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TELL ME THE HOW AND WHY? What is wrong and how do we fix it? (Don’t give a shit about the old format… that ship has sailed, so how do we make THIS format a better one? Tell us what’s wrong and if it isn’t an easy fix, how do we fix it… what makes this place better for @recon ?
Consider adopting a consistent language and provide definitions when publishing a FAQ/How-to.
In the below example @pfaffman explains that terms Forum and Category are used for the same thing. This makes learning the new M4C format more difficult than need be.
Familiar language might be worth considering. Example: At other gun related websites the term Thread is used. At M4C, Thread is called Topic.
Individually none of these things is a big deal, but combining a new format along with a different and inconsistent language can contribute to a confusing experience for new users.
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@M4C_Admin Phil raises a good point here… you should hear some of the shouting matches my mother has had over the years because too many different groups within Boeing IT refuse to agree on a common lexicon to sync terms an definitions. “But I’m a special snowflake and this is MY little empire and WE R DIFRUNT N U KANT MAKE UHZ KONFORM REEEEEEEEEE!!!”
Just for the sake of feedback, I think it’s going to be “us” in most cases. We aren’t going back to the old format and I understand that is just how it is. But at the same time some of us just aren’t going to catch on to the new / different.
Hell I’m still 50/50 success rate when it comes to quoting somebody. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And that is probably one of the easiest things to do. Everything is just so different that some of us aren’t catching on and I took a fair shot at trying to “get it.”
We also don’t seem to have anything even close to the activity we once had. I pop in to GD from time to time to see if anything is happening. I don’t even really look at the other subforums because navigation is still a bit challenging to me.
But I think Marketplace is where the focus needs to be, especially restoring feedbacks. M4C has one of the best and most reliable places to buy and sell guns and gear. I’d fix that before anything.
And also a “ignore” feature would be nice. I think I only ever had one member on my ignore list but man it was necessary.
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I still struggle with quoting. I do it correctly, but it shows up as [computer language] quoted text [/computer language] in my post roughly half the time.
My bigger struggle is that the text boxes are larger than my screen. I have to constantly mess with zoom, and even then sometimes I can’t proofread because half my shit is stuck off the screen.
I always, every single time, have to change zoom to hit submit. If I’m on 50%, I have to change to 75%. If I’m on 75%, I have to change to 50%. There’s a zero percent chance that 100% will work.
This is true both of the regular message board and the chat feature. The chat feature is more ornery, though. It’s impossible to proofread properly there, because even if I see an error, I cannot correct it, because when I click to move the cursor there, it jumps off my screen.
That’s right, except it’s like that 100% of the time (unless you look on the preview on the right side of the window). That’s what it looks like, but you can see on the right side that it’s doing what you expect. So the above quote looks like this in the composer:
[quote="1168, post:288, topic:483664"]
but it shows up as [computer language] quoted text [/computer language] in my post roughly half the time.
[/quote]
and on the right side (and when it’s posted) it looks like this:
You can visit https://m4carbine.net/my/preferences/users (which you can navigate to by clicking your avatar at the top right, the user icon at the bottom of that list, preferences, user) and ignore a user.
That sounds right to me. I haven’t been able to find the feedback in the database from the old site and am not sure how it should get implemented here.
As a temporary workaround we could just use what another board I was on did, a simple Good Trader List. A thread where if you have a satisfactory deal you just post “+1 [user]” or if unsat “-1 [user].” Then you need a mod to be the GTL Keeper and update the list in the first post regularly.
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That sounds like a fine plan.
That’s because the old software called them “forums” and this software calls them “categories”. It’s possible to change all of the text in Discourse (this platform) but “categories” shows up a whole bunch of places, and finding and changing them all will be difficult; I’d recommend just telling people that they are now called categories rather than trying to change them in all of the places they show up (including in the URL; like https://m4carbine.net/c/general/4 (the “c” there is for category, and you can’t change it, but maybe no one notices URLs anyway).
For example if you visit https://m4carbine.net/categories the header looks like this:
Right. It’s just like that. The old software called them “forums.” This software calls them “categories”. Should we keep using what the people who designed the old software called them or what the people who designed this software calls them?
Something like that could work, just have the buyer post a “yeah , I got it and it was great” post and then a moderator could add a “successful transaction” tag or “unhappy customer” tag to the topic and then it would be possible to do a search of that user’s successful transactions.
Thing with GTL is it’s all in one place where a prospective buyer can just look for a name in the list without seaeching the database.
Over there we also had a Three Strikes You’re Out rule for unsats. If you got three negatives, you were banned from the Marketplace for a time.
Front page (see below snapshot)
What is M4C-Stickman? Is it a “Forum” as this new software says it is below, or is it a Category as you say the system says it is?
Yes, Phil. I see that it has been changed in one place. The image that I posted shows both the word “categories” and “forums”. It’s not changed in all of the places, and is going to be confusing. I think there’s probably no good solution at this point. It’s changed to “forums” in a bunch of places, but there are a bunch more where they are still called “categories”. Since someone started down the “forums” road, it probably makes sense to continue to try to change it to “forums” in all of the other places. It’ll always be confusing for admins (who can see that the name of the text is js.categories.category_list and that displays “Display forum list”) and to people who use this software in other places, but that’s life.
I’d recommend calling a dog a dog and a cat a cat instead of fussing about how difficult of a task that would be for a software guy to fix. But under no circumstances does it make sense to call a dog both a cat and a rabbit and for a software guy to throw up his arms and say it’s just going to be confusing,
Keep in mind that Admin asked for recommendations from users of this forum… uh category… whatever.
You reading this?
I think you’re right and since someone started down the road of trying to call categories forums, we should probably stick with it.
But you’re not wanting to call a dog a dog. You’re recommending that we call the dog a “German Shephard” because the first dog you saw was a German Shephard", so now that we have a dog that is a Golden Retriever, some people still want to call the dog a Shephard. But it seems that everyone wants to keep calling it a shephard, so we can continue finding everywhere that the word was used and change it in the rest of them.
Exactly. We can’t call this site a forum, because we’re using “forum” as the name for “a collection of topics” on the site. So I guess this site is “these forums”. 
I had a lot of software guys who worked for me over the years. The above type of an answer would result in their last check and a walk out the door. If nothing else, answers like the above have convinced me that participating in this thread is of no value. Good luck.
Sorry, Phil. I’m just saying that I’d have counseled against trying to change this one word everywhere and that renaming categories will be confusing for some of the reasons that I’ve already described. But the decision is made, so it makes sense to stick with that decision.
No need to apologize to me. I’m not the operator of a needlessly confusing forum having run off many valued members and now asking the remaining members what’s wrong and needs fixing while the software guy jumps in to say uh… no good solutions, just live with with the confusion.
I feel sorry for the owner. He’s the one who needs an IT guy to remedy needless confusion in order to help reduce member departures and attract new, not me.
Cheers.
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yes, I’m reading along