My Favorite Forums

[Dani]

There's a new page in the bottom toolbar called "My Favorite Forums". Check it out and let me know if you find it useful as a starting place / replacement homepage.

[deceptikon]

Yummy, I like it. There's a good selection of forums I'm likely to look in a session. While it's a minor thing, being able to mark the forums as read from there with a single click is nice (it's minor from the user perspective, of course. I'm still traumatized by the mark as read algorithm).

On an unrelated side note, what's the 411 on graphic smileys?

[Dani]

The mark as read algorithm is definitely a huge PITA.

The 411 on graphic smileys is that I am traumatized by Markdown (and parsing in general) and have not yet had the courage to reopen that can of worms to figure out a way to ensure that smileys are never parsed within code blocks, inline code, URLs, etc. I also don't really miss them all that much, to be honest.

[deceptikon]

I also don't really miss them all that much, to be honest.

For the usual suspects it's not a big deal because most people recognize them. For things like :rolleyes:, I miss them, and I can think of others that I could make use of like :sarcasm: and :notsureifsrs:.

Since you're scared, I'll see about taking a little time to evaluate how much effort would be involved. I was thinking that there was another reason why you hadn't jumped on it yet.

;D

[LastMitch]

@Dani

Check it out and let me know if you find it useful as a starting place / replacement homepage.

I like a lot! If you used this format as your new homepage, it looks neat & clean & shows more activities.

[Reverend Jim]

Looks great.

[Dani]

There are no intentions in making this the new site homepage because it's oh-so-important to stick with something that is appealing to marketers. However, what I meant was that you could bookmark this page as your personal starting point on DaniWeb. There's of course the link to it from the footer of every page of the site.

[<M/>]

Quick question, how do you add a favorite or is it automatically done based on your activity on where you post?

My feedback is that the page looks nice and useful!... I now know where I am going to be finding more resources :)

Well done!

[Dani]

Your list of favorite forums is automated based on where you post.

[<M/>]

Alright, that actually is helpful for me because I always forget to fave things manually...

[mike_2000_17]

I like it. Not sure if it'll become my go-to place, time will tell. I actually kinda like the "Recommended" page more, for the fact that it lists all the threads of my favorite forums in one listing. Can you manually mark some forums as "favorite"? Some forums are not very active or I'm not overly active in them, so they wouldn't percolate up to "favorite" status based on my posting statistics, but I still navigate to them regularly, just to see (these include "C", "Linux / Unix", "Computer Science", "Game Programming", etc., which are either not very active or I only occasionally feel worthy enough to post on).

[Ancient Dragon]

I don't find it all that useful, I think it's more convenient to just use the menu bar that appears across the top of the page.

[Dani]

AD, I didn't design the page to be useful.

When writing the new system, I intentionally decided to not showcase how many threads/posts there are in a forum, or how many people are currently visiting each forum. Aside from not wanting to do the additional database queries or clutter up the page, I didn't want there to be any stigma associated with a forum, or give anyone any preconceived ideas as to how popular or unpopular a particular forum is that they couldd use to predetermine its usefulness before actually using it. I decided I'd rather just have the contents speak for themselves.

A conversation in the office the other day lead me to decide to create a Top List for forums the exact same way we already have a Top List for members. This way, those who are extremely curious can have a look at how forums compared to each other, but it would be self-contained to a single page as to not make the stats have a large influence on the community and keep the large database queries restricted to a single page. It wasn't until after the page was created did I realize it could actually be used as a starting page for some people.

[LastMitch]

@Dani

It wasn't until after the page was created did I realize it could actually be used as a starting page for some people.

It's very confusing when you mention that. It's like you have a gut feeling that this will be useful for few thousand members even though you don't know it will be useful or not. I mean this starting page is very nice. If this was a homepage it will look nice.

[diafol]

Nice page. Didn't we used to have an MFF before? Since then, I've started using different ways of searching for what I need. May use it from time to time though.

[JorgeM]

I like the page, great job!