[pete]

What do you think about the new discussion forums that CFD Online launched yesterday?

[Xiaokun_Zhang]

Wonderful，I'm waitting this day for a long time. The previous is too old

[gocarts]

Hi Peter,

Great work with the new forum.

Just a thought for you to consider. I noticed that the bread crumbs don't seem to reference the higher level forum categories, for example:

• in the OpenFOAM forum we get "Home > Forums > News & Announcements"
• whereas I'd expect "Home > Forums > OpenFOAM > News & Announcements"

Browsing the "New Posts" it's a little difficult discerning which forum is within which category, again for example:

• we get "UDF and Scheme Programming"
• whereas I'd expect "FLUENT > UDF and Scheme Programming"

[pete]

Yes, I agree, the bread crumbs are not perfect and should reflect the forum tree better. We just haven't figured out how to make that work yet together with the new forum software and the search engine optimization used to rewrite the URL addresses. I hope we'll find a fix for this soon.

[cavallo]

A remarkable improvement - well done!

[cfdguy]

Still confuse with the new resources, though. We'll learn.

Where are the Smiley faces? Ohhh, just found them.

[mattijs]

I want to see all new messages in a forum and sub-forums since e.g. yesterday. Tried searching but it requires a valid search key.

[mbeaudoin]

I totally agree with Mattijs.

The imported OpenFOAM Forums and sub-Forums are spread over more than 5000 threads. I will not visit each one of those to see what's new or what's interesting. And I cannot visit this Forum on a daily basis either to keep up with the new messages.

Maybe I am not familiar enough with the new Forum options, but I need a way to quickly find the latest posts from the last day, 2 days, week, whatever duration I need, and for a specific Forum (eg OpenFOAM, and not Fluent or STAR-CD).

I don't really care about a quick access to a smiley generator... I would much prefer a quick access to recent messages. This was one of the good feature from the old OpenFOAM Forum software.

Martin

[pete]

I have just added two new pull-down menus in the forums. One is entitled "New Posts" and will display the first few lines of all new messages since your last visit or over the previous day. The other menu is entitled "Updated Threads" and will list all threads that contain new posts since your last visit or over the previous day.

Having longer time-periods is not very usefull since there are more than 100 new messages posted every day in the forums. If you want to browse throug messages that are, say less than a week old, it is probably just as easy to just visit the forum of interest. Since all threads in the forums by default are sorted based on the date of the last reply it is easy to find the threads that have been updated most recently by just visiting a forum.

I hope that you will find these new pull-down menus usefull.

[Fabio]

This new forum is simply outstanding!!!
Now is much easier at least for me to follow the topics where i'm interestered in

[radiatn]

There was already another cfd public forum on internet and for a few years I simply didn't like to go there because of its website appearance (not easy to hop onto the threads, registration and so on). I like the old appearance because it is very easy to participate and use. Of course, it had caused several problems to administrators due to vulnerability in its format hence the need for change. But now I see less frequent replies in the posts and I wonder if that is due to the strong protective shield put up into this new forum.

[xnov]

I feel inconvenient to access the last post of each threat, I still have to open from the first post.. plz add a menu to access the last post whenever I browse the threat lists

[mattijs]

Is it possible to have
- inclusion of the body of the post into daily digests
- more frequent (e.g. hourly) digests
- a way to find out posts over longer periods? E.g. last weeks posts (+ body of message!). I tried to use the 'advanced search' facility for that but it requires a valid search string.

Thanks,

Mattijs

[pete]

vBulletin does not support any of those features I'm afraid

[mattijs]

Are there some extensions (on vBulletin.org) which can do this? Especially seeing the body inside the digest (like on the 'posts-since-last-visit') would be very useful.

Or maybe we can have instantaneous email of all posts in subscribed forums to the private messages facility. It is so one can easily mark which messages have been dealt with.

[pete]

I'm not aware of any extension that includes the message body in the email digests. More frequent emailing is something that would tax the server too much. It is wiser to just visit the forum and read the forum like a normal forum user would do. All messages and threads are marked with the time posted and you can change the sort order so that the newest messages come first if you prefer that. There is also a cookie functionality which will help you to find messages and threads that are new since your last visit.

[mattijs]

Originally Posted by pete

I'm not aware of any extension that includes the message body in the email digests. More frequent emailing is something that would tax the server too much. It is wiser to just visit the forum and read the forum like a normal forum user would do. All messages and threads are marked with the time posted and you can change the sort order so that the newest messages come first if you prefer that. There is also a cookie functionality which will help you to find messages and threads that are new since your last visit.

1) the 'todays post' pulldown menu does include the body. Is it hard to add that to the emailed digest?

2) as a substitute for emailing can we just have instantaneous notification to the 'private messages'? This should not tax any mailer since it all stays within the forum software. I can then use the facilities inside the 'private messages' to keep track of what's new/what's interesting etc.

3) the underlying problem is that I want to keep track of which posts I have dealt with. With instantaneous notification I can use my mailing program to do this:
- I can delete a message
- I can leave it to be dealt with later
Any ideas on how to do this on the forum? The 'posts since last visit' does not help me.

[pete]

All these features are diffucult to add since none of them are part of the forum software and requires user coding. That would give us a modified source code which can not be updated as easily. Since the new forum was launched we have already upgraded the forum software three times. One of the reasons we switched to a new forum software was just to get a modern forum software which is updated regularly.