I’ve started to clean up the forum of unnecessary plugins, namely the “Post Voting” plugin which allowed us to create comments under each reply in a topic.
To quickly recap how it worked: each Post/Topic had a number of Replies, each reply could have had Comments underneath it.
I realized that it was confusing and people were replying to the Reply instead of creating their own Reply to the Topic.
Disabling this plugin now has some repercussions, mainly all of the comments are no longer visible, they are still there, just not showing, another is that the posts/topics and replies are no longer ranked by votes (think Reddit upvotes) but rather recent post activity.
My main issue with the plugin is that it created confusion and started conversations in the comments rather than the actual Topic replies.
This is problematic due to the fact you can’t mention who you are replying to, which would eliminate notifications to appropriate topic participants.
Disabling the plugin would make for cleaner threads, more engaging conversations and less visual bloat. Wanted some input from the members. Again, the major downside is the existing comments will ‘disappear’ until the plugin is enabled again.
Should I bring back post voting?
Quick update, we now have a new Main Theme for the forum, defaults to light mode with option to switch to dark mode. You can toggle light/dark mode by clicking the moon/sun icon at the bottom of the menu/sidebar. There you will also find a dropdown that will allow you to switch to a different theme.
Dark mode might look odd in some places, I will be circling back to it after I finalize the the light mode first.
I like the new look tonight. Frankly I doubt it matters to me whether you keep or disable the plug-in. I rarely have seen a post to comment on. I have checked this site every night since it came live but with few to no threads does it matter?
I get you, thanks for stopping by! Unfortunately it’s the reality of starting a forum, it takes a while to get going, in this day and age though there’s quicker ways of interacting with people.
I’ve built the place, I can only hope people use it. There’s only so much I can do to drive traffic, user engagement is another thing. It could take a while for the forum to pop off, I really hope it does.
It’s been super fun to work on it from my end, lot’s of great ideas ahead just needing the audience. If it doesn’t pan out, so be it! For now though, I will keep the lights on and see what I can do to increase user engagement, we’re approaching 300 members, only a handful is active throughout the day.
I like having a place for people to meet in case of Reddit or other social media purge their respected pages.
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I was active at the prior CT Gun site but a lot of people were posting so there were threads to post in. I don’t know why they have not gotten active here. There is a forum for CT on the AR15 site and I think they just moved there and don’t come here. I’m there too but there isn’t much activity in that forum either but far more than here. I hope this gets going, I’m sure you put in a lot of work into get it going. I still check each night.