[Phil]

One thing that has always bothered me about bridgebase.com/forums are the thread titles. People think of cheesy/irrelevant/non-descriptive/trollish titles a lot of the time, like,

"to bid or not to bid",
"help me improve my game",
or
"prove me wrong"

These titles do not help us go back and see where new follow-ups are made. Since I've been slumming over at Bridgewinners the last few months, there are a few improvements that would help the forums me thinks.

On polls, Bridgewinners uses the hand as the thread title. This makes it much easier to jog your memory about a particular thread you read about a few days ago.

The other great feature is the "Alert" function. When I log onto BW, there is an alert tab that shows if there has been activity on the threads that I have responded to, or threads I have posted, or threads created or responded to by my friends list.

[Antrax]

You have the second here; It's called "watched topics".

[ArtK78]

And you can always pull up a list of threads that you posted in by clicking on your name in the upper right corner of the screen and clicking on "My Content."

[JLOGIC]

Lol bridgewinners. I think their layout is absolutely horrible. If you like bridgewinners so much just stay over there.

[gnasher]

ArtK78, on 2013-May-09, 09:26, said:

And you can always pull up a list of threads that you posted in by clicking on your name in the upper right corner of the screen and clicking on "My Content."

Thanks - I hadn't noticed that.

[wyman]

JLOGIC, on 2013-May-09, 09:54, said:

Lol bridgewinners. I think their layout is absolutely horrible. If you like bridgewinners so much just stay over there.

haha

I think the layout is really horrible also, but that doesn't mean that we can't grab the bits and pieces that are better. I agree though that something that makes old threads easier to search and find would be great. idk if the solution is putting the hand as the title or what, but I'll often look for old threads and take forever to find what I'm looking for.

[Phil]

JLOGIC, on 2013-May-09, 09:54, said:

Lol bridgewinners. I think their layout is absolutely horrible. If you like bridgewinners so much just stay over there.

Easy dog....

The interface is still stupid looking but there are some useful features that can improve the forums.

[FM75]

BBO also has the "view new content" link (maybe it is a bit hidden - see upper right...)
If you want "friends" bridge chats, maybe google circles or facebook is the way to go.

And I guess probably an RSS feed.

[barmar]

How can the forum software be changed to prevent people from giving poor titles to their threads? I've used many different forum systems, and none of them take naming rights away from the posters. As a result, you often get poor titles.

Are you asking for more active moderation, renaming threads with non-descriptive names? Forum moderation is just a background task for us, we might need someone doing it full time to do that.

[Phil]

barmar, on 2013-May-10, 10:25, said:

How can the forum software be changed to prevent people from giving poor titles to their threads? I've used many different forum systems, and none of them take naming rights away from the posters. As a result, you often get poor titles.

Are you asking for more active moderation, renaming threads with non-descriptive names? Forum moderation is just a background task for us, we might need someone doing it full time to do that.

If someone sets up a bidding poll, its easy enough (?) to require a hand be posted within the poll and use the hand at least as a subtitle for the thread title.

As much as I've been on here, I've never used 'my content' before. I suppose that is because for years its been "view new content' when I log on. Why couldn't we have a link to "my content" directly below 'view new content'?

[broze]

Forget about changing topic titles - the essential change these forums need is to be able to filter "New Content", and "Recent Topics Added" on the right of the main page.

The more foreign posters who use the site (and I hope it will be more and more - Bridgewinners is very anti-non-anglophone) the more this will become necessary. Even now my "New Content" is just a flood of Chinese characters.

Having said all this, my 'Watched Topics' tab doesn't work.

[broze]

double

[barmar]

Hopefully we'll upgrade the forum software one of these days. I think the vendor has made a number of improvements in these areas.

But we try to keep our customizations to a minimum, using the hooks that the software provides. I don't know how easy it would be to implement something like your bidding poll suggestion. How would the software know the difference between a bidding poll (which requires a hand) and some other poll?

Bridge Winners is a custom site that was designed specifically with bridge in mind. That's all they do there, they can spend all their resources on making it work well for bridge discussion. We're running generic forum software, with a few tweaks to embed bridge content using our hand viewer and editor tool. The primary focus of our staff is on applications for playing bridge, not the forum (which explains why we're now 3 revisions behind).