Author Topic: Ideas for upgrading Forums!  (Read 3259 times)

yobob

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Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« on: September 15, 2017, 12:04:58 AM »
Want to upgrade the forums? Let's give some feedback on how we can do that!
So here's me first!

When we post a link from twitter, can you display an image? for example, i copy a url from this site and post it on twitter, then it shows a nice picture plus nice description on the displayed page. I believe RPG maker does this.

Jubal

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Re: Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« Reply #1 on: September 15, 2017, 06:30:29 PM »
There is a general pinned Forum Discussion thread for minor issues and patch announcements, btw - but this is a slightly larger job though so I think a separate thread is useful.

Basically Twitter has "twitter tags" for this (unlike FB which does the same thing on an automated system). These are meta tags added into the top of the page that tell twitter what's in that specific page's content, which are a bit hard to write dynamically but I'm having a go. Fortunately I've been doing some PHP recently! :)

So far I seem to have the card set up but not the picture, I'll see what I can do about the latter...

EDIT: OK, that should hopefully be working now! They're a bit rudimentary, they just show the site logo and post title twice, but hopefully it's an improvement. I'm not sure if adding the top post on a page is possible as the longer descr, or whether that would work particularly well, but I could try that if people think it would be a particular improvement.

« Last Edit: September 15, 2017, 07:04:41 PM by Jubal »
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yobob

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Re: Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2017, 08:54:14 AM »
Hey jubal, good job on the work. I think it would be better to add descriptions as it will improve the quality a lot. Just reading duplicate things feels like a spam or an advertisement. People wouldn't want to click the think unless they read something interesting.

I'm super new to forums and stuff, but what do you mean by a new thread? Like a new post?

Jubal

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Re: Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2017, 02:33:55 PM »
Yeah, the basic terminology I tend to use is basically that "posts" are the individual messages, and those make up topics or "threads" which go into boards or "forums". Sorry, it's probably a bit confusing if you're not used to it :)

If I can't get the descriptions working (and it looks like being really difficult), would it be better to just leave the second line of text blank?
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Glaurung

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Re: Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« Reply #4 on: September 17, 2017, 03:23:22 PM »
If I can't get the descriptions working (and it looks like being really difficult), would it be better to just leave the second line of text blank?
I think so. The other obvious choice would be the first so-many characters from the body of the text, but I can see that picking them out would be difficult, and reliant on a lot of consistency in formatting.

Jubal

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Re: Ideas for upgrading Forums!
« Reply #5 on: September 17, 2017, 08:26:49 PM »
Yes, I can't work out how to do that - and I'm not sure how it would work for board indexes. :/
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