What do people think of the current SOTA forum?
Is there a will and a way to bring the SOTA “Reflector” into the 21st Century?
I don’t know about others, but I find the interface just a tad dated and severely lacking in functionality!
I’m a big forum user and coming from forums using phpBB, vBuilletin, SMF, MyBBS etc., really shows up the shortfalls of the current offering.
The “latest posts” on the SOTAwatch home page are great, but they quickly fall off the view. Once gone I’ll probably not notice them and miss some genuinely interesting threads.
Searching the archives is like looking for a needle in a haystack, the search functionality is sadly lacking.
My wish would be to see the following functionality:
A forum firstly broken into individual discussion categories/sub categories, e.g.
Rules
Activations
Equipment
Antennas
Gear
Access
Maps
Blogs
FAQs
Off topic etc.
Ability to follow and subscribe to posts, mark all read, see new, see active topics etc.
Ability to post rich text, embedded pictures/videos etc.
A powerful Search facility using standard BB operators, + - * | etc with ability to search in categories, subject line, author, time banded etc. etc.
All these are functions that are the norm and readily available “off the shelf”.
There already seems to be some formatting being applied to text yet I don’t know how or why it’s happening.
It’s a right pain when viewing on a mobile device as you end up with threads with a minuscule font, which my old eyes struggle with (and lots of pinch zooming required).
Example here: (sorry can’t embed photos)
So what’s the general consensus, don’t change what’s broken :-? or enhance the user experience?
I know none of this is free in time or money, but as I’ve said before I’d be willing to pay to participate in the SOTA programme.
(I’d post the link to the post but it’s impossible to find using the search facility :-))
73
Pete