Hey TP team,

Recently, I posted about the Shapeways worldwide meetup, and I only got a few responses. Then when I posted on the topic again after the event, some more people replied saying "Oh no! I completely missed this!"

I think this was caused by the fact that most forum members only have a few pages they check regularly. Personally, I usually only look at New Puzzles, Puzzle Building and Modding, and General Puzzle Topics (and on occasion, Puzzle Collecting). I'm sure that people like Claus and Frank spend a lot more time on Puzzle Collecting and Marketplace than I do. People like Brandon (bmenrigh) spend a lot of time in the Solving Puzzles forum.

The sidebar is really helpful, but only for very recent posts.

Have you looked into any way to make certain posts appear on every sub-forum? I'm sure there would be problems with people abusing it, but I think that if done right, it could be really useful for events, design competitions, and other announcements.

-Eitan

I think there should be an extra section on the sidebar named "Events" where events can be added by everyone, and seen by everyone. Also, because this will just make the sidebar even bigger I suggest making the grey writing clickable causing the sub-sections of the side bar to colapse and/or expand at will.

As someone who uses the "view new posts" link and finds the side bar unusable, I would hate to misout on news beacuse it was in the sidebar and not on the forums proper. I like the idea of some important threads appearing on every forum, but I think such a feature is probably better left to being used by the moderators or a larger group with special permissions while not extending it to the entire membership.

The same goes for me.

And the same goes for me too!




Pantazis

The functionality to make an announcement appear under every forum is already available in phpBB: https://www.phpbb.com/support/documenta ... ng_special
But of course this functionality is limited to administrators (and perhaps moderators) only.

I tend to use the "view active topics" link which gives 3 pages of topics which have been posted to recently. This provides a view of probably a few weeks worth of activity.

I never use any other way to browse the forum!

Whilst I'm on a topic that the admins mat be reading, what happened to Tapatalk compatibility? I thought it was coming!

I also exclusively use the View active topics link.

Me too, I have the 'View active topics' saved as a favorite tab, I always use this way to browse the forum.

I suppose the Announcements forum is somewhat for this purpose, but that is Admin only, and I wonder sometimes if anyone reads them...

The forum split into multiple sub forums in part to control the traffic and allow those who don't have time or interest to read everything to screen out categories of info. In this context, a site wide post somewhat defeats that purpose.

I had considered moving the Shapeways post to Puzzle Building but left it in General as it had appeal to collectors as well, and I figured that was would have the highest readership. But I'm not sure a post trying to get the highest readership is so different from well meant spam. One has to balance your goal of maximum attention (and I happen to believe this was a worthy topic to spread widely) with other's goal of filtering their reading to a consumable level.

Just some thoughts,

Dave