Be Excellent To Each Other

Don't worry, I won't force us all to use it

But I'm fed up with forums (like this one) being somewhat archaic.

Who has great ideas of stuff they'd like to see in a web forum?

homepage that automatically updates as you watch it, with new threads, and updated threads moving up the list.

The ability to add other forum's posts (from an rss feed or something) into your own personalised homepage.

The ability to "ignore" threads as well as users.

Malc

Tree based discussion thread navigation
Offline download and reading

Basically I want usenet back

First and the last one - Hell yes. Can you explain the second one a bit more?

Don't be so negative, turn that frown upside down.

Threaded Twitter without the character limit...

I'd like to be charged £2 a month to use it.

Grim..., I think you should start a new forum, and have it as a "reboot" of this place, a Year Zero if you will. A new beginning for a new era of change and re-beginningness.

You misunderstand - I'm going to code a new forum system, not just set another one up.

One of the main things is that the engine is going to be completely separate from the interface, with the interface communicating with the engine through an api. That way it'll be dandy for phones, tablets and web-browsers alike, and it will be easy to make add-ons for it (as opposed to "next to impossible", like this one).

What? A schism you say?! Down with BEEX! Fuck all of you! See you on Grim...'s new TwitterUsenet forum! Cunts!

That sounds like a Hero of Excellence wet dream.

I had a Hero of Excellence wet dream last night.

I will be hitting you all up for advice, though.

For instance: Searching. I thinking a table for every word 3 chars or more long, with a CRC32-hashed index of said words, the user id and the thread id. As that'd get very big it could be sharded into initial letters.
But what about when "someone searches in quotes"? Just pull it from the posts table? That'd be quite a task, and the posts table would have to run on an InnoDB engine for non-locking selects, so no fulltext indexes. Maybe have a MyISAM tables with the whole post in just for that?

Yeah, that's probably how I'd do it.

I don't think it's such a bad choice. The denormalisation isn't a problem as long as you code properly, and it won't be that big compared to the 'main' posts table (as MyIsam tables are typically 1/3rd the size of InnoDB, and it wouldn't have as much stuff in, either).

Do you think I should shard the posts table? If so, what would be the most sensible way to do it?

No shard.

From the limited testing I've done on this forum, though, that's where the bottleneck is.

Back to searching, the way this forum does it is to have one table called wordlist that (not surprisingly) lists all of the words on the forum, and another table called 'wordmatch' that lists the id of the word and the id of the post it is in. Apart from (I'm guessing) some slowness updating the index when adding new words (to either table) that's not a bad idea.

[edit]It'd be even better if you sharded to initial letters and shard the id table to, say, 5,000,000.

Make it so you can search you PMs.

Yeah, I figured I'd just make the PMs normal posts that only certain people could see, that way they'd be searchable like anything else.

In more exciting database news, I'm going to try partitioning

Can you make it be not blue?

Hmm.
What other colour could it be?

Any colour you want, because you can set your colour preference for every element in your user profile.

Yeah, but who's going to bother? You can do that here. Have you? Hell no.

No you can't...can you?

You can - not in your UCP, but you can make a style / theme if you like.

Well, quite. Fuck that.

I've seen/made things where the user can set their own colours and fonts and stuff, and everybody leaves them the Hell alone because otherwise you make a fucking mess

Might put it in anyway, for shits and giggles.

They've got it on a product I've just put in at work, and it works pretty well.

I will add it in, just for you.

Pinning your own threads to the top. Or maybe quick links to selected threads/posts.

Surprised nobody has mentioned a "like" type button. Useful for compiling posts of the week or cutting down on "this" type posts.

If that's possible, it'd be brilliant. I could have metal thread, football, Cheap iPhone etc always there.

Conversely, could we have a 'this sucks'-type de-prioritiser? Where threads we'll never click into can have negative weighting, thereby placing them below 'neutral' threads, never to be seen again?

I doubt it's possible, but if anyone can do it, it's Grim...

Will there be plenty of RAM for the ignore list?

Ability to download entire threads. Basically, offline reading options.

Like a 'hide' option?

Browser for the uploaded images.
Stats for length of time spent online, most posts made in a day etc for every poster.
POTW button.
Ability to foe admins and mods.
Personal stickies/non stickies as suggested above. A 'show me first/last' type thing.
Custom smiley uploader (and a most popularly used counter to avoid dross).
Better spam account detection eg inability to start new thread until ten posts have been made for example.
Dedicated mafia tools.eg for a gamesmaster seeing who hasn't posted in a day's thread for example.
Mandatory topic icons.
Drag and drop image upload.
Free flapjacks.

I knew I didn't like you.

pink, please!

Yeah, that's probably what I was driving at.

So yeah, what Malc said, then.

Malc?

Aye. First reply.

Ah! I see it now.

There are, of course, sensible reasons for not being able to ignore "power users".

Just as there are sensible reasons for being able to ignore them of course.

YOU WILL LISTEN TO EVERY DAMN WORD I HAVE TO SAY!

Like what?

BOOBS