I'm digging the new forum a lot (thanks @dom96!), but, as always, there are things that I think can be improved on for new and old users alike. Here they are, in order of what I consider to be most important and why.
I believe these first two points will help immensely in both making the community more positive and reducing frustration of experienced users having to answer similar questions over and over. They will also greatly help generate value for all Nim users that will stay around for a while instead of being buried.
I realize this will take time and effort, and I am willing to contribute a bit of time to help implement these if necessary because I like Nim and the community.
These next few are less important, but still important nonetheless.
Those are some of the things I think would help out a lot around here. Especially because users who have a problem are pretty much guaranteed to go to the forum, so I think it's the best place to put stickied links to tutorials, the manual, common problems, etc. so that they find what they need.
Also, if a lot of people agree (including @dom96), I can file these as improvement issues on NimForum's github. I just wanted to propose these changes here first to see if there was interest :)
Thank you for writing this up.
Categories
Indeed, I think categories are effectively tags in your proposal and they are already partially implemented in the forum.
Stickied threads
This is something I also planned to implement. It should be fairly easy to implement, just a case of adding a new field here.
Better search
I actually think the search is already pretty amazing. The person that initially contributed it did an amazing job and I just modified it a bit to work with the new forum. I think for this especially I would love to see more people make PRs to make it better :)
Ability to Sort Posts
That would be nice to have too, but this is slightly lower on my todo list.
Other things
There is a pretty easy task that is a perfect way to improve the forum and to get started with hacking on it. That is of course writing tests, I have set up a testing infrastructure that works on Travis so the hard part is already done, we just need more tests :)
Here is an example: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/blob/master/tests/browsertests/scenario1.nim. Many of the things done in this test should be abstracted into functions like login and register so that more scenarios can be written on top of these.
But yeah, feel free to make issues for this, but do check that they are not already there: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/issues.
Indeed, I think categories are effectively tags in your proposal and they are already partially implemented in the forum.
Cool, I didn't know that! You're right that the two concepts are similar and should be merged. I was also talking about the visual representation. Say maybe a different view that let you see posts from only one tag, but I suppose that's covered if search filters are implemented :)
This is something I also planned to implement. It should be fairly easy to implement, just a case of adding a new field here.
Awesome :) When I have a chance I'll look through the code a bit!
I actually think the search is already pretty amazing. The person that initially contributed it did an amazing job and I just modified it a bit to work with the new forum. I think for this especially I would love to see more people make PRs to make it better :)
Don't get me wrong, the search is really good for what it does right now, which is search everything. It's super fast and I can usually find what I want with some time. It would just be cool to be able to specify what fields I'm searching in, so I can find topics that might have a lot of unrelated results otherwise.
There is a pretty easy task that is a perfect way to improve the forum and to get started with hacking on it. That is of course writing tests, I have set up a testing infrastructure that works on Travis so the hard part is already done, we just need more tests :)
That's good to hear. When I get a free moment, I'll check out the codebase and tests and look into writing a bit more.
But yeah, feel free to make issues for this, but do check that they are not already there: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/issues.
Cool. I'll flesh out details and make some proper issues :)
I agree. I'd love to be able to do that as well. There are some pretty awesome gems that are buried somewhere in this forum that I've seen but can't seem to find anymore. Tags and filters would definitely help, so I'll definitely file a feature implementation issue about them :)
@DTxplorer, I don't think you can do that yet. @dom96 said there is partial support for them, but I don't think you can filter by them yet.
@euant notifications would also be super useful. Right now it's hard to know if you've been replied to without manually scanning the posts you've posted on. I'll make a note of this one as well, thank you!
The relevant github issues are:
If there were an option to search only titles
But titles are prioritised in the search: results with match in titles are shown before the others. At least it was so, and as I see testing a bit, it still works this way.
@LeuGim, ah, I see. In the cases where I've used it, that didn't seem to be the case (maybe it was just my specific searches, since I've just done a few tests and it appears to prioritize titles, or maybe the titles were too similar to other posts and they got buried). I'm assuming you're the one who made the search?
One thing right now that happens when a title is searched is that the search returns almost all of the posts under that thread title. Which is fine if that's the post you are looking for.
However, say if I want to know about issues about installing Nim. So I search "installing nim".
Right now, the search shows 5 posts from one thread, five posts from another thread and three posts from another thread, all with only the title in common (from what I can tell). So if what I'm searching for is pretty deep in the search, it's hard to get to with just this generic search, because my result will be buried under these "unrelated" results (unrelated because only the first post out of five is useful to me). If I know that "installing Nim" is either in the body or in title, it would be much more efficient for me to simply select that as my search field.
But, as I said before, the way the search works right now is really well designed for needing to search everything, so nice work :) It's just that for searching specific things, I think some extra bells and whistles could be applied to make it a bit easier to use :)
Yes, of coarse they extraneous and not supposed to be, in an old copy of the forum I've managed to find there's no such duplicates.
@dom96: A quick fix by replacing GROUP BY thread_id, post_id in fts.sql (there's only one such string) with GROUP BY thread_id should work.