Feature requests and ideas for SFN!

[PlayfulPhoenix]

Hey all,

SFN is very much in its early days, and because of that, it remains malleable for us to make it as we want it to be. A little earlier today, in fact, Aiboh added a feature that was requested by @iFreilicht, pretty much on a whim - so we're already beginning to tweak and tune the site as needed/desired.

...Consequently, it makes sense (to me, at least) to have a specific thread where everyone can put in suggestions for features, functionality, or other ideas, to add to the forum. Thus, I've elected to make exactly that And although we (obviously) won't be able to work on or implement every request, we've already started to make improvements based on feedback, so I'm sure there's more of that to come.

 

[jeshikat]

The problem is that it'd require a custom Xenforo add-on to implement properly. I could maybe hard-code the URLs but that would get messy very quickly. I'm not sure what that would cost but there's other parts of the site I'd rather spend money on first.

Edit: One of these days I'd like to have a series of articles chronicling the history of SFF and the communities surrounding it. Especially the rise and fall of Sudhian.com.

 

[jØrd]

Maybe we shouldn't stop there, but actually make all banners clickable. Yours is a good example. Not everyone here, especially newer users know what LOSIAS is or what it even stands for. Being able to click on the banner and get a bit of information about it would be a very nice feature. What does Moderator exactly mean? What can they do? Who are all the moderators? How do they differ from Site Staff? All that information doesn't really have a place on the site right now (I know you could make a sticky about it), but by making the banners clickable, you could easily get access to that.

I kind of agree w/ this. As far as user experience goes it makes sense to provide that information from the banner. I guess my only other question would be how to make it clear to the user that the banner is clickable & how much people would actually use it. Perhaps links to this additional info would be incorporated into the username lightbox popup since thats where most people are going to click and where their going to expect these options / info to be. Its really more of an academic question at present though.

 

[EdZ]

Yes. Right now it brings up the cached page, so all notifications were the same as when you lasted visited. A forced refresh would update the notifications to the most current state.

On the downside, forcing a refresh rather than loading the cache page would wipe out any partially written posts you accidentally navigate away from. I can't count the number of times I've been writing up a long post, and accidentally left-clicked instead of crtl+click or middle-clicking a link, and had to navigate back while panicking I'd lost a wall of text.

 

[jeshikat]

It isn't foolproof but Xenforo autosaves drafts so that's less of an issue here.

 

[Phuncz]

On the downside, forcing a refresh rather than loading the cache page would wipe out any partially written posts you accidentally navigate away from.

I was worried about that too as my first thought, but as Aiboh already said, drafts are luckily saved. Even after you leave a topic for a few days and come back.

Edit: One of these days I'd like to have a series of articles chronicling the history of SFF and the communities surrounding it. Especially the rise and fall of Sudhian.com.

I'd be very interested in the article about Sudhian, it was my first step into SFF communities.

 

[jeshikat]

It'll even save drafts of new threads, but it doesn't store them forever as I found out the hard way

 

[Blorgon]

I like the idea of quickly accessing more information on those banners. My first time to the site I tried to click one.

How about a panel activated on mouse-hover that slides to the right over the user's post that shows a link to their site if they have one in one section, and in another section, options for looking at their threads, their recent posts, message options, et cetera? Basically an entire profile page on mouse-hover, instead of a separate webpage. I don't know much about web development, and I feel like that would be intensive, but it sure would be awesome.

 

[jeshikat]

Some of that's already there

Just click on someone's user name and it'll pop up a box with most of that.

 

[Blorgon]

Some of that's already there

Just click on someone's user name and it'll pop up a box with most of that.

Woops! I'm so used to opening in a new-tab I didn't even think to try that.

My excuse is that I'm new here

 

[jeshikat]

No worries. I don't think there are many (if any) other PC hardware forums running Xenforo and it has lots of neat, kinda hidden features.

 

[jØrd]

lightobx for article images. right now i either get booted out the article or i remember to open graphs in a new tab, a lightbox would be great

 

[jeshikat]

Hmm...I personally dislike lightboxes but I'm usually on a desktop. Are you often on mobile and run into those issues?

 

[iFreilicht]

The main problem I have with lightboxes on most sites is that I have no one-click way of seeing the picture full-screen. I click on a 200px wide picture to see it in more detail and then it's restricted to a 400px box that I sometimes can't even use to get to the source picture.

Not sure how to feel about this, exactly. At least on desktop, I much prefer middle-clicking on the picture, but I can see why you'd want a litebox-ish thing.

 

[EdZ]

As long as it doesn't break middle-click/CTRL-click new-tab functionality, lightboxes are at least tolerable on desktop.