New USA7s Forum coming in early 2021

[BirkinBernie]

Thanks for the time and effort guys!!

[11Budlite]

Thanks for all you do guys to maintain this site! Looking forward to seeing the new look.

[Vovchandr]

The behind the scenes hard work is appreciated.

 

Looking forward to new interface.

 

Thanks all!

[JohnCh]

I have started a new thread here that will serve as the single view of the truth for the timeline and need-to-know information for our move to the new hoster and forum platform. It will be updated with additional information as we get closer to the dates.

 

-John

[Vovchandr]

Personal opinion: IF it fits the theme/direction of the forum I do advice adding a GIFFY type plug where you can easily search and embed reaction posts into gifs. Between most messengers, Facebook, slack and other main stream social media platforms it's a nice addition that people are used to and tend to expect to have.

 

I know I personally enjoyed having it when I tried the Xenforo.

[JohnCh]

Invision allows you to paste the link to a gif in the editor and it will automatically embed it in the post -- no need to click a button and go through an upload menu, or manually type in HTML or BB tags. So if you find a gif you like when doing a search on Bing or Google, it's very easy to add it to your reply. We can consider adding a plug in that gives people pre-canned choices searchable within the native environment, but there a number of other things we are working on that will take priority.

 

Once the new forum is live and people have a chance to use it, we'll create a dedicated thread for upgrades/improvements to capture the various ideas.

 

-John

[Croc]

[Vovchandr]

Invision allows you to paste the link to a gif in the editor and it will automatically embed it in the post -- no need to click a button and go through an upload menu, or manually type in HTML or BB tags. So if you find a gif you like when doing a search on Bing or Google, it's very easy to add it to your reply. We can consider adding a plug in that gives people pre-canned choices searchable within the native environment, but there a number of other things we are working on that will take priority.

 

Once the new forum is live and people have a chance to use it, we'll create a dedicated thread for upgrades/improvements to capture the various ideas.

 

-John

 

Excellent. The internet paradox is that a few extra clicks is equivalent to a monumental task that discourages most people from doing that work, I fully support in the future having a more native plug. (google isn't too friendly for gif searches/picture links ever since they disabled DIRECT linking the picture, but rather they relay to the source link)

 

If sourcing from https://giphy.com/ directly will still embed them, it could be a temporary compromise.

 

 

 

:rofl:

[JohnCh]

I didn't see that there is a native Giphy plug in that is turned off by default in the Demo site. It's now on and works. Took about 60 seconds. What else do you want?

 

-John

[Vovchandr]

I didn't see that there is a native Giphy plug in that is turned off by default in the Demo site. It's now on and works. Took about 60 seconds. What else do you want?

 

-John

 

Well..

 

Since you ask I'll share my thoughts. All depend on what your goal/drive is for the site.

 

#1 thing to have is means of driving new content and for it to be available to visitors as we all know.

 

We all go to ~6 regular sites when we are on the computer, see whats new and if there is nothing new, we move on. When I go to USA7's and click "new posts" and nothing pops up, I go off to check other forums.

 

One HUGE thing that I wanted to have and implemented to make the forum more upto "modern times" of visual browsing is to have pictures from each thread show up in the feed. It was the best of both worlds IMO of keeping it a forum but also having pictures in part of your feed. So you'd see a title and any pictures that the post might have would be posted below the title for you to preview. Don't have examples on hand but can find if necessary.

 

Landing page is nice to have but it requires upkeep. If nobody is motivated to do it, everybody's better off without it.

Tagging a person - likely is part of the new interface when you can "@" somebody in a post and it will ping the person.

Giphy integration - discussed above

Copy and paste embedding of pictures. I know you're trying to keep data costs down and by default you become the host when you do that but it's a nice feature.

Good auto resizing - I've fought with this for a while on my forum but when it works its very satisfactory. With so many huge pictures and phones taking huge pictures it's nice when there is an auto resize that will ensure you never post a huge picture, plus it makes it nice to browse when all pictures are consistent.

Easy phone uploading - huge issue. No idea how that gets handled by the new system. Very annoying to share content that we all have on our phones if it fights you over it. Tapatalk was a nice compromise for vB but was still hardly ideal. Endless forum battle.

 

 

Things that won't work for this community IMO

Likes/dislikes/reputation

Tags - they work in theory but they won't be used enough to be useful

Chat box

Gallery - not needed if there is an easy way to upload from phone

Different title rankings depending on posts/etc

 

I can think of more as time goes on. It's been a few years since I wrestled with this.

 

With all that said, I'm well aware how much work it is to volunteer your time and implement and troubleshoot any new implementations. You asked and I shared some opinions on the matter. I had an idea of what I wanted out of the forum when I was in the design stage and worked towards that vision. I'm not sure what you've got in mind overall. If I had to narrow it down to 2 biggest targets 1) easier phone upload implementation/posting 2) more visuals such as picture preview in the thread listings.

[JohnCh]

Thanks for the information. Addressing in order:

 

• Driving new content is a separate topic. By improving many facets of the forum and integration with social media (coming) we hope to grow the community and the daily content.
  
• I'm a member of many forums on various platforms and haven't seen the pictures included in the activity feed. I'll ask, but an example would help. The feed will show thumbnails of images added to a gallery, so it may be possible. The feed is also highly customizable by the individual user, so you can set it up to show what you want and ignore the rest.
  
• Landing Page - TBD for reasons you state
  
• @mentioning (tagging) is included
  
• Giphy is included. We can also set options by MPAA ratings. With this group, that may be a good idea.
  
• Pictures are now easy to add. You can simply copy & paste or drag and drop from device, or paste in URL from hosted image.
  
• Images resize and compress, so we will only have a limit on the total size in a single post. We can adjust this over time, but original thinking is 10-15MB per post. There are performance considerations here so we'll look for best practices. You didn't mention videos, but those auto embed when pasting in the url. Many platforms are supported including YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook.
  
• Platform works very well on a phone through a browser. Everything resizes properly and it's easy to add photos and post. There is also a mobile app, but that isn't available in the demo environment, so I can't comment on that.
  

 

Thanks,

John

[JohnCh]

I just realized I forgot to address your comment about content being available to visitors. Guests can view the content (although we may keep Downloads behind the registration wall). They can also reply to a post. However, when they click submit, they are asked to register, which they can quickly do with their Facebook credentials.

 

-John

[Vovchandr]

• I'm a member of many forums on various platforms and haven't seen the pictures included in the activity feed. I'll ask, but an example would help. The feed will show thumbnails of images added to a gallery, so it may be possible. The feed is also highly customizable by the individual user, so you can set it up to show what you want and ignore the rest.
  

 

John, thank you for all the replies. I'm looking forward to it, sounds very promising.

 

At this point the forum is down and waybackmachine doesn't have an archive on it but I'll try to dig something up and see what I can find to share. I was personally very happy with the result achieving what I set out to do IE to have a lot more organic picture content in the new posts/forum feed wall.

[Vovchandr]

Alright since I don't know when/if I'll ever find an old picture of the forum, I mspainted a brief preview of being similar to what I had setup.

 

Obviously it's no a 1:1 representation of the packaging that I've had but you get the idea of the concept.

 

The thread preview pictures would pull a preset number of pictures from the thread and display them underneath. You could change whether it does first pictures or last, could change sizes to make it a more prominent part etc

 

[JohnCh]

Thanks. The screenshot below shows an activity stream where the three most recent posts are:

• Text plus photo
  
• Photo only
  
• Gallery update
  

 

As you can see the post with text and photo does preview the text but not the photo. Given thumbnails show up in the Gallery update, there is probably a way to achieve what you're requesting, but it might require custom dev. I have an email out to Invision asking about this. BTW there is an option to show an expanded view which previews the post (view below) or a condensed version that eliminates the post preview and shows smaller thumbnails for gallery updates. Again, this is user choice, so everyone will have flexibility to create the activity stream view they prefer.

 

 

-John

[Vovchandr]

Thanks. The screenshot below shows an activity stream where the three most recent posts are:

• Text plus photo
  
• Photo only
  
• Gallery update
  

 

As you can see the post with text and photo does preview the text but not the photo. Given thumbnails show up in the Gallery update, there is probably a way to achieve what you're requesting, but it might require custom dev. I have an email out to Invision asking about this. BTW there is an option to show an expanded view which previews the post (view below) or a condensed version that eliminates the post preview and shows smaller thumbnails for gallery updates. Again, this is user choice, so everyone will have flexibility to create the activity stream view they prefer.

-John

 

Oh? Very neat!

 

Just so we are clear, I had no less than 20 plugins used to achieve all the things that I wanted. Obviously I can't recommend that for reasons of robustness. Your software choice seems to allow/includes A LOT of features in the native interface which is fantastic!

 

One of the huge things I wanted I was never able to achieve and I've only seen one forum achieve using custom coding - garagejournal.com. They are able to have threads as part of the landing page with direct embedding/linking between the two. Just talking out loud, I thought it was very neat and a great way to feed content to landing page as well as a way to highlight threads of high importance to the landing page while keeping it as one chain of replies instead of the two being separated.

Edited January 9, 2021 by Vovchandr

[JohnCh]

One of the huge things I wanted I was never able to achieve and I've only seen one forum achieve using custom coding - garagejournal.com. They are able to have threads as part of the landing page with direct embedding/linking between the two.

 

That's included in the platform. I haven't played with it yet, but it's supposed to be easy using area blocks. Each block can show different things: featured downloads, featured articles, featured photos, and latest threads. There is a video showing them putting one together in less than 5 minutes.

 

-John

[Vovchandr]

That's included in the platform. I haven't played with it yet, but it's supposed to be easy using area blocks. Each block can show different things: featured downloads, featured articles, featured photos, and latest threads. There is a video showing them putting one together in less than 5 minutes.

 

-John

 

Neat!

 

So there will be a gallery? I thought there was some comments about not having one due to bandwidth reasoning.

 

 

If there is a gallery I do have a comment towards that. One of the issues I've had with galleries is that they are just "too hidden" and not referenced enough. Usually people would upload for personal use but nobody would ever browse them.

 

 

I used two plugins to help that among other things.

 

 

1) I had random feed of the gallery between the header and the forums

2) The gallery itself was an endless scroll

 

 

Again not sure how feasible this is on the software but sharing opinions and experience

 

 

Example drafted below

 

[JohnCh]

We have galleries here, but vBulletin essentially hides them. The issue with promoting their use has been storage costs. However, this is less of an issue with the new hoster. The number of albums and total images will vary between registered users and Paid Club Members, but they will be enabled, and Invision doesn't make them hard to find, placing the link on the same navigation level as Downloads and Articles.

 

I'm between martinis (hey, it's Friday) so thought I'd watch the video I mentioned above and throw together a quick home page that is essentially a portal for the community. It's far from perfect (did I mention the martinis?) but gives an idea of the kind of things we can do.

 

 

-John

[Bruce K]

JohnCh - I just learned about this project today - thanks so much! I look forward to the new features, and eagerly await the rollout. I especially agree with the opinions expressed herein regarding the many thanks due to you, Croc and other administrators and assistants. "Labor of love" describes it all: Lots of labor, and payment in love.

 

For years now, I have been editing and compiling the "WCM & Other Sevens Maintenance & Upgrade Manual". The manual is now 193 pages deep, and is regularly updated and expanded. A couple times per year, I offer a PDF version on the forum (free of charge). I have retained the emails of all manual applicants over the years, and every spring I send out fresh editions to over 100 individuals on file. I believe this manual would be of assistance to any Super Seven owner. Perhaps it should be offered on the new forum site as a perpetual resource. I should have continued capacity to edit and update the forum file copy.

 

This manual began life as a personal resource. I used it to record all repairs and upgrades performed on my personal WCM S2K, including uprated oil sump, anti-cavitation fuel system, stainless braided lines and -AN fitting upgrades, rollbar-mounted chmsel, oil accumulator, racing mirrors/tires/shocks/springs, rod end upgrades, street and track alignment settings and much more. Once I offered my experiences for general consumption on the forum, contributions from other Seven owners began flowing in. I incorporated these into subsequent editions of the manual, and 193 current pages are the result. Another example of "labor of love".

 

Let me know how you would like to proceed, and good luck with your project.

 

Thanks!

Edited January 16, 2021 by Bruce K