The Shrine

The strength of this board is that popular topics can remain on top for longer.

The strength of the other board format is that you can get a gist of entire conversations by quickly looking at the threading and the headers.

I always thought the second format was ideal, but I thought the first format was more appropriate for high volume sites where threading would cause conversations to extend to the end of the universe (i.e. off the end of the page), thus killing the main benefit of the format. Low volume sites are more suited for the second format because you can quickly catch up on what's going on without reading everything and you can get a gist of the conversation just by reading headers...heck, most of the time with us, you could read the entire conversation without actually clicking on a header. And you can easily see where subconversations started and ended with a glance, something you can't do with this one.

Sine if you wanted to get super fancy and make an OSS project the envy of your peers, create a Model View Controller (MVC) message board framework where you can view the data using either board format, but the data model remains the same. I'd do it myself, but I'm a lazy fuck. ;)

Oh hell, I might just do it anyway and throw it up on freshmeat with all the other crap over there. It'd be a good excuse for me to learn PHP.

You're absolutely correct on this one. I also felt that the old board allowed for enough customization to make anyone happy. One major weakness against the other one that this one has for our type of community is the No Text thing. The vast majority of our messages had no bodies to them, and we always knew to which message they were refering to and could easily read all the replies, it will be a hassle to do that now since: #1 replies to a specific message will be spread throughout the thread, not bunched together in one area, #2 Without addressing them, it will be easy to mistake who the reply is meant for.

Yeah, this board setup is quite annoying. I've had to sort through these setups when trying to find out about my DVD burning stuff, and I freakin' hate it. The other setup allowed for much easier browsing and for you to see the development of threads (ie. conversation extending into other areas). That way, I could answer to something that was a few replies down but not have to care about or sift through the entire thread.

Thumbs down from me, big time. Not that it'll matter, though :(

'eh, I've never used phpbb extensively before, so this'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get used to this new format (and it will take a while)

We all miss the old format, but we'll eventually get used to the new one too and maybe even like it better

This format sucks for long subjects.

Don Wang wrote:This format sucks for long subjects.

Not if you quote the relevant parts of the posts.