Promote these forums, share your ideas.

by **Xdega** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 1:12 am

As some of you may know, these forums are not completely buzzing with active users/posters. I created this topic here so we can share Ideas on how increase the traffic on these boards. With more posters, comes more engaging discussion and debate on specs.

We have a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/WHATWG/116109708402918
Only having 9 likes at the moment. And unfortunately I am unable to edit the page to add a link to these boards.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to update the Wikipedia entry with a link to our forums:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Hypert ... king_Group

Also word of mouth can work wonders.

Anyways, share your ideas.
I would like to see these forums bursting at the seams with rich debate on the HTML spec.

by **zcorpan** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 9:34 am

You could write about the forum update on the WHATWG blog.

by **Xdega** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 3:11 pm

I'm not sure who runs the blog. But I don't have access to that

Good Idea though.

by **zcorpan** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 8:44 pm

Anyone can post on the blog - see http://blog.whatwg.org/submit-article

by **Xdega** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 8:53 pm

Oh very nice. I will get to work on an article later.

by **zcorpan** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 11:28 pm

You (or anyone reading this) could try to keep this list relatively short by posting helpful answers: search.php?search_id=unanswered

by **Xdega** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 11:53 pm

Very good idea Zcorpan. Although some of them posts may be years old, just to bear that in mind.

Also just an update. I posted the blog entry last week, and it was a success. Once these forums have more activity I may be able to write a weekly blog "digest" of popular discussion here.

I would like to see peoples <!Doctype HTML> websites. I think it could be very interesting to peer review the use of new HTML standards. I myself am currently working on a website for a local church (out of my own free will), but it's way in development at the moment

.
Maybe we can create a "showcase" section of the forums, a place where people can post their experiments and impelmentations for feedback. In the meantime they can just be posted in this section of the forums.

ps:
I would also like any ideas that people may have for forum based contests.

by **Amtiskaw** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:11 pm

Hey, just registered after reading your blog post about the forums.

I think the key to building a successful forum is building a core community of regular participants. Key to this is giving posters more of an identity. A problem with these default phpBB skins is that, while perfectly functional, they feel somewhat bland, and they really de-emphasise author identity. I would suggest taking a look at the Something Awful Forums. While the focus and audience of that site may be quite different, it has an incredibly large user base and I think is a great example of a forum whose design helps to build a sense of community amongst its members.

Some suggestions I would make are:

Turn on avatars! Unless I missed a setting in the user profiles, these are disabled at the moment. While they can seem a little silly, giving each poster a visual identity is very important. Avatars allow people to express their personality far more than a text username. They also improve usability by allowing quick visual identification of an author's identity. People can mentally process graphics far quicker than a bunch of usernames.
Redesign the post layout: Move the authorship block to the left of the post body. Increase the size of the author's name; it's tiny at the moment and this contributes to feeling of anonymity. In a community, who's saying something should be just as important as what's being said. Also, hide or turn-off the post titles and author name directly above the post body. They're unnecessary and break-up the flow of the conversation in the thread.
Modify the skin to be a little less bland a bit more fun, while still retaining usability of course.
Personality! A bit of customisation and fun applied to how the forum looks, what things are called, etc. can really bring it to life. Imagine you were in a city looking for a place to hang out and have a drink, and you passed two bars. The first one had drab white walls, Ikea chairs and tables, and generic, bored-looking bar staff. The second has art-deco decor, a big jukebox playing music, and a friendly-looking owner with a wall of photos of him meeting various celebrities and politicians. Which sounds like a better place to hang out?

Hope this is useful!

by **zcorpan** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:21 pm

Thanks! Avatars were enabled before, they must have got disabled in the forum upgrade. Enabled again, and allowed bigger avatars than default, too.

I'll leave the rest to Xdega.

by **zcorpan** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:10 pm

zcorpan wrote:You (or anyone reading this) could try to keep this list relatively short by posting helpful answers: search.php?search_id=unanswered

If you guys have twitter you can RT https://twitter.com/zcorpan/status/53548207921315840 :mrgreen:

by **Xdega** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:27 pm

Thank you for them suggestions Amtiskaw. I will go ahead and look in to making some of the more simple changes you suggested, however I personally am not very experienced in the field of forum skin design and feel I would be selling the WHATWG short if I alone was to design the graphical layout (besides some minor .css color edits).

I am more experienced with admincp controls and functions. I do believe there is a default skin that moves the avatar to the left etc, I will be taking a look at this.

Thanks again.

by **zcorpan** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:52 pm

Woot! New theme! Looks nice. Although it's a bit screwed up while loading, at least in Opera. BTW feel free to change the color of the WHATWG logo to fit the rest of the color scheme - we have different colors of the logo for the tracker and other things already (mostly to easier differentiate the favicon when having several tabs open).

by **Xdega** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:54 pm

Ok. I quickly went ahead and found us a new "theme" for the forums. Simply for the reasoning that it is "different" from the default install. There are tweaks that can be made (such as fixing the logo/graphics), but honestly I would rather look in to converting all the site graphics to SVG if possible.

by **Xdega** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:58 pm

zcorpan wrote:BTW feel free to change the color of the WHATWG logo to fit the rest of the color scheme - we have different colors of the logo for the tracker and other things already (mostly to easier differentiate the favicon when having several tabs open).

That's good to know. I think this theme has a very professional and solid look to it, a great start. As I said in my previous post though, I am going to look in to SVG. I believe we will be much better off doing so.

by **zcorpan** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 10:04 pm

Feel free (although I wouldn't bother :lol:

- aren't there a lot of images to convert?) Will you push the changes upstream so whoever maintains the theme can use the SVGs in upcoming releases if any?

There's an SVG version of the WHATWG logo here btw http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www ... /0042.html

Promote these forums, share your ideas.

Promote these forums, share your ideas.

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