The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

Any suggestions for additions or improvements to the forums should be put in this thread.


1) The header needs to be organized a bit better, with the link to the top level of the forums made explicit. Perhaps put the link for the Unicode Home Page as the logo link, like it is everywhere else on the Unicode site, with the leftmost link called "Forum Home" instead of, or in addition to "Unicode Home Page". Either that, or put a "Forum Home" link to the left of "Forum FAQ". It's a thought.

I also found it harder than necessary to navigate. The navigation links at the top, like

Board index » Everything Else » Forum Problems and Suggestions

are very small, and not obvious when you are looking for them. And they are at the top, while the intimately connected "Jump To" is at the very bottom.

The interface is quite busy; if the template can be changed to be less busy, and like controls in the same group, that'd be better.

I've spotted two problems with keeping up with discussions.

1. I don't see any method of detecting posts I haven't read.

2. I don't see any method of advancing to the first unread post in a topic.

Have I missed something, or are these capabilities simply not available?

I believe that the little paper before "Posted: date time" will appear orange, like a thread with unread posts in the forum view. As for automatically advancing to the first unread post, I've never seen it in any other forum, but that would be a good feature. So Rick, is there any way of doing this? It would be especially nice in multi-page threads to mark the page on which the unread messages lie.

Ah, I had missed something, unless the forum's just been updated. The information and the link to the latest post are visible now, so it may just be that one isn't alerted to posts made before one joined! The link appears just before the topic's title on the forum page. There is a pointer to the latest points within a topic - it's labelled 'View new posts'.

Not that I know of. However, I did notice in the notifications that it sometimes sends a link like this:
http://www.unicode.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=59&view=unread#unread
which supposedly points to the first unread topic (t) in a forum (f)...

Well, such a link just worked for me from the forum's list of topics. It took me straight to the post I'm answering now.

I did that: the logo now goes to the Unicode home page and I made the left link go to forum home. The snippets of code for that are in the "overall header" for the forum, so it appears on every page.

Of course "Board index" is also the forum home, but this might help newbies navigate, to be sure they're getting to the top level.

Other kinds of re-organization are more complicated. We use canned styles, and it's fairly complicated to roll your own. Some minor things are easy to change, others more of a challenge. E.g. I don't want to move the "jump to" navigation thing unless/until I understand it better and have scoped out how such changes would affect things. (And, the more such customization we do, the harder it is to move forward with new releases of the board software and the various style templates.)

That's OK. My fingerprints are now all over this forum layout. The plan has succeeded. Mwuhahahahaha!

I've dealt with forum administration before, and it is not pretty. It is very easy to fall into the rabbit hole and not emerge for days. I hope no one has undue expectations of what is possible.