Songwriter/Composer Forum

[Severe]

A friends forum that could use some attention.

www.lazybeat.com/forum

[ThatHitSound]

tell him to drop all the topics, and have just "one" general topic to post to.
you only start breaking down the topics when there is a huge amount of people
posting. also tell him to turn on GUEST posting mode, that usually allows people
to quickly post something there without having to register.

I would have posted this over there if he had guest mode on.

[Severe]

Thanks.

Will do.

[1b9]

ThatHitSound

[I've tried to take both of THS's suggestions -- I've added an RECENT TOPICS OVERVIEW (showing all thread topics in rev chrono order (four previous four weeks [MOD to put in complete rev date order 9-05]) as well as a special NO REGISTRATION NECESSARY GUEST FORUM.]


TK, webmaster at lazybeat, here (I also clean the catlitter and take out the trash).

Thanks for the suggestion. It makes a lot of sense. Certainly, it looks pretty empty right now.


I'm afraid my buddy, severe, in his generous attempt to help out, jumped the gun on me a little.

I didn't have any of my starter posts up besides the main welcome (and mostly still don't) and had only told two people about it (and one of them is a guy who will never register anywhere and who refuses cookies... not that he's a luddite, he actually has a Cisco cert... but he is paranoid by principal).

Anyhow, I think your suggestion bears serious thought. Certainly, I've seen busy BBs where people tend to collect in a single forum, even though they're talking about subjects that there are dedicated forums for.

What would be ideal would be the ability to keep the current structure but give people the option of a view where all the threads are collected in rev chrono order. I've seen that in other BB's but I'm pretty sure the one the lazybeat workshop is based on (Web Wiz -- I really like it... a lot of great features for both users and webmasters) doesn't have that as a stock feature.

Fortunately the Web Wiz author actually encourages mods (and skins). If I can't find something like what I'm looking for as a third party freebie, I can just code mod it myself.

Anyhow, thanks for the excellent suggestion.

[1b9]

ThatHitSound

[Slaps forehead] There is the Active Topics view -- but it's not absolutely ideal. It allows you to view all the forums with posts since your last visit or -- and this is a little closer -- you can select a time period from a pull down menu labeled "Show Active Topics since." You can select periods up to the last month -- and it stores the last used time period in a cookie.

You can check that view on the Recent Topics page. I modified (with an inelegant kludge) the page this goes to to show the last month of 'active threads' (and I removed the pulldown menu). You can see the original by clicking the "Acitve Items" link at the top of the page.

One problem/non-problem with this is that the thread list is in rev chrono order -- but grouped by Forums. It would be nice to have the option of ungrouped.


[Addendum: I did a bit more work to my mod and got it pretty much how I wanted it -- I think it gives the functionality that THS was looking for pretty well. When you click on the RECENT TOPICS link (above) you go to a page with the most recent posts on it in straight reverse chronological order. Thanks for the great suggestion, THS! Now if we could just get you to register and share your production skills over there.]

[1b9]

THS

And I've taken a cue from your suggestion and added a GUEST FORUM where visitors can post with NO REGISTRATION NECESSARY.

I can't guarantee I'll keep that feature (I'm a veteran of some artist boards where things have often gotten way out of hand, so I'm leery of wide open stuff. In fact, if it ever becomes necessary, I'm prepared to implement a mail-back registration.