Strike while the Iron is hot - new forums

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Well, I just read about the new forums coming here soon and that is a good thing. And in the post, the person said it is being worked on now…so while there is time… why don’t we tell them what we want…I’ll start

  1. Search engine
  2. Threads easy to follow and read
  3. Picture posting
  4. Seperate one for layout building, more time is needed to look at layouts before commenting, so a slower forum for layout building is a good thing.

What do you guys and gals want for your forum?

2

alot more SP fans

3

I would like to see someone to answer questions who is qualified and or cerifided to do so. Someone with a background in civil engineering would be most helpful. Spell check would be great. Ben

4

I will say it once again.

I would like to see a way of identifying all of the posts by more than just a date and time.

Ken, D&J Railroad, Stafford, VA

5

I would like to see names of who posted what. Also possibly a Members Registration List. This whould be a great way to contact members directly. The only other thing that could top everything else would be an chat room. Hemm just a thought!
I still love this place, is has been a great tool!
Icemanmike-Milwaukee

6

Essentially, our new forums will be very similar to our sister magazine FineScale Modeler’s forums(http://www.finescale.com/fsm/community/forum/).

Yes, it’s the same platform that Atlas and many other sites use.

Erik Bergstrom
Content and Business Manager
Trains.com

7

How about designing the web page with some sort of javascript so you dont have the ENTIRE page refresh every time you open a post, or reply to one. There has to be some sort of programming logic to allow this, after all, if you can watch paint peel in streaming video, you can make a model RR forum a bit less bandwidth consuming.

(Yes, there actually was a paint peeling webcam, it was linked to from a site called, appropriately, www.bored.com Obviously someone needs a hobby.)

Matt, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois

8

I vote of pictures. “picture is thousand word”
A user friend form (non HTML)

9

Erik,

I checked out FineScale and think the fourm is great! Thanks for letting us know what’s comming our way.

Keep up the good work at Trains.com.

10

no problems from me so far. i love this place. only thing i’d like is a place to see other’s layouts. i think it could give others ideas on what to build and it would be nice just to compare playouts.

also maybe a help section or something for beginners.

11

The Picture factor is huge, after all what we are doing is so visual, it’s amazing it hasn’t happened before. I can’t wait to really “see” what people are doing with thier train set-ups. I’ve been focused on working in a tiny space and I’m hoping to get more ideas from expert vets in model trains.

12

Hi guys,

Just to be clear, our forums aren’t being redesigned again. Note that my earlier post in which I mentioned FineScale.com’s forums was dated back in June… prior to the implementation of these, our new forums.

So basically, you already have what’s coming your way. [:)]

As far as photos go, it’s a tough nut to crack. There are several obstacles:

  • Controlling what people post We unfortunately don’t have time to police every single post that’s made so if some dirtbag thinks it’s funny to post an inappropriate photo in our forum, we’d have egg on our face.

  • Cost. We have over 135,000 registered users. Let’s say 1% of our users posted photos, but each posted an average of 10 photos. That’s 13,500 photos. In other words, a lot of server space. (And that’s a very conservative estimate.) And as much as I’d like to be able to let you guys post photos - because I too would like to see everyone’s work - I could just see some users posting their entire collection of locomotive and freight car images. I know how many I have, and I’m sure you guys have just as many.

So for now I encourage you guys to post the photos on your personal web sites and provide the rest of us links to your site. For those that don’t have your own personal web sites, I still want to find an alternative. I’m sure there’s a third party site that will host your photos. I just need to find the time to investigate.

It’s on my to do list.
Erik

13

I think that these forums are great. They have really helped me out over the past few months, asking questions and hearing what other people have to say… It’s great and I love it. Keep up the good work. oh ya I think that being able to post pictures here would be cool.
ShaunCN

14

I would love to see a “MyForums” along the lines of “MyEbay” which tracks all the threads one has posted to, and keeps track of them. I know there is a “watch this post” option here, but it uses email notification, which because of my constant flood of spam means that I don’t use it much or pay attention to the notices when they come. If there was a button on the page I could just click, and be taken to a digested listing of all the threads I’ve weighed in on, I’d use that feature ALL THE TIME.

As for pictures, server space doesn’t need to be the issue; just let the message field be able to display the images that are linked from other sites. The images wouldn’t ever be loaded onto the forum servers; it’d just be an html tag that retrieves the outside image.

Another option would be to build a library of stock images which users could use at whim; these could be famous locos, railroad emblems, or current MR content. They’d be just for fun, to be sure, but I’d love to have a big N&W hamburger herald under my name!