Keeping track of new posts and topics

Try over 15x times more posts than that and over 2x times more topics and over 5x more private messages and over 50 likes.

We still have a large number of members to visit again - at the moment people sticking around on the new forum quite well.

Well that just shows how inept & ill informed I am then, I was under the impression ( quite wrongly obviously ) that when I come onto the forum & it says 6 new, that means there has been 6 new posts since the last time I looked, but you say there were 90 posts, OK then where does it tell me there are 90 new posts yesterday, how can I follow them if nothing tells me they are there. Obviously something I am missing somewhere.

Julian

@Julian Check out this detailed topic New and Unread counts - What does it all mean?
Feel free to any questions regarding this over there.

Hi @Julian ,

I can understand your thought process because on the old forum ‘New posts since last visit’ meant new posts AND new threads, however on this one New means ‘New Threads’ started, new posts to existing topics come under ‘Latest’ now.

I have to admit I thought the same thing for a couple of days, but I’m blonde, what’s your excuse

If you particularly want to ‘follow/watch’ a thread, press the icon and they go under your personal list called Starred (at the top next to Latest, New, Unread).

Also if you look at your list of NEW and there’s nothing of interest to you, click Dismiss and they won’t appear as New anymore.

What I like is, as soon as you click ‘Forum’ it brings you straight to the new posts (Latest) page.

Hope this help - and I’ve got all that right, hehe

Tracie .

Yes Tracie it all sounds logical thanks, I`m Grey haired & getting older by the day, my excuse and I am sticking to it,

Julian.

DMT, you’re obviously very savvy about this stuff and it comes easy to you. Most of the members, including me, are used to based phpbb forums where details are presented a certain way, and this will take a bit of getting used to.

If activity is so high, then it might be worth dumping it in a sidebar or pop out for now, because lots of stuff I was checking on regularly, that had 250+ views, now has 10 or so because everything has reset. I don’t care but new members used to joining php forums and seeing 25,000 history lengths, are maybe going to worry that this forum is brand new?

I’m not computer illiterate and what Julian says is exactly what I see on first look - until you realise categories are sub forums, its a while to be able to read the data here and I would speculate it could make newcomers quite uncertain.

@Jeemy I didn’t want to loose track of your points in the Facebook conversation so I moved your post to this topic.

Things aren’t so easy - hard work and lots of time goes into most of the things I do.

I have been using forums and bulletin boards since the first day I was on-line. I’ve seen many different bulletin board systems come and go - playing active roles many communities.

I have seen security issues destroy communities overnight and never recover - like some real world natural disaster. This is something I didn’t want to happen to GTOUK.

A community lives on it’s current activity this is why Latest is front page of the forum area. Without the community seeing what’s happening right now it’s difficult to know you can participate and what’s important at this moment.

What would you imagine being in this popout window that is not already displayed?

Sadly yes the “views” imported from the previous software could not be maintained in the same way.

I for one would like to see an active community of knowledgeable members who I can ask direct questions of - where the answers are specific to me. Existing members can easily search through the history and point newbies in the right direction.

And as ever - the first thing you do is use the search to see if it has been discussed before - standard practice before posting in a forum.

Search in the new forum is better than ever and getting better all the time - just yesterday added support for searching for posts by a specific user in the current topic you are on.

So I think we have most of the bases covered.

What other things could we do to help newcomers with this?

The committee are already working on additional wording for the website and detailed information for newbies.
Introduction emails are also being written which will be sent to new users when they join.

Lots of things still to do - feel free to continue to share your thoughts do we can get this right for everybody in GTOUK.

Cheers,
Dean.

All I meant was you are clearly computer literate. For those that aren’t this is a bigger change.

Nothing major, just suggestions.

Not going to blow-by-blow it because I think you’ve done a good job with the site and understand there are going to be teething issues so what we see down the line will be greatly improved still.

I think you’ll probably find it 50/50 on people who take to this like a duck to water, and people who find it impenetrable. Although a lot of community features are here, they are not so easily laid out or easy to find as in phpBB. Sending PMs, or emails direct to users, how many posts the user has made, that kind of thing. I think these are not newbie features anyway.

Its a bit un-nerving with the ‘infinite bottom’ and I guess people are used to seeing info such as users online, total posts today, this week, ever, that kind of thing. This kind of stuff displayed in a sidebar or pop out might compensate from the loss of views carried forward.

Also I am used to when I go to a forum, seeing all the forums and sub forums as my home page, then clicking through to ‘new posts’. Going straight to ‘latest’ is likely what most people would do anyway, but it would be good to have a way of seeing those categories laid out and grouped; I know you can see them, I presume grouped by latest, when you click the menu item up the top, but just my $0.02 on all of this.

Search works really well.

Disregard that, I suck c*cks.

Did you add it or has it always been there? I found a top bar with just the things i was missing!

And a bottom bar on the top of the first post in each thread with more data on it.