The SharperIron Forum Revamp - Some Why and What
In just a couple of weeks (hopefully), SharperIron will go offline for a day or so to install a set of facelifts and functionality improvements. This time around, a pretty major forum overhaul is also in the plan.
What does “major” mean? To some extent, that’s up to you. We’d like to hear your ideas. It’s true that big ideas will take more than two weeks to work into the redesign. But we’d like to hear big ones as well as small ones—and we can always incorporate something bigger later.
To give those ideas some direction and boundaries, let’s consider a couple of basic questions.
Why have a forum?
SI began as a forum with a blog, then became more of a blog with a forum, then a news and article site with a forum. Quite a few news and article sites (most) follow the content-plus-comments model and offer no forum at all. Nearly all blogs fit the content-plus-comments model. So why have a forum?
1. Less centrality
A blog flows entirely from the top down. Its writers determine what will post and when, then discussion occurs based on the agenda determined by the writers. Forums, on the other hand, encourage users to start their own conversations, resulting in a wider range of content, completely unscheduled content, and less dependence on the perspective of one or two individuals.
Trade-offs are involved. The blog is easy to set up and operate, and forums are more work—especially if you want to hold discussion to some quality standards or topical boundaries. On the plus side, with the decentralization of content and conversational control forums offer comes at least the potential for more community, more sharing and contributing by more individuals and groups to what the site, as a whole, is.
2. More centrality
Less centrality yet more centrality. The language here is paradoxical but not post-modern mumbo jumbo. The observations above about less centrality sound a bit like an ad for Facebook—which prompts an important question: in today’s social-media-dominated Internet culture, why have a forum? Doesn’t Facebook and it’s few surviving rivals pretty much fit the bill for all the decentralized Web interaction anyone could want?
Not really. Facebook takes decentralization (or flattening, to move the metaphor into the vertical dimension) to an extreme. It consists of many millions of tiny centers, each an individual or group. Some of the groups have ideological or missional centers but the medium seems oriented toward each individual acting as the center of his own orbit, the hub of his own network. And when everybody is central, nobody is.
Worse yet, the decentralized and flat nature of social media lend themselves to temporary centers based entirely on “the madness of crowds,” or just herd instinct.
Forums can strike a balance between the completely top-down dynamic of the blog and the completely horizontal, atomized dynamic of social media.
At SharperIron, though opinions and perspectives differ, they just about always pivot on shared convictions. That is, here, even when disagreement is most passionate, much of that fervor derives from what we agree on, namely, that Scripture is binding on all of us, sufficient for all of us and inherently relevant to all of us.
Why a revamp?
The length of time since our last revamp is almost reason enough for changes. There hasn’t been a forum restructuring since pretty much the beginning. (I really don’t remember how the forums were labeled and organized before ‘06. But I think not much has changed.)
Secondly, Internet communities are naturally transient. Local church membership is fluid and shifty enough—and that’s in a setting where people have many shared face to face, Real Life Experiences in common. Though SI has some extraordinarily loyal constituents by Web standards, all ‘net communities are somewhat shallow and mobile. From time to time, forums have to have some new life breathed into them.
Third, the quality of the forum experience is shaped by the packaging. “The medium is the message” might put things too broadly, but who can dispute that medium is part of message? When it comes to forums, the structure of topics and groupings and such can invite or discourage participation generally and influence the kind of participation as well.
What’s coming?
The jury is honestly still out on that. Two basic directions are on the table. One, radically restructure the forum so that it bears almost no resemblance to what it was before. Call this the bold, “progressive” option. The other path is to reason that since the forums have never been reworked before, a smaller adjustment is in order. Call this the conservative option.
Conservative is likely.
At the very least, here’s what’s coming:
- New visual design
- New, user-friendly comment text editor (We’re going WYSIWYG and HTML. Bye, bye BBcode.)
- Streamlining of forums and forum-groupings into a smaller number of broader categories
- Some new forums/categories
- Miscellaneous improvements to “new posts” and “my posts,” and other forum tools
- Forum presence on the front page
Beyond that, your suggestions would be most welcome. If you’ve always thought “SI should have a forum for…” tell us about that. If you have suggestions for current forums that should be merged, separated, renamed, or jettisoned, that sort of feedback would be welcome as well.
- 9 views
It helps to get some feedback from folks we don’t often hear from.
I’m also posting a little something on “Bride of Christ” in the Affinity thread.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Evangelism and Outreach could be combined with Missions (a natural extension)
Discipleship, Christian Education and Practical Points could be combined.
Fundamentalism and evangelicalism could be combined.
New categories:
Bible verses and portions: meaning and implications of specific texts
and, although it is possible to say this is covered by our controversies category, we might even out the number of threads if we add this one:
Standing firm: where do we draw the line?
Thanks for your consideration,
Ed
"The Midrash Detective"
Fundamentalism and evangelicalism could be combined.We could call it “Convergence” ?
Seriously, several good ideas there, Ed. Thanks.
(And I do think Fund and Ev can be combined … under something like “Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism” …. rather than “Fundamentalism vs. Evangelicalism” which would be too specific, eh?)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer] I appreciate the font geekiness. There are ways to use uncommon fonts in web designs—and make them load to user’s PCs in some way. So I’m told. But for the most part, websites have to use fonts that are on just about every PC.Aaron,
I looked at a couple of the new MS fonts- Candara and Corbel. These didn’t really strike me as being nicer looking than Treb/Tahoma/Verdana, though they’re supposed to be optically better for tired eyeballs. But there are still a fair number of PCs that don’t have these fonts I guess… and I don’t know if there are near enough Mac equivalents that are commonly on Macs.
(Nowadays you have to think about what’s on phones and ipads and such too)
There’s always Times New Roman but… it’s just so boring.
This may be crazy to even ask, but is there a way to do multiple fonts? That way you could just allow the end user to pick between 3 or 4 personally preferred fonts instead of trying to come up with the one perfect font for everyone. Keep the current font as the default, and let us choose what we like best. Saves yourself the headache, right?
There is a http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/usability_no17.htm website that talks about preferred fonts for websites (well, there’s actually a LOT of websites that talk about this kind of thing, but I’m too lazy to http://www.pallasweb.com/fonts.html read a bunch and http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/22/font.asp] aggregate the results ), and this advice seemed to be helpful for you:
The Web Is Not PrintPersonally, my favorite fonts are Book Antiqua, Calibri, Georgia, Tahoma, and Verdana. So that’s my .02 worth.
A printed page always looks the same. You can read it in the library, in the bathtub, or on the deck chair of an ocean liner. No matter what your location, the type, size, and colors will always look the same.
But the print on a Web page is subject to many more variables:
Screen resolution: A font face and size that looks great at 800x600 may be indecipherable at 1024x768. That’s because you have a lot more pixels pushed into a smaller space. Although it seems backwards, the “bigger” the resolution numbers, the smaller the page elements appear.
Screen size: Many schools and people with limited space (and money) are still using 15 inch or smaller monitors. Other visitors have 19 inch or larger monitors that look more like movie screens than computer monitors.
Different platforms and browsers: PCs and Macintosh systems support different fonts and display them differently. There are even differences between how Netscape and Explorer display common fonts like Arial and Times New Roman.
In these cases, the only quick and reliable way to know how your page looks is to test it with http://www.netmechanic.com/products/browser-index.shtml] Browser Photo . You’ll see actual screen shots of your Web page in 16 different browser, operating system, and screen resolution combinations. You’ll know in an instant if you’ve selected a problem font.
Selecting A “Good” Font
But if you’ve used a problem font, how can you find one that works for the majority of your visitors? Usability testing is vitally important, but it may not give you all the information you need about font selection. The problem is that usability tests usually involve just a small number of people and your personal PC.
That’s why the studies done for the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University are such valuable resources. In January 2002, SURL published the results of a research study titled: “A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which Size and Type is Best?.”
It’s helpful to read the entire study, but we’re going to summarize some of the most important points here:
Legibility: The most legible fonts were Arial, Courier, and Verdana. Comic Sans was found to be the most illegible of the eight fonts evaluated.
Attractiveness: Study participants found Georgia and Times New Roman the most attractive fonts.
Font size: At the 10 point size, participants preferred Verdana. Times New Roman was the least preferred. At the 12-point size, Arial was the most preferred and Times New Roman the least preferred. Overall, Verdana was the most preferred font and Times New Roman the least preferred.
Now, some of these results appear to conflict. How could Times New Roman be the most attractive font and at the same time be the least preferred - no matter what the size?
The study’s authors speculate that most people are just more comfortable with Times New Roman because they see it a lot:
“It is possible that Georgia and Times were considered attractive because of their widespread use in both print and on computer screens (Times also serves as the primary default for Microsoft Office software suites) and, thus, participants were more familiar with this type of font.”
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
More likely: an interface that allows you to adjust your fontsize for the site. Of course, you can always do this anyway via your browser. On most browsers, you just ctrl+ to make everything larger and ctrl- to make it smaller… and ctrl0 to go back to the default size for the site.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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