Suggestions, Comments and Support

I have a feeling that SFN's servers are getting bogged down with the level of users that we have on at any given time. I've had quite a few "Server is too busy" errors thrown out by vB, and occaisionally I can't get through at all. Knowing that SFN is on a VPS at the moment, I think there are a few possible solutions, the most obvious being "get a dedicated server." Of course, I don't know if blike is willing to shell out that much a month, so the only other possible solution would be to reduce the amount of work the server has to do. Disable a bunch of unnecessary vB features, clean up templates to decrease the disk usage/bandwidth, etc. Hope things clear up soon…

I've thought up of a way Blike could take advantage of vB's paid subscription system. By enabling the system, he could eliminate the Google ads (given enough revenue from subscriptions) or upgrade to more expensive hosting, software, whatever he wants. A few ideas on what the paid subscribers would get: 1. Ability to lock own threads. 2. Ability to "soft delete" own posts--make them only visible to moderators, so that we can get them back if they abuse it (I think this is a vB feature) 3. Greater PM limit. 4. Images in signatures. 5. A nifty little rank image or title or something. 6. Larger avatars (?) 7. No ads. 8. Whatever else I think of. Of course…

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but lately I cannot load ANY Latex equations, they all give the error message '[LaTeX Error: couldn't open URL] ' ... What's up with that??

Looking at this thread you can see that "In My Memory" is clearly very knowlegeable about Christianity and capable of making very good posts. Searching for all posts by IMM just confirms this. As far as I can tell, the Philosphy & Religion board doesn't have a resident expert so if it were to have one then IMM would be a great choice.

I was noticing in the main screen (not the forum index), the link that says Contact Moderator hasn't been updated recently (ie: to include Pangloss and Mokele, and is Dudde back?) I think you should either change the link to Forum Leaders (which is correctly updated), update the post which has mods/admins or both...

Me want a t-shirt with me user name and logo on it from SFN. Perhaps me go make my own at cafepress?

I was looking at another forum, and I got they used this thing called Karma. I know this could lead to some problems of competition. But it also might be good. Users who regularly post good coherent information get good karma. Perhaps we could modify this idea to suit SFN? Maybe by having only mods be able to issue karma.

We'll be discussing the SFN front page (or "portal", as the kids are calling it these days) at the staff meeting next week, so if you have any suggestions now is the time to make them. Is there anything that should be on there and isn't? Anything that could stand to be removed? If any of you have access to the vBulletin members' areas, and can recommend specific plug-ins or modules, so much the better (It would help if you could keep your suggestions within the realm of the possible. From past experience, we've often been given ideas that would take fifteen coders a month and a tonne of chinese takeaway to complete.)

Is it possible to delet our own posts in this forum? Thanx

I think a section for science media would be a good idea. I've posted a few really cool things to look at and people tend to react positively.

We are considering using forums to help displace meetings...especially for people who only have one thing to say and don't want to attend an hour long meeting. Has anyone tried this and is it effective?

It's gone gold now. Are there plans to upgrade immediately or are we just going to wait until it goes through a few updates to iron things out? Frankly I don't know what front-end changes there are, so I'm indifferent.

this is the 8billionth time i have gotten this PM.

This is a rather radical suggestion, but anyways... At the moment, I really think that the main page of SFN is rather dull. A newcomer would see a list of threads and not get much of an idea of what the forums are about. The "news" posts are few and far between (though they used to be used far more, I think) and so it's really a rather boring front page. I think we can do better. A more custom front page including the following would probably make it nicer and more attractive to newcomers: A nice welcome message, like the one from Fafalone that was there loongg ago. More news articles. Not sure how you could get more activity in the news forums, but that's n…

the calculus lessons in the calculus forum? I think it'd be very useful for those to be right there for referance in the calculus forum...

I really like what dave has done to the template on SFN. It looks rather nice. However, I have a few suggestions that could make it quicker loading and cost less bandwidth: Move the CSS to an external file so it can be cached independently of the page, saving bandwidth. Look at the Quick Reply box. It has its own table and is nested among several layers of borders and such (same as the reply box). Some of those extra borders could be removed without affecting how nice it looks, while helping rendering time. Move stuff from inline style tags to the main CSS so it can be cached. I'd like to see the little top bar thingy redone. It doesn't look that great at the mo…

[math]\sqrt{x}[/math] When you click on LaTeX images a window pops up with this link that goes to nowhere: Also when you hover over the image a blurb appears that incorrectly says: \\sqrt{x} It appears you need to run stripslashes() on the title and alt attribute.

I was wondering if someone could put in a sociology board. I'm noticing more and more some people are talking about sociology. I don't know if there is any great scientific value to sociology but there are quantitative results that can alter each other to create an outcome.

I've gotten the PM (attached image) everyday since the month started at exactly 9:59 PM every night (Mountain Time). It's like there is no sender the only info on the side is "Join Date: December 1969 >Posts: 0" so I can't reply like it says to if I have a problem. 1969? Anyway, what is this? I know I got a warning for a reason and deserve to be punished, but this?

Why isn't their a geology section? I have a question about Geology but i don't know where it would go.

Hi, Are their any small SFN link buttons like the firefox ones you can get from spread firefox for placing on websites and in sigs etc... If not any chance some person far less lazy than myself could come up with some?

When a thread gets "moved." Is it at all possible to say where it's moved to? Like, instead of a thread saying "Moved:" Could it say "Moved to ________:" Or making the link still take you to the thread, wherever it gets moved to? Or is there a way to do this that I haven't found.

For about a week I've been waiting for these forums to get fixed, but maybe nobody else has this problem? It worked before I went to camp (3 weeks ago I think) with the same browser, same OS, same everything. Anyway, this is waht happens. Threads sometiems load completely, but the rest of the site (indexes) only load so far. They stop at the immages on the left. If I wait long enough, I see text, Go to first new post You have 1 post(s) in this thread, last 06-17-2005 Poll But there aren't any actual images. It just says "Transferring data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com..." Even right now, in post new thread, the smilies at the right aren't loading. N…

Whaddya think of having a sciencey news feed on the homepage?

a thread that i have given is moved . what does it mean . it has been erased from the site or it is shifted to some other place