Suggested improvement for DUC

[Philthy]

Hello Web Admin(s),

the DUC is a great bulletin board-it works fantastically smoothly and quickly and the layout is clear and easy to use. The one weak spot, in my opinion, is the search engine, and in particular, the lack of control over what areas to search- it's either search the entire board, or just one area. How about a form list with the option to highlite each area to be searched? Or maybe a list of check-boxes? The way it is now, I dread using the search function- to do a meaningful search takes way too long because of the need to sit through 10 searches that don't even relate, and afterwards the "back" button is rendered useless, filled up with 15 or 20 blank-titled "Digidesign User Conference:" links!

Otherwise, keep up the good work on what must sometimes be a frustrating and demanding job... [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[lwilliam]

I 2nd that notion!!!!

A wonderful enhancement would be a pick-list of forums to search (and get back to using the user name instead of number).

If the search facility was streamlined, I'd bet there would be fewer "same topic" threads introduced just 2 weeks ago.

[Mark Haliday]

Was going to start a similar thread myself so I will jump right in and support these suggestions !

Mark

[CO2]

Hello everyone:

Agreed!!!!

GREAT idea Philthy!

Best Regards

[QuikDraw]

Yes, PLEASE!!

The search functionality is virtually crippled the way that it is.

I support the idea of checkboxes. You could check one, all, or as many individual forums as you like. Also the one-click "search all forums" should still remain in addition to the added checkboxes.

And please do reinstate search by member name. I can remember user names, not numbers. The way it is now I have to first find the user I want to search by to learn his number before I can do the actual search.

Great ideas here.

Mike

[Philthy]

Oh Boy, sitting through a search now... any chance of an improvement anytime?

[tld]

I always thought that being able to search selected forums would be great, but I'm guessing that the Ultimate BBS software they're using simply doesn't have that feature (since I see the same limitiation elsewhere, like at musicplayer.com). Unless Infopop has added (or will add) this feature to a newer release of the bbs, Digis only option would be to hack the bbs themselves, probably voiding any support they might get.

I'm really surprized it doesn't have this feature already. It shouldn't be a difficult change...it has to search each forum individually anyway. The search page could still use a drop down list, just one that allows multiple selections (like the plugin list on my preset co-op).

Tom

[KaiXXX]

Agreed, on all points mentioned above!

But there's another thing I'd like to see changed:

If you submit a message for a topic with more than one page, you land on page one after submitting. I'd like to see my message (or at least the correct page) after hitting 'Add Reply' since there's no preview as well.

[Barnabas]

I agree that the search function could be improved.

Also, I wish the main topics would be listed in almost the reverse order. This would put the more general boards at the top and the more specific ones at the bottom of the list. Too many people click on the first in the list and talk off-topic in the TDM lists. The TDM users won't mind scrolling to the bottom of the list.

[Avid]

We would agree with almost all of your points, especially regarding the way the search function works. Unfortunately, we have very little control over how the UBB software works, and are limited to whatever features are (or are not) in the software. The change from how the software looks for member numbers rather than member names was implemented by the UBB software within the last year, and I believe they did that to more efficiently index member information and index member posts. While some people running the UBB software have created a lot of different hacks to the software (which is allowed by InfoPop), we would be extremely reluctant to use any of these with a bulletin board with the large volume of the DUC. We don't even install any of the beta versions of the software, but we do plan on installing the next major shipping version, 6.2. We'll have to see what features make the final version, and how they are implemented (if you click on the InfoPop logo on the bottom of the DUC pages, you can find out some of what they are working on). One of the things we hope will work again is the ability to transfer a topic to the correct forum. (this was broken in the current version we are running)

I definitely disagree with the idea of putting the General forum back at the top. We did that for the first few years of the DUC, and people posted things there all the time that belonged in specific forums. And quite often, they double-posted in both the General and the specific forum. The incidents of people posting in the wrong forums went WAY down when we changed the order to the current listings.

I didn't answer this thread right away because I'm quite interested in your suggestions. Please continue to offer them, and we will do whatever we can to implement anything on the board that we actually do have control over, and that make sense for the majority of the users. Always room for improvement.

Bruce Paine
DUC Dude