New USA7s Forum coming in early 2021

[JohnCh]

Thanks for the information. Addressing in order:

• Driving new content is a separate topic. By improving many facets of the forum and integration with social media (coming) we hope to grow the community and the daily content.
• I'm a member of many forums on various platforms and haven't seen the pictures included in the activity feed. I'll ask, but an example would help. The feed will show thumbnails of images added to a gallery, so it may be possible. The feed is also highly customizable by the individual user, so you can set it up to show what you want and ignore the rest.
• Landing Page - TBD for reasons you state
• @mentioning (tagging) is included
• Giphy is included. We can also set options by MPAA ratings. With this group, that may be a good idea.
• Pictures are now easy to add. You can simply copy & paste or drag and drop from device, or paste in URL from hosted image.
• Images resize and compress, so we will only have a limit on the total size in a single post. We can adjust this over time, but original thinking is 10-15MB per post. There are performance considerations here so we'll look for best practices. You didn't mention videos, but those auto embed when pasting in the url. Many platforms are supported including YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook.
• Platform works very well on a phone through a browser. Everything resizes properly and it's easy to add photos and post. There is also a mobile app, but that isn't available in the demo environment, so I can't comment on that.

Thanks,
John

[JohnCh]

I just realized I forgot to address your comment about content being available to visitors. Guests can view the content (although we may keep Downloads behind the registration wall). They can also reply to a post. However, when they click submit, they are asked to register, which they can quickly do with their Facebook credentials.

-John

[Vovchandr]

• I'm a member of many forums on various platforms and haven't seen the pictures included in the activity feed. I'll ask, but an example would help. The feed will show thumbnails of images added to a gallery, so it may be possible. The feed is also highly customizable by the individual user, so you can set it up to show what you want and ignore the rest.

John, thank you for all the replies. I'm looking forward to it, sounds very promising.

At this point the forum is down and waybackmachine doesn't have an archive on it but I'll try to dig something up and see what I can find to share. I was personally very happy with the result achieving what I set out to do IE to have a lot more organic picture content in the new posts/forum feed wall.

[Vovchandr]

Alright since I don't know when/if I'll ever find an old picture of the forum, I mspainted a brief preview of being similar to what I had setup.

Obviously it's no a 1:1 representation of the packaging that I've had but you get the idea of the concept.

The thread preview pictures would pull a preset number of pictures from the thread and display them underneath. You could change whether it does first pictures or last, could change sizes to make it a more prominent part etc

[JohnCh]

Thanks. The screenshot below shows an activity stream where the three most recent posts are:

• Text plus photo
• Photo only
• Gallery update

As you can see the post with text and photo does preview the text but not the photo. Given thumbnails show up in the Gallery update, there is probably a way to achieve what you're requesting, but it might require custom dev. I have an email out to Invision asking about this. BTW there is an option to show an expanded view which previews the post (view below) or a condensed version that eliminates the post preview and shows smaller thumbnails for gallery updates. Again, this is user choice, so everyone will have flexibility to create the activity stream view they prefer.



-John

[Vovchandr]

Thanks. The screenshot below shows an activity stream where the three most recent posts are:

• Text plus photo
• Photo only
• Gallery update

As you can see the post with text and photo does preview the text but not the photo. Given thumbnails show up in the Gallery update, there is probably a way to achieve what you're requesting, but it might require custom dev. I have an email out to Invision asking about this. BTW there is an option to show an expanded view which previews the post (view below) or a condensed version that eliminates the post preview and shows smaller thumbnails for gallery updates. Again, this is user choice, so everyone will have flexibility to create the activity stream view they prefer.
-John

Oh? Very neat!

Just so we are clear, I had no less than 20 plugins used to achieve all the things that I wanted. Obviously I can't recommend that for reasons of robustness. Your software choice seems to allow/includes A LOT of features in the native interface which is fantastic!

One of the huge things I wanted I was never able to achieve and I've only seen one forum achieve using custom coding - garagejournal.com. They are able to have threads as part of the landing page with direct embedding/linking between the two. Just talking out loud, I thought it was very neat and a great way to feed content to landing page as well as a way to highlight threads of high importance to the landing page while keeping it as one chain of replies instead of the two being separated.

[JohnCh]

One of the huge things I wanted I was never able to achieve and I've only seen one forum achieve using custom coding - garagejournal.com. They are able to have threads as part of the landing page with direct embedding/linking between the two.

That's included in the platform. I haven't played with it yet, but it's supposed to be easy using area blocks. Each block can show different things: featured downloads, featured articles, featured photos, and latest threads. There is a video showing them putting one together in less than 5 minutes.

-John

[Vovchandr]

That's included in the platform. I haven't played with it yet, but it's supposed to be easy using area blocks. Each block can show different things: featured downloads, featured articles, featured photos, and latest threads. There is a video showing them putting one together in less than 5 minutes.

-John

Neat!

So there will be a gallery? I thought there was some comments about not having one due to bandwidth reasoning.


If there is a gallery I do have a comment towards that. One of the issues I've had with galleries is that they are just "too hidden" and not referenced enough. Usually people would upload for personal use but nobody would ever browse them.


I used two plugins to help that among other things.


1) I had random feed of the gallery between the header and the forums
2) The gallery itself was an endless scroll


Again not sure how feasible this is on the software but sharing opinions and experience


Example drafted below

[JohnCh]

We have galleries here, but vBulletin essentially hides them. The issue with promoting their use has been storage costs. However, this is less of an issue with the new hoster. The number of albums and total images will vary between registered users and Paid Club Members, but they will be enabled, and Invision doesn't make them hard to find, placing the link on the same navigation level as Downloads and Articles.

I'm between martinis (hey, it's Friday) so thought I'd watch the video I mentioned above and throw together a quick home page that is essentially a portal for the community. It's far from perfect (did I mention the martinis?) but gives an idea of the kind of things we can do.



-John