After several years of procrastinating and trying to find time, I have finally decided that it is time to commit to the development and roll-out of a new website to replace this one - a project to start on a clean sheet of paper, taking in many suggestions that have been put to me both over the years since 2005 and recently.

The current site, powered by a home-brewed content management system called Hansard, had humble beginnings and has had dozens of functions bolted on over its long life. However, the way some things were done in the early years has obstructed the roll-out of one or two much sought-after functions. The construction of a new content management system will allow for these to be included and bring everything up to date in a more general sense.

Some of the planned functions include:-

1. Each member will have their own photo album with unlimited disc space. Linking uploaded photos to posts will be as simple as clicking on a thumbnail image.
2. Support for mobile devices will be included. Are you in an antique shop or museum and see a radio you'd like to comment about? No worries - just take a photo with your mobile phone, upload to your photo album and then start a new post - easy.
3. A comment ratings system will be introduced. Members will be able to score each other on how informative provided information is and how well questions have been asked. To keep the system beneficial, no negative score would be able to be given. Positive scores will rank from one to six stars and contribute to an aggregate numerical score shown under the member's username on their profile page.

There are others planned too though the purpose of this forum will be for members to offer their own suggestions in one place so they are easy for me to come back to and compile into a to-do list which will be located elsewhere here.

So for now, over to you, the members. I look forward to reading your suggestions. By the way, just because other forums don't contain a feature you'd like to see doesn't mean we cannot have it here. If you have an idea I'd still like to hear about it.

Will the content of this site be migrated to the new one?

The recent changes to this site have improved its functionality greatly and there are numerous suggestions contained in the threads on the home page.

However, if you're starting with a blank page I'd hope that you'd incorporate the standard functionality of vBulletin, pHp, etc, which is what most frequent forum users would expect to find.

I am not much of a forum person...cept for this great site!!
But would it be possible to receive auto email notifications of replies to any threads that a user posts?...easier than trying to find old posts that you have made & checking for replies manually. Even being able to set in user preferences to receive an auto email for any post in selected discussion forum(s) that may interest a user...........hope that makes sense!
Regards Paul

G'day all,

Firstly, I can confirm that all current content will carry over. One of a site's greatest assets is quality content and because of the forums we have lots of that here.

Secondly, the new forums will feature e-mail subscription. A few members have asked for it so it is definitely on the cards. In off-the-shelf forum packages it is customary to allow members to select which forums they'd like to subscribe to and that is what will happen here.

So get ready for a much bigger control panel - though it will be better laid out than the existing one. I am pondering on using dropdown menus rather than radio buttons to control selection of options. These take up less room and the 'plain English' is easier to understand.

I am a moderator on a mate's vBulletin-based forum and that has allowed me to see how lots of things are done elsewhere. I also once ran a site called the Australian Chat Forums which was a pretty big place and incorporated unofficial forums for Big Brother, The Fugitive and a few other television programmes that were once very popular and that site ran on Snitz, which was the leading forum package for Windows servers at the time.

I think the only thing that may disappear is the live chatroom. It's seldom used and is powered by a Java applet - a fairly obsolete technology these days.

Brad: "I think the only thing that may disappear is the live chatroom."

I clicked on that once and my PC (running XP-Pro SP3) was rebooted ... so I haven't dared go there again.

If at all possible, it would be nice if the general look and feel of the new forum looks like the old one. Of course that may not make sense for everything.

One thing on the old forum I haven't figured out is how the recent thread postings are sorted on the list you see on the "home" page. Looks like the latest posts come up near the top, but it looks not strictly. Maybe some sort of marking for unread followup posts for those post threads would be nice (assuming one is logged in, so the server can know you are there and can tell you what you haven't seen yet).

If you need to place the material in the right hand panel of the old site elsewhere, I can deal with it...

The look of the main forums will be similar. This was taken into account when they received a makeover about six months ago. The older style which is still visible on the front page forum will be changed to look like the main forums.

The order in which comments appear on the front page forums will soon recognise a member's settings for the main forums, meaning that if you want to view most recent posts first then that will be what happens.

The sidebar will stay but the content and links on it may change slightly. Basic page structure will be the same but will have a more modern look and pages will load much faster, even though load time is already fairly good.

The new site is likely to be approx. 1240px wide. This will allow much larger and more detailed images to be included in posts and it fills out more space on 15 inch widescreens plus slightly older 4:3 monitors up to 20 inches.

Background colour will be lighter to allow a better contrast between background and text colour to help those with eyesight that is less than 100%.

As per comments in this thread I will introduced two further functions:-

1. A statistic on member profile pages that shows when a member was last here.
2. A buy/sell switch for original posts in Wanted and For Sale which will force the e-mail subscription on sellers for a certain time, say, a month or two so that they won't forget about any ads they have placed.

New site update.

Whilst time seems to be at a premium at the moment I think I have just about got the template for the new site sorted. For those unaware of what I mean, the template for a website, otherwise known as the 'front end', is the code that tells a web browser how to render the page and allow it to support the look and feel, along with the desired controls.

The next (and more challenging task) is to code the application, or back end, the part of the site that actually powers the functions we'll all enjoy, such as a more powerful discussion forum.

With this in mind, I have decided that aside from any security issue that may arise, no further development of the Hansard content management system will be undertaken. This will allow more time to be spent on the new, yet un-named, system.

no further development of the [current forum] system will be undertaken.

So I guess this footer showing in each post ought to be removed:

Member Tools: Quote Post · Report Post · Rate Post (Options coming soon)

Yes, that was a bit like St James Railway Station - built with the best intentions but after 80 years still only operating at half capacity. Unfortunately it is getting difficult to squeeze new things into this software. The last few new features involved doing repairs on things that I mucked up along the way. With the clean sheet of paper approach all that will get sorted before the new forums go live.

When the time comes I am going to ask a couple of members to begin using the new site and in return for early access they can do some crash testing for me.

Hi Brad
In the new scheme, could you put in a "return to top" of page either after each post or the last post in a thread?This will allow a quick return to select either a different thread in the topic or Forum Home, rather than a sometimes long scroll.
Regards
Harold

OOPS!
I just realised there is a return facility, but I didn't see it under the Quick Reply. Perhaps it is being missed by people reading the posts, but not actually replying.
Regards
Harold

Yep, it's easy to miss in its current location.