Major forum update coming soon

Hi everyone,

We will be migrating the forum to a new platform imminently (likely using discourse.org). We will do our best to keep the transition simple and lossless, and the only thing you'll need will be to reset your password. 

As we prepare for the transition, are there any features that you always wished to have in the JUCE Forum? Now is the time to ask!

Thanks,

JB

the basics please :

- advanced search
- order by date for the search results
- working 'subscribe' (with automatic subscribe to a thread when you post)

 

thanks!

It'd be helpful if people could try discourse.org and see if there are any massive showstoppers with it! We tried it ourselves and it seems better than the current Drupal forum, but any feedback on it would be welcome.

I've used discourse on other sites and it works well, can't see any showstoppers. As long as we can have easy (GitHub style) syntax highlighting as well it sounds like very good news to me! Thanks yes

I don't know, if there is a forum that supports this, but some kind of resolution field would be good, which you can filter. So when I asked a stupid question and made a fool out of myself, people can hide that stuff (some kind of withdraw without deleting it). Same for meanwhile fixed bugs...

But improving the forum is great news, thanks for the effort. The hierarchy of categories might be a subject for revision, but I'm sure you're already at it...

My input here would be

  • coding questions
  • algorithm questions
  • Projucer / Introjucer / project generations
  • possible juce bugs
  • other topics like license/release dates etc.

Putting plattform into extra categories is counterproductive IMHO, as it duplicates parts of the structure. Here additional tags could help.

One possibility might be to have a single forum that is tag-based? Like SO...

Example tags might be: suggestion, bug, dev, beginner, offering, projucer, platform-specific, licensing, events, general chitchat

Advantages would be:

  •  you only need to look in one place to see new posts
  •  you can give multiple tags to a post (that might otherwise be awkward to pigeonhole)
  •  easy to create new tags

π

Will I lose my registration date? I'm so close to being a jucer for 10 years -- I'm at 9 years 11 months.

I'd like to see a list of all my posts, especially topics that I started. It's a pretty basic thing, but currently it can be quite hard to find posts that you made in the past.

Wow, great news ! What I'd like in the new forum, apart from the suggestions made above, would be to not have to log in once per week, per computer, I find this quite annoying with the current forum.

I would also like to be able to consult the list of my forum topics & posts.

If so, I'm sure we can hack that into the database for you :)

Thanks for the feedback so far, keep it going to make sure we're not forgetting anything. 

As far as I can tell, all features requested so far are available in Discourse. Some features may not be implemented from day 1 but the forum framework seems easy to adjust and we'll improve it as we go.

I'd love a mechanism that would let you jump from one unread/updated topic to the next so you didn't have to jump forward and back so much. I actually built my own app to do this with the current forum (appropriately called "Forum Junkie").

I think it would be good to have a choice between question and discussion when creating a post. Then for questions, you can mark them solved or unsolved. You could even mark a comment as the best answer, similar to Stack Overflow.

Also, I think we should be able to give a comment or post a thumbs up or thumbs down. This could help by letting people know if an answer is good or not. Perhaps even a reputation system could be used too so users are rewarded when posting good answers. 

@AndrewJ, a button that toggles between listing posts chronologically and by thread would address that, I think.

@JordanHarris, one possibility would be simply to use Stack Overflow -- I'm sure there is some way to trigger an alert whenever someone post a question with the JUCE tag. Better than reinventing the wheel I think!

It would also be nice to be able to work in an RSS feed (if that's the right term, I've never used it until today) so that subscribers can be notified whenever there is a new post.

That's what I've just done today on the IRC channel bot -- whenever a new commit is made to the JUCE-master repo, a notification appears on channel (which is logged btw, log URL in topic).

It would be funky if any forum post or SO post also triggered a notification.

That would mean only one place to look to keep track of JUCE activity.

π

It’d be cool to be able to attach simple cpp files or small .zips

While it's probably a seperate issue outside of moving the forum platform, something that's been mentioned a few times is integrating ROLI and JUCE forum accounts into a single system.

Also +1 for adding additional forum sections for different kinds of JUCE talk past "general discussion" as has been mentioned by others.

@AndrewJ, a button that toggles between listing posts chronologically and by thread would address that, I think.

Not sure about that. What I'd like to be able to do is jump to the next topic with a new/updated post with a single click. Don't want to have to browse back to a topic list first.

Keep RSS please.

@otristan, does that mean the current forum has RSS already? If so, someone give me the link and I will get my IRCbot to notify the channel whenever someone posts on the forum.

I think that would be really handy, because it's rather labourious to manually check 5 forums several times a day.

I can set my IRC client to ping everytime the bot delivers a message -- much cleaner!

@jb, maybe it's worth making this thread sticky until the change happens? Just so everyone gets to see it.

Another forum feature that would be nice: easy drag-and-drop image upload -- currently it's fiddly -- I have to upload to an imagebin, feed in the URL, and then it resizes the image so I can't share a big screenshot unless I manually link the URL.

π

I'd like to see an area where people can post links to gits of open source juce projects because searching for code examples on github searches brings up mostly half finish projects and things that don't compile/work as expected.