General

A place for discussions about anything

The new system

edited February 2006 in General
Excellent. I noticed before that any posts we made would be available in the google search engine. Not sure if that is a bad thing. I would guess they would find that by word content. Will this new system change the way that works?

Comments

  • Seem to work OK so far. I'm a little miffed that I can't plug my wares, but I guess it's not out of line to plug my website. Now how does it work with pictures?
    brooxes Basic KAP Kit (BBKK)
  • Hey, I like it much better already! Go Cris!
  • Shiny!
    Very nice interface, and works quite well from this end.
    Thanks for all your efforts. -karen
  • edited February 2006
    This looks great! I'm very much looking forward to having the new system online.

    - Dave Wheeler
  • Would someone please try to block this comment as a test. Lets see what happens.

    - Dave Wheeler
  • edited February 2006
    I logged back in as myself instead of my spammer alter ego and did a "block user" This doesn't have any visible effect to me except to change the action on the right hand side to "unblock user".

    So what effect does blocking a user or comment have? Does it flag it to the administrator for removal?

    [I found my own answer in the Vanilla documentation (see Cris's post below.) "Blocking" doesn't hide posts, it just prevents HTML from being rendered. You can block an individual post or every post from a particular user. Blocking only affects your own view of the discussion group.]

    [P.S. I love the edit feature!]
  • edited February 2006
    Dave -- thanks for serving as a "crash test dummy" for SPAM intrusion.

    1. I banned your SPAM persona -- see if you can post in that guise again.

    2. I killed the "see if you can block this" message.

    3. Right now I have the registration system setup for folks to have "member" privileges immediately on registering. Later, I can reset this to "applicant" and screen incomers if necessary.

    4. The system can also ban posts by keyword, prevent posts with over (x) number of URLs, and a few more measures besides.

    Woo Hoo.

    Thanks for serving as a As administrator I have the capacity to assign various roles to users. The normative role is "member" but below that lies the categories of "douchebag" and "banned". I can set users in these categories to have fewer or no privileges (cannot post or cannot see).

    I think the blocking feature adjusts the site for your point of view alone and that you probably cannot block yourself.

    I banned your test spammer (spammerone).
  • Now, even though I blocked the user and you've banned the test spammer, I still see the user and the posting. But the posting has a big red banner reading "I have been banned".

    Is there any way to remove the posting so nobody sees it? If it had been an actual spam message that's what we would want, right?

    I also have a concern that the registration process doesn't have a feature to defeat scripts from registering. (Like the kind of thing where you need to enter a word that appears in a distorted image.) I think spammers will get through the defenses in place so far.

    - Dave Wheeler
  • See my post immediately above. I was editing while you were editing.

    I removed the banned user post.
  • edited February 2006
    Note: being banned did stop "spammerone" from logging in to the site again. And now that you've removed the post, its gone from my view.

    Goodbye spam!
  • Very very promising!! Thanks for testing these features.
  • edited February 2006
    I've been playing around a bit with the new site's features and would like to recommend a couple tips to everyone:
    • Visit your personal information page by clicking the "Account" tab at the top of every window, then hitting the "Personal Information" link on the left.
    • Add URL's to the Account Picture and Icon fields to give yourself an icon.
    • Add a key/value pair with the key "Flickr Home" and put the URL to your Flickr home page in the value field
    • Get a job that affords you lots of free time to surf the new KAP discussion board.
  • Nice work Dave!

    I am now iconized and my member profile entry is spiffed up. You can find documentation on the Vanilla Forum at the Lussumo WWW site:

    http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php#vanilla_documentation
  • On the registration issue, one approach commonly adopted is sending a registration link email. This ensures that the email address is valid, and is enough to stop most spammers from registering, and stops any scripts.

    the registration page looks to ask for a valid email address, but doesn't test whether it is actually valid that I can see.

    Despite that, great new site. "big up" to you
  • Having just made a mistake in the HTML in my member profile (put a blank between '<' and 'a', I'd dearly like to be able to edit or delete it. Is this possible? If not, could Admin delete it?

    Dave Mitchell
  • edited February 2006
    Dave, You should be able to edit that yourself. Is there no 'edit' option for you on the right side of the posting? (You would need to be logged in to see that, of course.)

    I've editted my profile after initially posting it and can see the 'edit' option on my postings.

    Oh, and one more tip: when including html like that, make sure you select the Html radio button at the bottom of the editiing box. Otherwise, it will just show your markup.

    Dave Wheeler
  • Hi Dave,

    David is right, you can edit and hide your own comments. The links to these features are subtle (on the right side opposite your name in posts).

    Other useful Vanilla Forum features user features can be found at:

    http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php?id=vanilla:users#your_account

    Another feature is that URLs entered in the regular 'text' mode will be made into hyperlinks (as in the example above).
  • As you say the links are subtle, but I should have looked!
  • I don't know. This might be spam proof, but I'm lost in this new forum. Wonder if anyone else notices this.
    Good KAPing to all.

    Tom
  • edited February 2006
    I'm finding the new forum much easier to use than the previous one. Let me share a couple tips on how I use it. Hopefully these will help others get more comfortable with the system.

    First, I always log in when I'm viewing the forum. The Vanilla software knows which articles I've already read and it will highlight new stuff for me but this only works if I log in.

    Second, I always start on the Discussions tab. (That's the first page I see after logging in anyways.) This list shows all the active discussions in order of how recently they were used. The one with the freshest comment is at the top and the one at the bottom is completely stale. Those that have comments I've not read yet will appear in a darker color and have a red number showing how many comments I haven't read.

    To see the comments I click on the discussion name. Vanilla will show the whole list of comments in the order they were posted. But since it knows which ones I've already read, it scrolls the view down to the first one that I haven't read. So I can pretty much start reading from that point. When I'm done reading that discussion I can get back to the discussion list by hitting the "back" button in the browser, by hitting the "Discussions" tab at the top of the page, or clicking on Cris's nice big heading at the top of the forum.

    To add a comment to any discussion, there's always a comment entry box at the bottom of the page. I just enter the text then click "Add your comments".

    This system has a number of advantages over the old one. Here are a couple of my favorites:
    * I can see the entire discussion on one page instead of having to read each comment one at a time.
    * If someone makes an addition to an old topic, that topic comes back to the top of the list instead of getting lost a mile down the page.
    * I can edit comments even after posting them.
    * I can put HTML in my comments. That means I can add pictures and links to other web pages.

    I hope that helps.

    Dave Wheeler
  • edited February 2006
    Great summary David.

    Some extra comments about the Categories tab to the right of the Discussions tab. Right now this tab seems of little use because the system is new and there are only 27 discussion threads total in all categories. After a few months there will be many more discussion threads in each of the categories. At that time you may wish to view an old topic and the Categories tab will come in quite handy. New comers to KAP and the Discussion page will find the Categories tab an extremely useful tool to focus their efforts to gain information. It could eliminate some of the common questions that always arise.

    The search tool will also be much better than in the old system because a search will return the complete thread for each topic with everyone's comments.

    David failed to mention how to start a new discussion thread. At the top of the left column you will see a link in red Start a new discussion. Click this and get a new page where you can get things rolling. We will all have to get used to thinking about categories when we creat new threads. We don't want a discussion about kites hidden over in the Members Profiles category.

    www.kaper.us
  • I too find this a lot easier than the old system... which is why I'm here, and never made it to comment on the old system (though I listened in occasionally.)

    one comment/question:

    on the account > personal information page it says 'check here to make your real name visible to other members' and ditto for your email.

    In actuality this makes your real name visible to anyone who visits your profile, signed in or not. (The email doesn't show up to non-members, though.)

    any chance we can have an option to make our real name, like our email, available to members, but not to the general public? I'm a bit leery of using a real name anywhere publicly on the internet.... so for now I'm just using a last initial.
  • Dave, thanks for pointing some of the basics out to me. I'm already starting to see the advantage. Just have to spend more time with this, and I'm sure I'll be a convert. Didn't have much succes with putting in an icon, but maybe the picture I had was too big to begin with. I'm keep playing around. Thanks for the help.

    Tom
  • edited February 2006
    I like the organization and everything. Look like you made the top photo a hyperlink too. It's really great!

    T H A N K Y O U C H R I S !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Doug
    http://www.theouterbanksblog.com
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