(03 May 2020, 8:13 pm)Dan wrote Evening everyone.
In recent months we've seen participation on the forum vastly decrease - once upon a time probably the most popular discussion forum for enthusiasts in our region, most of our users now just post on groups and pages on social media instead. That said we do still have a significant amount of viewers, a lot of whom just do not post. Of our 646 registered users, just 62 are actually active, so we've lost a lot of members along the way, but we still have a lot of long-term users (those who have contributed since the website's early inception back in summer 2012!) and we want to do more to try and retain those users, as well as welcome new users to contribute and bring back the 'spark' that NEB once had.
As I mentioned yesterday, we're really hoping to use the current pandemic as a time to give NEB a bit of love and attention. We're going to regularly promote our news articles and Bygone Era submissions on social media to help drive more traffic onto our website, and we hope that by doing this it will encourage more new users to join.
We're going to make more of a conscious effort to keep the fleet lists and fleet news up to date. Both Go North East and Stagecoach's latest news is now up to date. The news is one of our best resources, and the archive of this news is really what sets us apart from most other enthusiast groups. We're still trying to find a reliable source for Arriva North East fleet news for us to be able to backdate our records (can anyone point us in the right direction for this?)
The biggest change that we're going to implement is a new-look forum. With improved mobile optimisation and user-specific colour/layout customisation, the new forum will include a number of new features:
- new index page, which is brighter and depicts sub-forums more clearly by use of imagery, and makes it easier to see which threads the latest posts have been made in
- new forum 'feed' page, which will allow users to preview the first post in newly created threads, so if it is of interest, they can read further.
- 'like' system re-implemented
- new notification system, which informs users when they receive a private message or when another user has quoted their post.
- new calendar system, which we can upload details of bus rallies and events to (once things go back to normal!) or even key dates for service changes etc.
We've tried to fix some of the various bugs reported over the past few weeks too.
Our approach with the new theme is to give the forum more of a social media 'feel'. We appreciate it's a big step from the board we've been used to, but a growing number of enthusiasts in our community are younger, and have not grown up with discussion boards and forums. By implementing some features commonly found on social media, we hope that this will encourage more younger enthusiasts to join our community and contribute to our discussion forum.
We'd encourage everyone to add an avatar/profile picture - our only request is that you try and ensure it's equal in height x width dimensions otherwise certain areas of the forum go slightly odd.
The biggest step-change for the forum is by moving away from our traditional 'monthly' operator threads. Discussion should now be shared in individual threads unique to that topic. This, like social media, means that if there is a particular topic that users would like to join in on the discussion, they can. Rare and odd allocations can be split into unique threads by day rather than monthly, should users still wish to report these (the inception of popular website "bustimes" has rendered these threads largely useless, as most enthusiasts use this to check rare allocations now rather than post them on our forum, but we appreciate there may still be users who'd like to discuss these allocations or share their photos). We have unfortunately lost in excess of 30,000 'rare & odd working' posts from Go North East, as I clicked the wrong button and we didn't have a backup of the database from today.
We hope everyone likes these changes. Feel free to leave us any feedback below, or to comment with any bugs you stumble across.
Dan.
(03 May 2020, 8:42 pm)streetdeckfan wrote It's certainly better than the last update! (I reverted straight back to the older version as soon as I figured out how)
One thing that I've noticed it's pretty difficult to read the sub-forum names, it might better to have these below the images rather than on top of them.
I personally love the fact the Discussion threads are no more, it always felt awkward posting in case you 'interrupt' other conversations. Hopefully that means I can post about the X21 NSAs to my heart's content without annoying certain people! ?
(03 May 2020, 8:44 pm)Dan wrote Wow... We weren't expecting your approval!
Thanks for the feedback on the visibility of the sub-forum names. One for us to ponder on.
(03 May 2020, 8:49 pm)streetdeckfan wrote See, I'm not just full of negativity! (as some would have you believe). Although, if I find anything I don't like, I'll certainly bring it up!
Don't know if it's related to the update, but Tapatalk notifications seem to be coming through instantly rather than with a massive delay
(03 May 2020, 8:54 pm)Dan wrote I'm sure you will!
Possibly. We've refreshed all of the forum plugins etc so that could have helped it on a little. Deleting 30,000 posts by accident would have also reduced some strain from the forum database somewhat!
(04 May 2020, 12:38 am)Michael wrote Can we have the view "unread posts" button back please?, it was quick and easier than clicking about 3 times before you actually get to what you want.
Not keen on the mobile version so I've had to change back to the old version.
Can't see to find out how to skip to the last post in a section either?, was on the Northern trains thread and clicked on the tab and it took me to page 1 and couldn't figure out how to skip to the last one. (On the new version)
(04 May 2020, 12:38 am)Michael wrote Can we have the view "unread posts" button back please?, it was quick and easier than clicking about 3 times before you actually get to what you want.
Not keen on the mobile version so I've had to change back to the old version.
Can't see to find out how to skip to the last post in a section either?, was on the Northern trains thread and clicked on the tab and it took me to page 1 and couldn't figure out how to skip to the last one. (On the new version)
(04 May 2020, 1:20 am)streetdeckfan wrote If you're on the desktop site, you can just click 'Last Post' on the forum page and it will take you to the last page but on the mobile version it doesn't look like there's a quick way
(04 May 2020, 9:39 am)Dan wrote Read more: https://northeastbuses.co.uk/forum/showt...#pid242488Yea I've just read it after trying to navigate way round new site. I personally feel it's very messy and the amount of threads is really overwhelming and some dont even have any posts or very few. So if I wanted to post something, I'd have to scroll through pages of threads to see if there is one about a certain topic, if not then create a new thread that may only get a few responses? Sorry not liking it. Least beforehand you could have a quick dip and see if there was anything new or quickly post something
(04 May 2020, 9:46 am)JP6004 wrote Yea I've just read it after trying to navigate way round new site. I personally feel it's very messy and the amount of threads is really overwhelming and some dont even have any posts or very few. So if I wanted to post something, I'd have to scroll through pages of threads to see if there is one about a certain topic, if not then create a new thread that may only get a few responses? Sorry not liking it. Least beforehand you could have a quick dip and see if there was anything new or quickly post something
(04 May 2020, 9:51 am)Andreos1 wrote Is there anyway to get the unread posts back towards the top of the page?
I've seen the comments about it being at the bottom of the page, but I find it is quite easily missed when scrolling past everything else.
The red arrow thing is quite intrusive too.
I've also just noticed that to get back to the previous page, you need to scroll back to the top of the page.
Quite clunky in a popular thread.
(04 May 2020, 10:44 am)Storx wrote I hope I don't come across a bit of a knob when I say this but I feel your really taking the wrong approach if your wanting to try and take the social media crowd.
The big reason why most people choose social media is it's one feed instead of lots of little feeds which are split all over the place and it's way that newer forums are going too as it's just easier to use. The design you've chosen here is the total opposite and fragments it badly with the images etc which is a waste of space. The most important part the last post info is tiny at the bottom and it's cut off as it's capped on one line.
For an example of a modern forum check out https://forums.gearsofwar.com/ it's all one page with the option of splitting it up into seperate categories if you want but it's purely a feed and that's what people want to see. They also use tags which is another way to get seperate topics out so you can further split thread types up. Reddit is another example of a good forum design (it's what it is really) and is something which killed many forums off in many other subjects which is similar but doesn't have forums at all and only uses tags. I'm not sure what's possible with MyBB though as I've never used it.
I won't be all negative though and say I'm glad you've finally decided to split the forum threads up as the latest discussion together didn't really work as it was too many discussions bouncing over the top of each other.
(04 May 2020, 11:14 am)Dan wrote Not at all. Cheers for the feedback. We'll have a look at that example to see if there's anything we can take for inspiration.
The new 'feed' page is really the thing that shows everything in one feed, rather than the forum itself.
Glad you like the new split threads! We've debated this one for a long time now and never been brave enough to go down the route of splitting it. I've had the full weekend to adjust now and I do think it's a lot better.
(04 May 2020, 10:18 am)Dan wrote Cheers, Andreos.
It's "all or nothing" with the unread posts thing, so the user stats, board stats and latest threads would all have to be at the top too on mobile view which is why it wasn't put there originally. If it was in the side menu (the three lines where you navigate between news, photos, fleet lists etc), would that suffice? We'll have to take the unread posts feature offline for a few hours to be able to do this.
We're not too convinced by the red arrow scroller so we'll look into its removal.
(04 May 2020, 12:42 pm)Dan wrote Brilliant. It's there as a link at the moment without the (count) at the end of it, but we're going to get that sorted too.
(04 May 2020, 12:52 pm)streetdeckfan wrote With MyBB is there a way to add 'spoilers' to the posts? I'm thinking of posting something with quite a bit of data and it would be quite handy if it was 'hidden' until you click on it
(04 May 2020, 5:55 pm)Adrian wrote It appears to be possible by plugin. I'm not particularly for or against, but what would could you see the use case being for having it?
(04 May 2020, 6:36 pm)streetdeckfan wrote On other forums (LTT in particular) it gets used as a way to 'compress' the post down by hiding parts that aren't essential. For instance, I use spoiler tags whenever I post an image, so the image would be inside the spoiler tag and therefore hidden until it's clicked on. This is particularly handy when you're doing quite a long post and referencing lots of things. Granted, it's not something that's you'd use all the time, but it does come in quite handy.
I've just been going through all my travel data for the last 6 months and I was going to make a post about it, comparing the costs of travelling by bus compared to car, comparing different pricing strategies etc. (I spent far too much time in Excel last night!). Ideally I would like to have the tables and graphs of the data in the post, and it would be much better imo to have them hidden unless you want to click on it.
I suppose I could just create a blog and post it on there like some others do!
I started planning the post out last night and so far I'm up to 3 A4 pages long (with the tables/graphs). I really need to realise that this isn't for work and I don't need to be writing a 100 page report on it like usual, but I can't help myself!
