This may be one of the 90 unworkable suggestions, but how about a top level button that dynamically builds pages listing all recent posts in all update threads. The idea is that you would see what looks like a regular forum thread, but it would contain posts from many different update threads, sorted by time. It would be a quick overview of "what's new" across the forums without having to click through to each section.
Quote from: Poole Amateur on 08/08/2016 02:06 pmIs it time for a name change perhaps?I can rule that out right away. It's like "maybe you should change your 12 year old daughter's name" to my mind. I get the point, but one has to stick with the name. Maybe we should create more splinter sites?
Is it time for a name change perhaps?
This kinda goes along with what Galactic Penguin SST was talking about above in https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40878.msg1568004#msg1568004It would be kinda nice to have some sort of data structure to contain the launch logs (whether it be database, xml, csv, whatever) where the people maintaining launch logs of various areas (US, SpaceX, Europe, Russia, China, etc) could all update a common set of data. Then you could have a launch schedule feature on the site where it could automatically show an up to date list of upcoming launches, and people could filter it by country/launch provider if they wanted to.
This one might be a bridge too far but...What about NSF arranging events off forum? NASA and contractors have done social network gatherings and open houses in the past and NSF has a lot of members within NASA and the various companies. Maybe every now and then a meetup could be organized to tour some sort of site, or for an expert in some field to maybe talk about a project or do a little Q&A.
Quote from: Chris Bergin on 08/08/2016 03:25 pmQuote from: Poole Amateur on 08/08/2016 02:06 pmIs it time for a name change perhaps?I can rule that out right away. It's like "maybe you should change your 12 year old daughter's name" to my mind. I get the point, but one has to stick with the name. Maybe we should create more splinter sites? Instead of splintering, how about subnetting? Like "spacex.nasaspaceflight.com", "spaceshuttle.nasaspaceflight.com" and the every-valuable "L2.nasaspaceflight.com". Each could be a copy of the current forum software -- this also solves capacity depending on how the subnet sights are hosted.I am also on board with the "new of space" website and would be willing to help with that (I've made webcrawlers and harvesters before).
Two things; apologies if they've already been suggested. First, I'll also throw out a suggestion that may well be completely unfeasible. Any chance of getting an equation editor built into the forum a-la-LaTeX? The sup/superscript buttons can only take us so far. Secondly, when a thread gets large page numbers are listed like "1 2 3 ... 100". Clicking those three dots always seems to expand the smaller end of that number line. Which is great if I want to jump to page 6, but somewhat less than great if I want to read page 96; the latter of which occurs more often when I'm trying to catch up on recent posts. Can we get a few trailing numbers for the last few pages of a thread? (Or even better, something like "1 2 ... 50 ... 99 100" )Appreciate all of the work that's gone into the site!
Things like the first one might be like the acronym expander. We had that, but it put a lot of load on the database (but that might be solved by now, so we have this thread and Mark can pick out things that are viable). I remember "likes" was a problem, but that has since been solved (per load).
I had this idea of nested discussion thread, where you could post an update, a discussion comment, or a party comment in the same thread. Those who wanted to just view updates could select just the "update" option. This would allow easy discussion of updates and would avoid having updates in the discussion thread and vice versa. Mods could easily mark comments as "discussion" or "party" if they were incorrectly tagged originally. It'd also prevent a proliferation of threads.Anyway, just an idea.
I have a very simple request: could the orange "NEW" button at the end of thread titles (that links to <url>#new) be a little bit bigger? It's awfully hard to hit on higher-DPI touch screens.ta!
Chris an important implementation would be an SSL certificate for the forum (subdomain would be cheaper than all domain and subdomains). Google values SSL on their rank and it is a good idea for security reasons also. Don't know what version of Wordpress we are using (hope it's updated) but there are a lot of awesome off the shelf themes that with some proper customization could really step up the news site both in terms of functionality and design, and all of them are now responsive so they can adapt to mobile devices.