This is more or less in response to Charlie's post which begins the thread "This is interersting..." He asks, "This is very simple but I wonder how many threads will be managed." One thing that will help is to give them meaningful titles! Hence this new thread instead of a reply in Charlie's thread.
Clearly, if this board is to be used heavily, the present setup will be inadequate. Typical message board systems (like Yuku's) have a hierarchy of fixed depth, e.g. Board->Category->Forum->Topic->Post. Here, at present, we have Board->Thread->Post. To make a hierarchy is simple enough (or so says Dag), just do multiple installs to make multiple forums. It's not clear we need more than one additional level of hierarchy, though we might decide we want it. If not, I'd advocate a Forum->Thread->Post structure, with a set of forums something along the lines of
I may have missed a sensible forum or three.
Maybe "Side projects" for another forum.
I like the breakdown. I wonder at the maintenance of a bunch of forums. I don't know what kareha is like in that respect.
Using the prototype, for example, it would easy to create a tab or frame and use and <iframe> to insert a targeted forum.
If it's going to be heavily used, any simple web board will be woefully inadequate. The RSS feed would eliminate the biggest problem of finding what's new, if I knew a reasonable RSS client. I've only tried Thunderbird so far, and I gave up on it even faster for RSS than I do every time I try it for mail and news.
Otherwise, personally, I think the flat organization is just fine. It would be nicer to have hierarchically ordered replies, but I don't really see a need to break out the threads into categories. OTOH, it would be nice to establish a convention of identifying song and album threads with the word SONG or ALBUM at the beginning of the title.
Creating a new Kareha forum means putting copies of the Kareha files in another directory. So, if we want a songs forum, I would create a /forums/songs directory (or maybe use the existing /songs directory, assuming no Kareha files are the same name as anything in that directory) and edit the config file to set the admin password and forum name.
Kareha can handle a lot of threads in one forum; look at the [Kareha support forum](http://wakaba.c3.cx/sup/) for an example. What I don't like, though, is a lot of sprawl. I see a lot of forums that have a ridiculous degree of hierarchy, with the only result being thousands of nearly-empty topics and an ambiguous classification scheme. Also, it breeds bitchy topic cops.
The way I see it, we only need a few forums. We want to keep it small, because each is a separate RSS feed; we don't want it to be unmanageable for users. We also don't want any forums to go belly-up, so we should only split off topics into their own forums when they are high-traffic. For us, songs will be pretty active, at least from time to time, so there should be a Songs forum. Collaboration, to me, seems to fold into that forum nicely; just add a request for a singer or something to the thread for that song. Or create a new thread, no big deal there.
We could put threads for new album in the same forum, since they won't be as heavy traffic, but I see nothing wrong with separating it into an Albums forum, simply because album art design might actually take off once we have a separate forum for it. Plus, I'm wondering where Kareha uploads files... if we're lucky, it dumps them in the same directory as the index.html, and we can use Kareha to aid in updating the rest of the site.
There of course needs to be a blather forum, like this one. But beyond that, I can't think of another forum that would be absolutely necessary. I say: let's wait until we spot a high-traffic topic, then split it off.
I already uploaded a graphic (IBC logo); you can see where that ended up...
Hadn't thought about the separate RSS feeds. Good arguments there for not splitting off too much; but let's not keep it flat and put tags on the subject lines. Split off enough forums, not too many... but not too few.
When we talk about uploading images are we uploading them to the forum or to the main site? How do we distinguish? Should there be a more formal method to promote a resource to the main visible site?
> Should there be a more formal method to promote a resource to the main visible site?
We may have to, Charlie. Doctroid's upload and mine went into the forums/src directory, which is not what I expected. However, it's a good temporary method for uploads.
Unless Kareha automatically prunes images that are too old (which I don't think it does, but I don't know a huge amount about it) there isn't any reason I know of in principle why the images couldn't stay whereever Kareha puts them.
Practically, it might make sense to move images that are going to be used for something that's outside of the forums to another directory. Of course, that would require that somebody who has access move the files over. Right now that would have to be talysman or me, although I can give additional people access if it would be useful.
[I should note that for a while all I've done for the ?!C website is provide webspace. I will keep an eye on these discussions, though, and will try to help out with this sort of stuff if I can. Clearly the fact that I haven't recorded any music for the project in a really long time isn't keeping from sticking my oar in in these discussions.]
I'm not sure why you'd need to put images in another directory; perhaps just symlinking to where the forum software puts them would be adequate.
Or maybe the forum software could be modified (with Dag's help, if needed) to put images in a different directory.
Or maybe this has already happened, and we just need to learn how to tell it to do that.
> I'm not sure why you'd need to put images in another directory; perhaps just symlinking to where the forum software puts them would be adequate.
>
> Or maybe the forum software could be modified (with Dag's help, if needed) to put images in a different directory.
>
> Or maybe this has already happened, and we just need to learn how to tell it to do that.
I just checked the config file. It's just a matter of changing a variable.
Is there a way to preview a post? I had the n00b experience of having to delete my erroneous posts a couple of times before I got it right.
D'oh - nevermind. I just saw "preview post" under more options