Forum feedback

The forums aren't as heavy traffic as others? That's quite a statement. I belong to others too and there may be more members online, I doubt they are busier.

I just looked at the forum home page. 48 members on-line and 437 guests! I have never seen any other modeling site with that much traffic at one time.

I'm on cable, I wait no longer than 3 seconds for a complete load. I think a limit in bandwidth somewhere could be the problem, but I would question it on their end as I rarely have a problem.

I didn't mean to imply that the other forums I am a part of are modeling related. There is a photography forum I go to and these are some stats:

dpreview Forums statistics: There are 22,969,776 messages in the forums posted by 584,774 unique posters. There have been 269,032 new messages and 3,364 new posters in the last month.

This month averages 5.9 posts per minute. The website is much faster too. I don't want to sound over critical because I love this web site. However, if I go in to the Aircraft section of the forum and click on a thread. When I hit the back button to see all the threads, it has taken up to 10 seconds before. That is a long time for the internet, and I don't have this issue surfing the internet. Like I said I do love this site, and all I meant was that it could benefit from more speed.

Scott

 

I'd like to join in on this comment.

I'm also visit much larger forums (about other things really) and they are indeed much faster.

How hard would it be to convert the database for this forum to a newer/better supported forum?

My main gripe is the search functionality. I'd think everyone would want more options than what is now available. It is crazy slow as well. I can put in a query and then go browse other sites for awhile and come back only to see it hasn't finished yet... and when it does it hasn't found anything. At least for aircraft, you should be able to put in "p-38" and get a list of threads about it (and it should be long since it's a popular plane), but there are zero hits for that search query. (I just confirmed that search, 33s for no results)

Also, allowing for support for more browsers would be nice too. I'm mainly a Safari user, and Safari can display most any page Firefox can, yet this forum doesn't allow it to have all the bells and whistles of the message composition. As proof that it can support it, I can change Safari's "User Agent" flag to Firefox and get those same gizmos that were previously kept hidden.

I'm on Firefox, and have zero complaints about either the speed, functionality, or performance features of this forum. I would seriously cry if they changed it; I really think it's about as perfect a forum as I've ever been on. That's one of the reasons I consider it my "home" forum.

bertman wrote:

My main gripe is the search functionality. I'd think everyone would want more options than what is now available. It is crazy slow as well. I can put in a query and then go browse other sites for awhile and come back only to see it hasn't finished yet... and when it does it hasn't found anything. At least for aircraft, you should be able to put in "p-38" and get a list of threads about it (and it should be long since it's a popular plane), but there are zero hits for that search query. (I just confirmed that search, 33s for no results)

bertman, I just typed in "p38"--no dashes--into the Aircraft forum, and got 11 pages worth of results.

You have to be in the appropriate forum for the Search to work. You couldn't search for "p38" for instance, in "Armor". And like any Search feature, you just have to learn it's idiosyncrasies--but it world just fine, and not very different, from any modeling forum's Search that I've used.

I hope this helps you out.

The search function does have its little quirks.

One of these is that the minimum length of a search term appears to be 3 continous alphanumeric characters. This excludes punctuation marks and symbols. So, in the example above, P-38 is broken down into "p" and "38" and the "-" is ignored.

So when you enter "P-38" as a search term, it's interpreted as "P" and "38" separately. Neither is of sufficient length for the search to work properly, and after several minutes trying to decide what to do, the search function will return the following:

Sorry, no matching items were found for your search. Please try again.

 

Thanks for the tips :)

I just wanted to express that it was my main gripe and will continue to be until it changes.

I'd think that a lot of people are like me and like to put the dashes in names, so I'd find it hard to believe that p38 finds all the instances of the p-38 airplane. I also search from the main search page where you can select which forums to search in. I just made a thread about the xp/yp-38, and searching for p38 won't find that thread unless someone mentions p38 in a response. On the other hand, I could just use Google who found my thread very quickly.

The forum is very clean, I like that. But it has flaws. It shouldn't be that hard to change out the underlying structure of the forum and make it look the same. Although it would hopefully add more options like sorting searches by thread/date/creator/...

I guess my point is, this is an awesome forum in users and content but it is handicapped by it's searchability/archivability.

Hi Guys,

Our online technicians are looking into this. There may be a quick, easy way for us to improve the search engine.

Kelly, FSM

It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.)

Kelly, FSM

Kelly Shaw wrote:

It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.) Kelly, FSM

Kelly, to be honest, I'd prefer you not change a thing here than change it to something that has more bells ad whistels but runs crappier. This site is the easiest I've ever been on!

It'd be nice though, if we could get that "sticky" thread/forum about the best tutorials and essential techniques?

the doog wrote:

Kelly Shaw wrote: It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.) Kelly, FSM Kelly, to be honest, I'd prefer you not change a thing here than change it to something that has more bells ad whistels but runs crappier. This site is the easiest I've ever been on! It'd be nice though, if we could get that "sticky" thread/forum about the best tutorials and essential techniques?

...Please...

Regards,

Jeff

the doog wrote:

Kelly Shaw wrote: It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.) Kelly, FSM Kelly, to be honest, I'd prefer you not change a thing here than change it to something that has more bells ad whistels but runs crappier. This site is the easiest I've ever been on! It'd be nice though, if we could get that "sticky" thread/forum about the best tutorials and essential techniques?

Assuming that more bells and whistles would make the site crappier is silly. When they upgrade, it will be to improve it and not to "crapify" the site.

I'm looking forward to it Kelly, Thanks.

bertman wrote:

the doog wrote:  Kelly Shaw wrote: It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.) Kelly, FSM Kelly, to be honest, I'd prefer you not change a thing here than change it to something that has more bells ad whistels but runs crappier. This site is the easiest I've ever been on! It'd be nice though, if we could get that "sticky" thread/forum about the best tutorials and essential techniques? Assuming that more bells and whistles would make the site crappier is silly. When they upgrade, it will be to improve it and not to "crapify" the site. I'm looking forward to it Kelly, Thanks.

Quite often, especially with forum software, additional functionality (ie. more bells and whistles) can result in a performance hit.

I think that what Karl means is that he would rather have a system which delivers the basic functionality (ie. the basic post/reply/messaging functions) as a priority, rather than have a super-duper all-singing-all-dancing system where every whizz-bang function adds an overhead which degrades basic performance.

Even a seemingly innocuous function like listing members who have a birthday today at the bottom of the screen adds an overhead. Add something like a "shout box" and an internal instant messaging system and there's more overhead.

While all these additional functions can add to the overall forum experience, they're not essential and can cause a performance hit to a forum's basic functionality.

 

bertman wrote:

the doog wrote:  Kelly Shaw wrote: It appears we'll have to live with the current search engine, at least until the Forum is upgraded to a new community server. (Sorry, Doog, it's bound to happen someday.) Kelly, FSM Kelly, to be honest, I'd prefer you not change a thing here than change it to something that has more bells ad whistels but runs crappier. This site is the easiest I've ever been on! It'd be nice though, if we could get that "sticky" thread/forum about the best tutorials and essential techniques? Assuming that more bells and whistles would make the site crappier is silly. When they upgrade, it will be to improve it and not to "crapify" the site. I'm looking forward to it Kelly, Thanks.

What I specifically mean is if they do something like change the photo display system to that uber-crappy system they use over on Armorama, for instance. You can't save any photo from it, and I save a decent amount of photos from this site for reference and inspiration.

There are also other sites whose setup makes them impossible to navigate quickly, and which lack the simple functionality of this site. I prefer"simple-and-WORKS" over "Flashy-but-complicated".

OK, you guys are being really pessimistic here, don't you see?

You can keep the simple and works idea and add better functionality to it as well. Just because the searching routines are updated doesn't mean all of a sudden we have a birthday alert or shout-box. Bells and Whistles are options, whether or not they come with the forum as a default or not they can be turned off (or even coded out!).

As far as the picture thing, go tell the autorama people about it because I'm sure more than just you hate it... or they have a work-around for you. Just because autorama "upgraded" their photo viewer doesn't mean that is the only one out there and that FSM will do the same thing. Have faith in the admins, they'll think of something for us.

Also, Kelly, how about adding Safari to the accepted browsers? That should be a simple one line of code :)