A few suggestions to make the forum itself better

[professorsnapper]

Find a member. On the toolbar at the top of the forum screen, you'll see the "Members" button. When you click on it, you'll see the "find a member" bit, with the (very) basic option to refine a search by the first letter of someone's username. Given that there are 17,000+ forum members (and growing!), a more powerful "search" tool, with the ability to search by more specifc criteria, would be very handy here. Beyond simply "username begins with", examples of other useful search criteria could include:
+ "username includes this string" (eg, I remember someone's username included the word "monster" - help me find them!)
+ "user registered in "X" country / region) (eg, New Zealand, or Latin/South America) - could be good in terms of beginning to form stronger local/regional usergroups, like Ubuntu's LoCo groups, etc!
+ "user flagged as belonging to "X" Linux Mint subcommunity (eg Art, New Users Support Team, Marketing & promotion/media, Documentation, Translation / Language skills, etc) As I see it, one of Ubuntu's great strengths lies in it's effective organisation of its' community - LM can get even better on this front too.
+ "username has posted within last X months" (probably most useful from a forum admin point of view)

that's a few ideas to start with...


Friends & foes. (Under User Control Panel) Surely, this section can serve it's intended purpose without setting an adversarial mental frame. Simply calling them "preferred contacts" & "blocked contacts" would be better than the existing method, which suggests an "us & them" approach - we open-sourcers like to present ourselves as open-minded, don't we?

Voices. Check out the following link:
http://www.zumodrive.com/forums/1/topics/628
that forum has the nice feature of "Voices", which indicate at a glance (via a panel on the sidebar) who's participating in a particular discussion - not quite as useful on massive threads perhaps, but a useful feature on the small & medium-sized ones, don't you think? IMO, this gives a more personal/ised feel to the discussion. The ability to add avatars to this could also be useful.

Snap.

[markcynt]

I'll make a suggestion. How about having links open in a new window so we don't have to leave the forum when we click on a link?

[professorsnapper]

I'll make a suggestion. How about having links open in a new window so we don't have to leave the forum when we click on a link?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you'll be able to do that by right-clicking on your mouse/trackpad button & selecting the option "open link in new tab"... the same option on a mac is accessed by holding down the control button while clicking the mouse (both options involve having the mouse pointer over the desired link).

(I'm not writing this from within my linux setup at present, so I can't test it in that environment at present - I'm pretty sure it is similar).

[emorrp1]

It's even quicker than that - just middle click on a link.

[markcynt]

I'm aware of those methods but sometimes I forget. It's much easier to have links open in a new window and then I set FF to open new windows in a tab.

[johonunu]

I would like to have like a small chat room on the front of the forum, like a shoutbox or something like that, where users can comunicate together and share their thoughts and problems I know there is XChat for this, but I know that this would be more visited than IRC

[professorsnapper]

I would like to have like a small chat room on the front of the forum, like a shoutbox or something like that, where users can comunicate together and share their thoughts and problems I know there is XChat for this, but I know that this would be more visited than IRC

I'd be interested to see how an idea like this might go. I haven't made much use of the IRC channel so far, but I'd probably be more inclined to use such a tool somehow integrated into the LM forum or site, as you suggest.

Also, it occurs to me that it would be REALLY cool to have polls on the forum, so that the devs (and hopefully, community members too) could float ideas & get a fairly quick, easy & concise way to canvas opinion. This could turn into a very useful decision-making tool in shaping the future direction of LM. Further, the polls could be linked to by a "have your say" button on the homepage, or similar, to encourage even greater interest/input into LM.

Snapper.

[emorrp1]

There are some webchat tools available that will integrate with phpBB, so I think this would be a good idea. The advantage of forums over IRC for solutions is that the solution stands searchable for others with similar problems (not that it seems anyone actually searches before posting exact duplicate questions) phpBB also does do polls (see FAQ), for instance merlwiz79 created one to see which network manager people wanted in the XFCE edition. It would be good to see the devs using them more though.

[markfiend]

I'll make a suggestion. How about having links open in a new window so we don't have to leave the forum when we click on a link?

There is a reason for this. The "_target" attribute of the <a> tag is not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant and is being phased out of HTML in general. See http://www.sitepoint.com/article/standa ... ant-world/

[markcynt]

I'll make a suggestion. How about having links open in a new window so we don't have to leave the forum when we click on a link?

There is a reason for this. The "_target" attribute of the <a> tag is not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant and is being phased out of HTML in general. See http://www.sitepoint.com/article/standa ... ant-world/

While I don't really understand what the author was saying, the javascript method seemed to work.