Future Plans for Boards.ie

El Guapo!

Before I start I just want to say that I love Boards and use it practically all day every day and in general, I think the mods and the dev guys and everyone involved does a stellar job. For this reason I decided to subscribe a while ago to kind of give back as a way of saying thanks.

But lately I've noticed something in Feedback and Site Development tht has been getting to me a little bit.
A lot of users have been asking questions about possible features and/or problems with the site and have been making suggestions, but a lot of the time the reply is simply "No we can't do that" or "No there are no plans for x,y,z" or "We don't support X and have no plans to do so in the future" or "X isn't in our schedule, sorry"
Some, but not all of the above replies relate to questions about Boards touch. There seems to be very little interest by the Dev team in the touch site, but I'd hazard a guess that a hell if a lot of members use it daily. I'm using it right now and I generally use it all day until I get home and can use the laptop and I feel the touch site is greatly overlooked and its users are missing out. I know the touch site was meant to be a stripped down version of the main site but since its now more prominent in users' daily lives, I think it'd be a good thing to invest more time in it.
As I say though, the queries I've seen have not been limited to just the Touch site. Some questions/requests about the main site have been shot down too.

I may be wrong in what I've said or I may be out of line, and if I am then please ignore this and accept my apology, but its just been something getting on my nerves lately.
Is there any chance that maybe if a suggestion or question gets enough support then it could be looked into by the dev team even if its not on the schedule.
Or some queries even go unanswered sometimes which can be a bit irritating if someone was waiting on a reply.
What are the actual plans for the development of Boards in the future?
Again, this isn't meant to be taken as an angry complaint. Quite the opposite. I'm just genuinely curious about what's in store for Boards.

Sarky

I must admit, I do end up using the touch site a lot more than I thought I would. There are days when the only time I'll use the full site is when I have to do a moderator thing.

It might be because my laptop is really goddamn slow and my phone is handler. We'll see if that changes when my SSD arrives and I can boot from that ^_^

oscarBravo

This is just my understanding, not inside information: this website is built on vBulletin software, which provided all the needed functionality back in the day, but the site's needs have totally outgrown what vBulletin is able to deliver in terms of performance, scalability and feature set.

So there's a major project under way in the background to replace the functionality provided by vBulletin with in-house developed code that can scale and provide a platform for future development. Future development of the touch site is somewhat dependent on this work, so it has to take a back seat for now.

As I say, that's my understanding at least.

MugMugs

I'd hazard a guess that the majority of boards daytime traffic, compliments of the smart phone revolution is touch traffic during the working day. Would it not be prudent for boards to better their main way of communication?


I have to agree with the op here, feedback doesn't really seem to feed back anymore which seems to negate its point.

TeddyTedson

There's small things that aren't included on the touch site yet such as "find all post that quote TeddyTedson".
Also there's no way to see if you have new PMs unless by chance you click in. Could a little (x) be added to where the PM header is?

Boards.ie: Danny

If you're talking future development like non-technical features, new products/IP and other shiny stuff you can actually see then this post probably isn't for you I'm afraid; Tony/Dav are the folks for that one, the community & product managers. But since you mentioned the devs, I've hopped in with a response, hopefully it answers your queries for us in any case


Pretty much everybody who has ever used boards has suggestions, bugbears and stuff they'd love to see improved. Unfortunately, as with most businesses, time and resources are limited. There is a team of three developers currently working on the site, Paddy, Rónán and myself (From November '11-April '12 it was four). We all work regular office hours, Monday-Friday. Since the start of July there's been about four weeks total where we've had a full team of devs working, we have been pretty busy just maintaining the site - the underlying architecture is anything but typical and can be very temperamental.

We've touched on the "state of Boards" and future plans before, as has oscarBravo here in this thread. Let me elaborate rather long-windedly, you can just call me Wibbs the Second if you don't tl;dr on me

Our core system is vBulletin 3. We're using it's database structure, it's data structures and right now we're using a lot of it's code too to run this site. vBulletin 3 was written and optimised for PHP4 and released in 2004. It's had upgrades to v3.5 and v3.8 in 2006 and 2008 respectively but these just built on the code base that existed before. It's almost 10 year old code by now for a PHP version that's no longer supported by PHP themselves. Nowadays we're on PHP5.3/5.4 looking towards 6.0 now with vast improvements in performance, language constructs and pretty much everything a coding nerd loves.

There are lots of hacks and fixes to keep a site of this magnitude ticking over on this non-optimal code, limitations to several features, the absence of other typical vB features (e.g. the calendar). Minding this site can sometimes be a full time job of itself, not to mention implementing improvements.

But there are improvements. For starters we have a (non-public) RESTful API. Get a key, point to a URL and you'll get JSON back. This API allows us to build user interfaces (UI), like Touch, without relying on vBulletin. It allows the mobile team to build a mobile app without vBulletin. So you want a new post/thread WYSIWYG editor? No longer a problem. You want a new theme? Not an issue. You don't like the way threads flow, or the workflow (e.g. having to post a thread before posting a poll)? Not an issue. If the API was public, you could build your own user interface in whatever language you like, even a Windows desktop application would be possible so you wouldn't need a browser - but that's crazy, right? :pac:

The API is strongly coupled with vBulletin - that is if I deleted vBulletin tomorrow the API would break and touch would fall over. The API still communicates with our database through core vBulletin code. It still runs a fair few permissions checks through vBulletin. So it still has limitations, the most complex of which would be the permissions system. Progress has been made to alleviate this bottleneck because as we expand it'll get worse. It is a complex issue though, so work is ongoing.

The API is feature-incomplete. We're not even sure if it'll ever be properly complete - like I said, everybody has suggestions. The API is constantly under development. Mods would love to be able to moderate posts on touch - the API doesn't have all the functions to do it yet. Sure, it could be patched in given some time but nothing will be improved by doing a rushed job. We'll be looking at it in two years with the same problem we've had for a few years - code that's highly inefficient, not optimised for our current (and future) site load and not well thought out killing the site. Running with the mod example, it's better to think about the best ways to implement all moderator functions needed now, and in context of we'll need more in the future so leave room for expansion, and then do it all in a bulk job - a project if you will just like polls rather than piecemeal. Adding polls to touch took two weeks of work or thereabouts between updating the API to support polls, designing the UI changes, coding the UI and testing - all for one relatively small feature with 3 operations (create/view/vote).

Now you know most of the problems and have an idea why just asking for feature X that's on the main site for touch is nowhere near as simple as you think. Hopefully I've also explained why having community-driven solutions just popped onto our schedule randomly as they get upvoted will result in "just ok" code that's more of a liability for us in the future.

As for right now, we're working on some new stuff that involves expanding the API with another project. It'll all be revealed at launch, just like the new skin sort of landed in here without much ado beforehand. It's all-go on that and that is why we're only fixing the critical bugs right now and maintaining the code.

Finally to feature suggestions. We read 'em all. Well, most of them. We move them from Help Desk, and when we find them in feedback or some other forum we'll move them from there too. We're all subscribed to Site Development, not a post in there doesn't get read by at least one of us. But there isn't infinite time or resources, and we don't want to tell anybody we'll deliver on some feature only for a year to pass by before it even gets on the radar. It's not fair on you the suggesters, and when we don't deliver it wouldn't be fair on us to have pointed out we're not delivering on what we said. The easiest thing is to tell you the feature isn't available or alternatively just not respond (we'd be having a different thread right now if we did that ) Please don't take it that your suggestions aren't worthy, in almost every case they're great. It also isn't that we don't care what you guys think, it's almost 2am and I'm here writing this. It isn't the first time and won't be the last time that one of us will respond to your request out of hours. We'd love to do all of the suggestions, if only it wasn't for the scheduling/resources but c'est la vie.

Finally, for the touch lovers out there - touch traffic is nowhere near our main traffic, it's 1/6th of our total with the other 5/6ths coming from the desktop. I use it myself on the commute to/from work, I've got plenty of suggestions for improvements too but zero time to do the improving However, the eventual goal is to have it a fully functioning main site on touch screen devices. If you interested in current thoughts on how to achieve it then I'll give you two words - reactive design. The downside? It'll take time, and will just never work with vBulletin. So I better get some sleep before we go expanding the API again tomorrow to speed up the vBulletin divorce :cool:

If you want any more technical details, please feel free to reply here or PM me and I'll nerd out as much as I can without causing the rest of the guys a headache.

muffler

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Let me elaborate rather long-windedly, you can just call me Wibbs the Second if you don't tl;dr on me

That's the only part of your post I understood

Morag

I think part of the reasons the touch numbers are so low is that it's so buggy and awkward to use. I can check my email, twitter, g+, facebook all on my phone, boards really there's no point which is a pain in the arse when out and about and I have to use the Desk top.

Boards.ie: Paddy

We've been thinking that the touch site needs a bit of love too and have been compiling a list of improvements/features we want to make. So rather than just choose the improvements we think are important what I'm going to do is put together a multivote poll with 10 - 15 items on it. Whatever wins the poll we'll implement first and then we'll continue on down in the order that the community think is important. We will be the arbitrators of what is included on the poll since we know what's feasible and what isn't, but hopefully you guys will feel you're getting some sort of input into how we set our priorities.

A brief list of what we have so far is:

- Speed up load times and page performance(reduce number of HTTP requests and make those requests smaller)
- Add support for post attachments on devices that support this (e.g. iOS6)
- Add an address book style index on the forum list to reduce the need for scrolling
- Add a main site style forum hierarchy breadcrumb in thread view
- Add an unread PM indicator to the links at the top of the page
- Add page links to the top of the page in thread view
- Add more and better client side validation
- Take forum specific BBCode settings into account (e.g. no images in after hours on touch)
- Improve search options available on touch (advanced search form, vanity search, quoted search)

If anyone has anything else they'd like to add to the list let me know. I'll try to put together better descriptions of these items and get the poll up tomorrow.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

muffler

Captain Morgan wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

User CP ----> Edit Options

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> Thread display options

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> Number of posts to show per page

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Blowfish

CaptainMorgan wrote:

-Have a subbed link up with the other links (Forums, PM, Account) again like on the m.boards site.

Wouldn't that just be the same as clicking the logo, then My Threads?

[edit] Ah, guess not. Didn't realise that you meant subbed forums rather than threads.

One thing I noticed is that there's no way to access social groups from touch. Given that they don't get all that much traffic though, I imagine it'll be lower down on the priority list.

Boards.ie: Paddy

Captain Morgan wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

We don't have space for another link at the top of the page, also the "forums" page already lists your followed forums at the top. Personally I feel that the real problem here is that the forums page is too big and slow.

The other issue is a runner though, I'll add it to the list.

Zaph

The one thing I'd love to see on the touch site is a "Mark Forum as Read" button please.

Boards.ie: Paddy

Blowfish wrote: »

One thing I noticed is that there's no way to access social groups from touch. Given that they don't get all that much traffic though, I imagine it'll be lower down on the priority list.

My gut reaction is no. But in the spirit of letting the community decide I'll include it

Boards.ie: Paddy

OK the poll is up here.

Democracy, ain't it a beautiful thing

Sauve

For those who want to gete PM notifications while using touch, I've set up email notification for it.
It's a bit longwinded, but at least you get notified somehow when pms' come through.

Boards.ie: Paddy

PM notifications will be coming very soon as part of our next major update, they're done and sitting on a branch waiting to be merged and deployed.