The MyBB Humanization Project

[Scois0n]

Holy God.

[Scoutie44]

A good collection of modifications and suggestions, well done.

I suspect many people will take this information word for word, although I'm assuming you're wanting people to "adapt" these for themselves (rather than just outright copying). I don't think that every modification you've made is suitable for every forum (obviously), but the rationale you've provided is useful, so hopefully people will think before blindly modifying their designs "because brad-t said so".

I've been meaning to cut out some of the "crap" included with MyBB by default, but of course I have the attention span of a rock when it comes to actually staying on something

[brad-t]

Definitely. People are free to "steal" these ideas, but I think it will go a lot better if people are thoughtful about what their user needs. That's the whole point of this -- to stop thinking of our forums from a technical perspective and put ourself in the average user's shoes.

[Leefish]

Ok, I have been really busy this week so I did not get the chance to read and comment until now. I agree with most of what you have done - the USERCP and PROFILE pages are incredibly ugly really and do need some major change, and I like the way you are going with it.

I totally agree on the replacing of the post thread with a popup to modal and I implemented that some time ago. I also have it so that if js is switched off then all links to standard pages are there as fallback. I don't have a touch screen and I don't really understand how tabbing works in webpages so I did not test that. I saw the remark about the modal content showing if js is off - not sure what that means, I know mine doesn't. Mine is prototype of course.

Back to the post thread button - I actually changed the text on mine several times. Variants include: "sign up or sign in" - but the post thread indicator is missing for members - or "you must be a member to post in this area " << a bit Colditz like that one - and good old post thread. Maybe post thread is best.

I REALLY like what you did with the subscribe/follow and I might borrow that on showthread. Like you, I had also tried to clean up a bit and put my pagination in my thead on showthread. It looks less random there.

Some earlier comments have been made re "the what you did wrongs" and said much better than I ever could. I would agree with most of what you have done so far - except -I actually DO subscribe to forums. It is really handy on big boards with a large range of topics and there are lots of new threads. I just zip straight to my forum subscriptions and check for new posts. The downside of that is that it DOES prevent users exploring the board and from a forum owners standpoint, trying to get activity in all areas it is probably a shrewd move to remove/disable/hide forum subscriptions. It also gets rid of that daft icon in the bottom of forumdisplay that I can't figure out where to put.

[brad-t]

Lee, not sure what you mean re: modals. Only modal I'm using is the login box. Is one of us misunderstanding the other? Maybe it's me haha

Re: forum subscriptions, maybe if I had more forums it could be useful, but as it is right now I don't think it is. A few things that I had removed (e.g. thread review) have been restored after people complained, but nobody said anything about forum subscriptions.

[Leefish]

Yes, that is the modal I mean, I was not totally sure what it was either re the "disabled javascript shows box"

On subscribed forums - I totally agree that it is really only needed on a board with a lot of forums and a very diverse number of subjects.

Do you have a way to "solve" the new posts disappearing thing? I use the unread posts plugin from the mods site. It has been a real help at keeping users informed on new posts. I also have it so it only pops up if there actually IS an unread post.

While we wait for a notifications system I find it is better than the default disappearing new posts.

[Eric]

Thanks a bunch, I've been using some of your suggestions on the WD redesign.



I agree with this so much. You should totally help out with a MyBB framework or something that fixes a lot of this issues by default.

[brad-t]

Looks slick! Thank you!

[IntoxNitram]

Eric, that looks way better! Great way of taking the ideas and making something great out of it! Can not wait to see that in action

[faviouz]

Why don't you get rid of the important/normal discussions separator? And instead apply a different background colour to sticky threads and/or something else.