Any updates planned for Javaranch forums?

[Neo Phesus]

Hi folks,

I am wondering if there is any plans of updating the javaranch forums with extensions such as mailing capabilities, PMs and other usual features of a full fledged forums. Just curious to know

It just flashed my mind while planning a formation of a study circle in yahoogroups.

Thank you,

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

See those little icons at the top of your post? The one that looks like a flying envelope is for email, and to send a PM, you can click on the icon of the person standing next to an envelope. What other features are you referring to ("and other usual features of a full fledged forums")?
[ April 15, 2007: Message edited by: Marilyn de Queiroz ]

[Henry Wong]

Also when you post a new topic, there is a checkbox (at the bottom) for you to be informed by email, when someone replies.

Other features of Yahoo groups such as Calendar, files (database), polls, etc., just doesn't make too much sense because JavaRanch is a forum. Not to mention that it will get a bit too unwieldy due to the number of members that the JavaRanch has.

Henry

[Neo Phesus]

Hi Marlyn et Henry,

Thanks for clearing my head off with this

I was kind of thinking of some universal email feature where in each user gets notified via an email when a new post is added in particular section of a forum, which intrests him.

Like for example, If I am preparing for SCJP 5.0, for a period of time I would intrested in recieveing emails about new posts+replies each day from SCJP forum as well as Java programming(beginner) forum.

Something of this kind...Also, the user could change his preferences of auto-notify through his settings in "My profile".

Just a thing that flashed from my neurons I assume, that the admins and mods of the forum should have already thought of these kind of enhancements

Thanks for the time you took to respond me

Regards

[Ulf Dittmer]

I was kind of thinking of some universal email feature where in each user gets notified via an email when a new post is added in particular section of a forum, which intrests him.

Email is not the best way to implement this; these days there are better ways. We plan to announce something soon in this area.

I assume, that the admins and mods of the forum should have already thought of these kind of enhancements

Even if we hadn't thought of it, plenty of members would have (and indeed have) suggested this. But in the discussions on how to prioritize, it helps to have direct feedback from the community.

[Neo Phesus]

Hi Ulf,

Thanks for the response

Thats great to know about the feature, looking forward for it.

Regards,

[Wilson Gordon]

You guys should really consider upgrading the forum to vBulletin. UBB 6.x is very old.

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Thanks Wilson, but we are not likely to change our software simply because it is "old".

If there was something major missing in the current software that we could only get by going to vBulletin then we might look at it. However (and this applies to all other bulletin board systems) as a bare minimum it would have to support every single feature we currently have and use, and it would have to be as customizable as our current system. Whatever feature we would gain by moving to some other software would have to be pretty darned impressive for us to put up with the pain of migrating all our customizations and all our existing topics and users. In addition, the fact that someone would have to pay for us to migrate to vBulliten makes it far less likely that we would consider it, as does the fact that it is written in PHP.

You might want to take a look at this.

Regards, Andrew

[Wilson Gordon]

hehe... true. If you guys want to use another forum software, something that's written in JSP would be first choice, since this is a Java forum.

There is no doubt that the newer forums offer many more features though. I have been using vBulletin on my own website for several years and am very happy with it. We used to use UBB (up to version 5.4).

I don't know how heavily the system is modified here... I hope it doesn't use flat text files to store the posts.
[ May 05, 2007: Message edited by: Wilson Gordon ]

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Wilson Gordon:

I don't know how heavily the system is modified here... I hope it doesn't use flat text files to store the posts.

What's wrong with flat text files?

[Wilson Gordon]

You already know that using database to store data has many advantages over flat files.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Wilson Gordon:
You already know that using database to store data has many advantages over flat files.

And disadvantages - databases are hardly the right tool for *every* job (but that's probably better discussed in a different forum).