V-Flyer

isnt it silly how there is a no "post a new topic button insight" on this website ??

vegasdude wrote:isnt it silly how there is a no "post a new topic button insight" on this website ??

Sorry

There is a 'post a new topic' button in every specific forum.

Neil wrote:

vegasdude wrote:isnt it silly how there is a no "post a new topic button insight" on this website ??

Sorry

There is a 'post a new topic' button in every specific forum.

This is way off topic but I agree with vegasdude, it's always such a trek finding the new topic button. This is partly because the breadcrumb trail isn't very obvious. While I love the forum as a whole, the navigation and usability is a retrograde step. But I've said this all before, could the managers give us an update on all that feedback we sent a year ago?

Cheers

I don't think its hard to find the 'post new topic' button - it just takes a little thought about the best place for a topic to be started in rather than just general posting willy nilly.

There is also the 'view new posts' button as well to see all the new / responded too threads

While I don't disagree with your view Tonty I was thinking about how I use the button. Usually it's from Active Topics. To get from there I have to click on Forum, then choose the forum I want, then click on Post New Topic. It would be much easier to have some form of shortcut from the Active Topics page.
I do however think there are more fundamental site issues that would serve us better enhanced than adding a shortcut!

I agree with the thread, for example when you post an itinerary, wouldn't it be great to have a button to post the next one, instead of going back to the itinerary forum.

And no, and I don't mean to be rude to Pete who puts in a hero's worth of time to the site, I don't think it is as easy as it should be to start a new thread (one click stuff)!

Systems can always be improved but I like the 'new' site. I also like forum structure and to keep that you need the 'post a new topic' button in the right branch of the tree. If there was universal post button it would have to bring you to a page to choose your section anyway.
Fair point regarding itineraries mind you.
The things I miss are the list of members online and the members hotel/restaurant reviews.
Overall the site is beautifully drawn, easy to use and look at.
Nice work, Pete.

Some of this can be explained by the fact we moved from a Windows-based forum called Snitz (which had been pretty much abandoned by its original developers) and moved to this Unix-based system called phpBB (which is a well established, and still very actively forum codebase). The two systems are completely different, so the priority in the switchover was to try and retain as much of the old data as possible, and then custom-fitting the features like Itineraries, etc, so we could take advantage of the new, without losing the content of the old. We did, however, have to make some compromises on the workflow paradigms that long-time V-Flyers would have gotten used to on the old site. It is, afterall, a completely different forum structure and some things just don't operate in the same way.

The New/Active Topics view, for instance, doesn't organise itself by forum, so a 'new topic button' is not possible to add, since it won't know what forum you want to post in. I have tried to figure out if there's a way to change the New/Active Topics view, but even after several hours picking through the code, it really isn't straightforward, as (and excuse me dipping into technicalities here), those shortcut views are all built off of the Search functions, so there isn't one chunk of code that can be edited without having an adverse knock-on effect on multiple areas of the site.

I can, of course, tweak the code where necessary, but there will be limits based on how the underlying phpBB forum code is constructed. I firmly believe this is a vast improvement over Snitz (and a necessary one, as the old codebase was falling apart), but that's not to say that we can't improve it over time.

Pete