Forum Improvements

Below are the slides from last night's presentation to the Waterloo Region user's group on Drupal Forums, using The Webmaster Forums as a case study. Audio possibly to come soon if we can clean it up adequately.

For more information, we have two articles on our switch to Drupal Forums here:

Goodbye vBulletin, Part One: Reasons to Switch
Goodbye vBulletin, Part Two: How We Got Away

Hi everyone, I come here to announce a new module that help to integrate a vanilla forum (http://vanillaforums.org) to drupal.
The module is available here http://drupal.org/project/orchid and provides the following features :

• SSO and autocreation of user the first time they visit vanilla.
• Easy embedding of vanilla inside drupal pages with block or panels.

upcoming : avatar synchro :)

you can view it in action in this screencast (please excuse my poor and boring english :p ): http://vimeo.com/muldos/orchid

David

Hello,

I'm looking for a forum solution for a Drupal site. This forum must support moderating. Is there any lightweight solution, or is the forum access module scalable? Last year I had problem with a node access module. Is it correct that Forum Access sustains the same issue?

Do you know any big forum (a few dozens of thousands of nodes or more) that uses the Drupal forum?

Thanks.

Hi -
I have been using Advanced forum for a couple of years... however one of the pages where I display forum topics was generated with a snippet in order to show part of the forum hierarchy in just one section of the page:

I was trying to figure out how to make the snippet work with advanced_forum. Turns out that all I have to do is change "theme_forum_list" to "phptemplate_forum_list"...

I think the following links should interest people that are looking for efficient solutions to improve their forum based on Drupal, only by using the forum core module (no Advanced Forum), and by respecting and following the strict modular logic of Drupal (modules, hooks, themes and so on).

Here are the articles:

• Drupal Tip #1: Add Smileys to your forum
• Drupal Tip #2: Message Quoting
• Drupal Tip #3: Post Advanced Formatting
• Drupal Tip #4: Add "Views Count" column
• Drupal Tip #5: Add a "Who is online?" block
• Drupal Tip #6: Add a breadcrumb to your forum
• Drupal Tip #7: Use Custom Thread Icons
• Drupal Tip #8: Hide Specific Forum Containers
• Drupal Tip #9: Theme Forum Topics
• Drupal Tip #10: Beautiful User Profile in Topics
• Drupal Tip #11: Friendly URLs in your forum with Pathauto

Note that we should publish new articles soon, and if you are interesting, I will update this discussion as well. The primary target of these articles was to explain how we improved the Discussion Forum of our Drupal website.

See also the Full List of Drupal Tips

I hope you will find our articles interesting and useful for your personal needs.

[Updated] June 16th, 2010: 3 new articles added.
[Updated] January 18th, 2011: 4 new articles added. List is now complete. Happy hacking!

Hello,

I'm struggling with this one issue for a really long time, if some one could give me a heads up on resolving this, i would really appreciate it. I'm using Advanced forum 6.x-2.0-alpha2 on Drupal 6.14. All the forum pages shows the enabled advanced forum style, except for the forum posts page. I have attached screenshots for better understanding of the issue. Btw, this was working previously, dont know what is causing the issue. Any help is much appreciated.

Thank you.

When trying to import external forums into Drupal, I've found the main difficulty is a single fundamental difference between Drupal forums and the rest of today's forums.

It's the same one difference that for example makes common administrative tasks such as splitting or merging threads (while keeping chronological order), etc., easy in well-known forum systems but so difficult in Drupal forums, core and Advanced; difficult with Comment Mover, and even directly editing the database. Drupal forums are good and usable in most cases, with most normal functions similar to other systems but, for more advanced moderation, they are not yet ready.

Why? What's that basic difference? We can see it in the support forums of the currently most popular forum systems, such as vBulletin, phpBB, SMF, and Invision Power. Or we can install them and look at the tables where posts and threads are stored.

Drupal have modules for threaded and flat forums, so this is not the main difference. Most current forums are linear/flat by default, but part of them admit both linear and threaded display modes.

The basic difference is another one, truly simple but with fundamental effects:

An idea I had after reading this post from Michelle. http://groups.drupal.org/node/20542#comment-71555

I have a possible solution for Point 1 from Michelle.

Instead of turning off threading with flat comments, what if a reply to a specific comment, automatically creates a new thread with the comment being replied to as the top post and the reply being the second post. A link to this new thread could be inserted underneath the comment in the original thread.

Categories field is collapsed by default when creating new forum topics.

In Drupal core forum (when there is more than one vocabulary assigned to the forum content type) creating a new forum topic causes the categories field to appear collapsed by default.

See attached pics.

This is not very user friendly - especially since category is a required element. Typically the user will miss the field altogether and submit a forum post only to receive a red box warning - somewhat ironically around the now visible category field.