 SBs that floats to the top, with 3 sub comments...or what if the highest ranked comment that is in response to a comment later in the thread gets voted up - what if it doesn't make sense without the context of the comment it was responding to?
What happens when one of those sub comments has 6 SBs? Or do you only float to the top the posts that are direct responses to the OP? Thanks for the feedback, I'm not very familiar with Reddit, but woudl be open to this idea so the better content could float to the top easier...
Thanks! Patrick
Thanks for the reply Patrick. I see what youre saying. If posts with the most SB's float to the top, indenting would be critical to maintaing the flow.
In regards to the search function, users should be able to sort by newest and/or most comments. When i search, I dont see a sort feature. Another user has said differently. Am i not seeing something?
When you search, if you look to the right you shoudl see Filter blocks...one by author, one by Forum (which needs to be fixed since it's just the forum categories) on by content type and one for Date (once you click on a year it will give you months to let you drill down more)
I think we used to have # of Comments as well so will see if we can get that back...also, I'm having issues right now finding the weightings for search. I can definitely put more weight on more recent threads...
As far as the floating up of comments, I'd love to figure that out. Maybe the option with indenting is to make each indentation extremely subtle, like only 5-10 pixels, and then keeping a minimum width of a comment at ~1/2 of what the current width is so things dont get too stacked...another issue with this is that our user profile images. reddit is much more just text...we'll definitely give this some thought.
I think a solution (not sure how easy this is to do) is to structure it like the ESPN comment boards. Where there is a drop down box with "Most Liked" aka SBs, "Most commented", "Newest" etc. This way people can drop in and out.
I'm glad you're open to suggestions, WSO is a great community. Personally, I think message boards/discussion forums are moving towards a Reddit/Quora format. Message boards have been around since the dawn of the internet - distilled, quality information seems to be what people value most. Thanks for considering it.
I think it's fine, plus if it becomes more "forum"-like my bank will surely block it.
Not so sure about the idea of floating most SBed comments to top cuz of flow issues but DEFINITELY a modification to the search function to sort for date. I hate searching for something and finding that the thread is from 2006 and no longer relevant.
Date filter box shoudl be right to to the right of the results...given that a lot of people have asked for this it's clear that it's a UI issue.
We'll be addressing that soon.
Thanks, Patrick
Floating comments will make this messy.
I think you already have a feature to "follow" certain users, so I'm imagining its not that hard to track where favorite users are leaving comments. But then the issue becomes finding the specific comment that user made within a thread - here is my proposed solution to that, which would also address the OP's original concerns:
Perhaps, at the top of every post, have a data synopsis showing the following, with respective hyperlinks to direct you to that applicable metric: # of comments/views; which comment received the most SB's (by clicking on the link it will collapse all non-SB responses, and compile all top comments, instead of you trying to dig through it); and another data/point link displaying the composition of the users that commented (was the responder from IB, PE, student, unknown, etc which is fed from users profile info, if provided) - this way specific viewpoints could also be filtered.
Last point, I think everyone should be allotted more SB's. perhaps, we should be able to have the option to give one SB for every thread (this would make the functionality of filtering top comments, a lot more robust and incentivize users to reward users for solid comments, as opposed to reserving them because most of us just don't have that many bananas to give).
Making this a little more mobile friendly would be nice, especially when comments become stacked up.
Love to hear other folks comments.
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