Topic: [Pre-Release][Forum Software] Olympus Discussion | Bounty Entree (Read 5814 times)

On February 7, 2011, the Gawker sites underwent a major design change and were quickly met with significant backlash from users.[14] A beta run a week earlier on Io9 was also met with the same backlash.[15] Numerous bugs have been noted by users[16][17] which range from making the site unreadable, to unnavigable, to unusable, as well as a sizable increase of in-page pop-up ads covering articles, the removal of Gawker's "Fusion" Option, which allowed users to merge news feeds from multiple Gawker sites, and the increase in difficulty in reading older news posts. Numerous users have called for the old design to be reinstated or made accessible, at least until the new design is operational, having likened the redesign to the failure of New Coke.[14] Pageviews since the redesign have gone down significantly, with many users either leaving the site or viewing international versions of the site, which haven't switched to the new layout.[18][19] Gawker's sites saw an 80% decrease in overall traffic immediately after the change,[20] from 1.75 million average views a day to less than 250,000,[21] with a consistent decrease in overall traffic since, as of March 17, 2011,[18] which has caused Gawker to have a "massive" loss in ad revenue.[21] Founder Nick Denton has insisted that everyone should "Stay cool: we've been through worse backlashes", and it has been revealed that he has created a bet on the new design with New York-based digital media consultant Rex Sorgatz after Sorgatz wrote on his blog that the design would "fall flat", which would see the two check Quantcast on October 1, 2011, and that for every million pageviews/month over or under a total of 510 million starting from February 1, they would have to pay out $10, and that if the design is restored to the original format, Denton forfeits the bets and must pay out $1000. Some have already cried foul of the bet, as the site has tried to introduce a blog view that is a blend of the two formats, but this blend has been poorly received as well.[21] As of June 27, 2011, the total was approximately 220 million pageviews/month for the U.S. domain (as foreign domains have refused to switch to the new design and thus are not counted), and despite a traffic boost in June from E3 2011, the monthly page views were still 10–20 million below those from before the site redesign. By early October 2011, visits had only partially rebounded, and were still generating an average of 200,000 less hits than before the redesign.[22] Denton ended up losing the wager, as it was determined that the total pageviews was 500 million, 10 million short of the agreed number.[23]
As of October 24, 2011, a button in the shape of an eye was placed at the top right hand corner of the webpage, giving the reader the option to choose from three view options: Traditional (entire page scrolls), Two Panes (side bar scrolls independently), or Blog View (listing of stories by date).

jeez, dont mind but it looks ugly.

Even vanilla forum looks 10 times better than this.

http://cdn.vanillaforums.com/www.vanillaforums.org/addons/screens/ao2OWEW3PL1NYB.png

look at esotalk http://esotalk.org/forum/

It's the most original forum "moockup" i've ever seen. It's something of the level i wanted to do for a website of mine for years now.
So, i'm positively surprised.

But again, you shouldn't start fresh out of nothing.

Not exactly a fan of the mock up UI. https://inputs.io/beacon Individual posts take up too much space, and black on grey is not a good color combination for long reads. The

or whatever makes the subject take up disproportionally more space - even through in 99.5% of the posts the subject of replies convey no additional information.

The topic list UI is not well designed. The user bar should have a constant width that makes it easier to skim through the subjects. There's too much clutter to the right that makes it hard to see replies / views at a glance, and there is no last reply message. The timestamp is also unfriendly - you should use relative time (eg 3 minutes ago, not dates unless it is very old).

Most people also generally read from left to right. IMO the sidebar would be better positioned on the left (and you should really get another color palette).

Quote

The default theme should be minimalistic like the current theme. Nothing that looks "web 2.0": no speech bubbles, no significant space between posts, no significant hover effects, and few rounded corners.

The default theme must work well with all functionality and a reasonable page layout on text browsers without JavaScript. It should also work perfectly on browsers with unusually small browser dimensions. It should be at least somewhat usable (though maybe not pretty) on ancient and broken browsers like IE6.

Same color scheme as we have now: light with some blue.

I also recommend to not go with major design overhauls to make it look web 2.0. I use Bootstrap a lot, but it's simply not what will work with the Bitcoin community. That means, don't start your project off with Bootstrap's large empty spacing, font size, large buttons, white/grey/black palette.

Making something more web 2.0 has disastrous results for a technical internet community. DigitalPoint migrated to the latest version of vBulletin which is like the direction your UI is going. Take a look at how they are doing:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=340&h=150&o=flt&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&f=999999&u=digitalpoint.com

You can quite easily see that after upgrading their forum to be more web 2.0 / shiny, their userbase stopped visiting as much. They had to move to another forum software that was more traditional, and better for "power users".

Listen, i hope that you win the bounty because SMF sucks, but building a forum from scratch is not the way to do it. I've personally done it, all the major forum software (IPB, vB, XF, etc) can be modified to match the requirements. All of them. Also, it's something it would be easy to do.

So you are creating a forum software out of nowhere?
Why would someone do it?

It is our entree for the 5500+ BTC bounty that theymos started in 2011 (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/looking-for-someone-to-createmodify-software-for-this-forum-5500-btc-50617), assuming he still intends to honor the bounty.

Very interesting. After release and possible adaptation by the Bitcoin community will this platform be up for sale or maybe become open source?

It would be fine for you to sell your software after you make it for this forum.