A few points.</p> First, S2 was designed for IE6+ and FireFox 1.5+. That it works at all with a macintosh browser or mobile phone browser is a plus. Those two browsers account for 99% of all the browsers used on the Internet, so it's not like we're excluding a whole lot of people. The targetting of those browsers do allow for a newer generation of WWW based software, and S2 is that newer generation of software. Truthfully, the other browsers out there are broken, and S2 isn't going to be the only site that won't support them. Pressure should be brought to bear on the browser developers to bring their software up to standards, and not to cripple our WWW sites. If you want me to get more specific on this point, I'll be happy to elaborate, but I can start by pointing out that if a browser doesn't support the DOM standard properly, there's a LOT of nifty features (like the dynamic list of members viewing) that simply won't work.</p> Second, S2 was not meant to be a message board. The core software for S2 is a more modern Content Management System - it features blogs and web pages and game threads (and the potential for all kinds of innovative document types). The S2 platform is also an application delivery system - things like the Pick Em contests, historical stats database, trade checker, and ultimately PM system (among infinite other possiblities) are what we wanted S2 to be about. As much as being about posting threads, message board style.</p> Third, the message board paradigm was chosen as a means to display and navigate the content because it's familiar to all of us, and has certain benefits. The way threads bump when people post in them is extrapolated to blogs and Web pages, too. In retrospect, people want the site to be a message board and aren't really taking advantage of all the neat extra features. There's a weird (IMO) resistance to seeing S2 for what it is and what it's meant to (going to) be, which is my only source of disappointment.</p> Fourth, because there is so much pressure to make the site into a message board, the focus of my energies on the programming side has been on thread features and that sort of thing, instead of on the novel features that S2 was designed to promote. Frankly, it's become a waste of my good time, since there are other fully featured message board software packages out there to choose from - I shouldn't be spending my time reinventing that wheel. However, I don't think that message boards are all that great - few grow to any significant size, and they have real limitations in their own right.</p> Fifth, a lot of the complaints about the software and HTML formatting are quite valid. I'm not offended by these complaints in the least, though I am surprised that people are satisfied with so little in terms of form and function. While I see complaints about the rosters, for example, on the team pages, I've also seen just as many posts praising them and the presentation. It's a mixed bag, FWIW. While some of you see rosters that don't change, I see rosters with player names that should be links to player pages that DO change, I see timely and important information that is there in front of your face when you are posting, and that should help you with the research you need to do to make the best post possible. Again, the rub is that instead of making those names into links, I've been tweaking fonts, replacing the editor with another one, and otherwise working on duplicating the features of message board software instead.</p> Sixth, the current incarnation of S2 is not at all what S2 is supposed to be. Ultimately, S2 won't resemble a traditional message board at all, but in the early stages of development, we need a flat HTML style version that does work something like a message board ONLY FOR THE SEARCH ENGINE ROBOTS to be able to index all the great content everyone is making (posts, blogs, etc.). Before getting to work on S2 for real, MikeDC and I (we were the two original founders) built a prototype site for S2 that doesn't look anything like what S2 is now. It had live chat on the team pages, a trade checker in a popup window with drag/drop functions, mouse over links that caused popups to open with live content in them (e.g. mouse over a player name, get his stats in a balloon help kind of thing), and so on.</p> Seventh, the merging of several sites along the way wasn't meant to destroy existing communities, but rather to bring several together and to provide us with a means to build S2 as a community effort. S2 isn't/wasn't meant to be a separate JBB community, separate NFL-Forums community, etc., migrated to share a single server with a message board with forums for all the sports. The idea was to put blogs and the other features in front of the community members, get feedback to make those things better, and to get ideas for further advancing the state of the art that S2 is.</p> As well, S2 was designed all along to be about community and not about distinct communities sharing the same site/server. My experience at other sites, and even observing JBB, is that people tend to congregate in their favorite team/sport forum and hardly ever leave. I happen to think the world of the JBB posters AND the NFL-Forums posters (and all the others, too!), and the neatest thing in my experience is seeing a JBB poster get to know an NFL-Forums poster. S2 has excelled at this - I think CelticBalla32, Max, TheBeef, DolfanDale, GArenas, GMJigga, custodianrules2, chutney, and many others are quite familiar to everyone on the site, and they all come from different merges (or signing up with S2 outright). This is something that is difficult to achieve using vb3 or ip.boards or any other out-of-the-box community solution.</p> (I want to point out that I am thrilled to be now working with shape and hunter and M Two One and the other admins who've come from a mix of merged sites, and that I hate naming names like I did in the last paragraph because it's hard to without leaving out way too many other great posters/staff. If I didn't mention you, there's nothing to it, just trying to make a point).</p> Eighth, we're not deaf when it comes to seeing/reading comments and criticisms and setting about correcting those. Shape's already let the cat out of the bag, so I'll make a second post to talk about the future direction of S2 and the near-term project we're working on that will affect all of us.</p> </p>
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane)</div><div class='quotemain'></p> A few points.</p> First, S2 was designed for IE6+ and FireFox 1.5+. That it works at all with a macintosh browser or mobile phone browser is a plus. Those two browsers account for 99% of all the browsers used on the Internet, so it's not like we're excluding a whole lot of people. The targetting of those browsers do allow for a newer generation of WWW based software, and S2 is that newer generation of software. Truthfully, the other browsers out there are broken, and S2 isn't going to be the only site that won't support them. Pressure should be brought to bear on the browser developers to bring their software up to standards, and not to cripple our WWW sites. If you want me to get more specific on this point, I'll be happy to elaborate, but I can start by pointing out that if a browser doesn't support the DOM standard properly, there's a LOT of nifty features (like the dynamic list of members viewing) that simply won't work.</p> Second, S2 was not meant to be a message board. The core software for S2 is a more modern Content Management System - it features blogs and web pages and game threads (and the potential for all kinds of innovative document types). The S2 platform is also an application delivery system - things like the Pick Em contests, historical stats database, trade checker, and ultimately PM system (among infinite other possiblities) are what we wanted S2 to be about. As much as being about posting threads, message board style.</p> Third, the message board paradigm was chosen as a means to display and navigate the content because it's familiar to all of us, and has certain benefits. The way threads bump when people post in them is extrapolated to blogs and Web pages, too. In retrospect, people want the site to be a message board and aren't really taking advantage of all the neat extra features. There's a weird (IMO) resistance to seeing S2 for what it is and what it's meant to (going to) be, which is my only source of disappointment.</p> Fourth, because there is so much pressure to make the site into a message board, the focus of my energies on the programming side has been on thread features and that sort of thing, instead of on the novel features that S2 was designed to promote. Frankly, it's become a waste of my good time, since there are other fully featured message board software packages out there to choose from - I shouldn't be spending my time reinventing that wheel. However, I don't think that message boards are all that great - few grow to any significant size, and they have real limitations in their own right.</p> Fifth, a lot of the complaints about the software and HTML formatting are quite valid. I'm not offended by these complaints in the least, though I am surprised that people are satisfied with so little in terms of form and function. While I see complaints about the rosters, for example, on the team pages, I've also seen just as many posts praising them and the presentation. It's a mixed bag, FWIW. While some of you see rosters that don't change, I see rosters with player names that should be links to player pages that DO change, I see timely and important information that is there in front of your face when you are posting, and that should help you with the research you need to do to make the best post possible. Again, the rub is that instead of making those names into links, I've been tweaking fonts, replacing the editor with another one, and otherwise working on duplicating the features of message board software instead.</p> Sixth, the current incarnation of S2 is not at all what S2 is supposed to be. Ultimately, S2 won't resemble a traditional message board at all, but in the early stages of development, we need a flat HTML style version that does work something like a message board ONLY FOR THE SEARCH ENGINE ROBOTS to be able to index all the great content everyone is making (posts, blogs, etc.). Before getting to work on S2 for real, MikeDC and I (we were the two original founders) built a prototype site for S2 that doesn't look anything like what S2 is now. It had live chat on the team pages, a trade checker in a popup window with drag/drop functions, mouse over links that caused popups to open with live content in them (e.g. mouse over a player name, get his stats in a balloon help kind of thing), and so on.</p> Seventh, the merging of several sites along the way wasn't meant to destroy existing communities, but rather to bring several together and to provide us with a means to build S2 as a community effort. S2 isn't/wasn't meant to be a separate JBB community, separate NFL-Forums community, etc., migrated to share a single server with a message board with forums for all the sports. The idea was to put blogs and the other features in front of the community members, get feedback to make those things better, and to get ideas for further advancing the state of the art that S2 is.</p> As well, S2 was designed all along to be about community and not about distinct communities sharing the same site/server. My experience at other sites, and even observing JBB, is that people tend to congregate in their favorite team/sport forum and hardly ever leave. I happen to think the world of the JBB posters AND the NFL-Forums posters (and all the others, too!), and the neatest thing in my experience is seeing a JBB poster get to know an NFL-Forums poster. S2 has excelled at this - I think CelticBalla32, Max, TheBeef, DolfanDale, GArenas, GMJigga, custodianrules2, chutney, and many others are quite familiar to everyone on the site, and they all come from different merges (or signing up with S2 outright). This is something that is difficult to achieve using vb3 or ip.boards or any other out-of-the-box community solution.</p> (I want to point out that I am thrilled to be now working with shape and hunter and M Two One and the other admins who've come from a mix of merged sites, and that I hate naming names like I did in the last paragraph because it's hard to without leaving out way too many other great posters/staff. If I didn't mention you, there's nothing to it, just trying to make a point).</p> Eighth, we're not deaf when it comes to seeing/reading comments and criticisms and setting about correcting those. Shape's already let the cat out of the bag, so I'll make a second post to talk about the future direction of S2 and the near-term project we're working on that will affect all of us.</p> </p> </div></p> I'm not trying to start trouble, but the reason why most of us joined JBB was because we wanted to join a messageboard, not some "super site." I understand how you guys are looking to run this site, but I'm just disapppointed by this merge altogether.I amby no means trying to bash you, or anyone else by that matter, but I just feel that a lot us who came from JBB had a different vision of this site than how it is currently put out to be. Again, I joined JBB because I wanted to join a message board with intellegent fans to talk basketball. I didn't join because of all the extra features and stuff. Anyways, hopefully you guys will implement some of our ideas into the new design.</p> </p>
I really don't understand how these boards are inferior to traditional message boards. The only thing that comes to mind are the smilies.</p> It's pretty easy to navigate, and if you were to really want a traditional look, you can just click forums.</p>
So here's a major announcement on my part.</p> As soon as possible, we are going to dump the current incarnation of S2 in favor of IP.Boards AND a lot of custom additions.</p> When?</p> I'm hoping for mid December, but it may take longer than that to properly prepare. In the mean time, we ask your patience, and that you continue to use S2 as much as possible - nothing you do between now and the migration to IP.Boards will be lost, and, S2 is actually growing at a nice rate as-is. As I posted above, S2 is about community, so there's no reason to stop being a community while we admins (and other staff) are working on the migration.</p> Why IP.Boards?</p> IP.Boards is a commercial message board system that can be the core of what S2 has always been envisioned as. It is feature rich, will work on all the browsers, provides a lot of features missing from S2: Search, RSS, subscriptions, richer moderating functions, killer member pages, and other neat hacks that we can add. It's written in the same programming language as S2, so our ability to customize it is there - we don't expect it to just be an IP.Boards site in the least.</p> We evaluated a number of message board systems, and IP.Boards has all the qualities that we want to build upon. In particular, it has a blogs module, an image gallery module, a MediaWiki integration module, the best member page of any software out there, it's well written/easy to modify, and it's scalable (we can be as big a site as we want).</p> What about SportsTicker?</p> I've been rewriting all the SportsTicker content to go around the IP.Boards and MediaWiki pages. It's a distinct and separate part of the site, though it can be integrated into the IP.Boards pages if we see fit. It's already a lot better/nicer than what we have on S2 - the news features the game previews and recaps, there's a Game program that shows preview/recap/box score/events list for each game, game logs, player game logs, etc., etc. Sportsbook bets will be available in all the "proper" places - like when viewing a game preview.</p> Immediately, there won't be SportsTicker game threads, though I plan to implement them in a different manner from the current one, that addresses peoples' complaints with the current implementation.</p> What's the Status?</p> I've already tested the migration of the user accounts and have imported about 1.2M of our posts. Everything seems to work. We've tested blogs and the image gallery. Mel is working on skinning the IP.Boards and WikiMedia modules. The new site already has a built-in chat function, so we can all communicate via the site instead of having to deal with some people on AIM and others on Yahoo! or MSN.</p> We're not going to switch over until everything is "right" for doing so. When we do the switch over, it marks the beginning of a bigger effort to expand and extend what's there.</p> We already had a plain old message board, what's the benefit to sticking with S2?</p> IP.Boards doesn't represent the end-all for S2 in the least. As I already wrote, we're going to apply all kinds of fun hacks that already exist (like arcade games) as well as our own unique customizations. We see IP.Boards simply as a fully-featured CORE of functionality to start using and enjoy right away while we further develop our unique S2 additions.</p> As well, we're not losing focus on the nifty Web 2.0 concepts we set out to design for S2. The big difference going forward is that the means of capturing user content will be IP.Boards (with our modifications) instead of the custom S2 software we now use. That is, the Web 2.0/version 2 mode of the site will simply query the IP.Boards database instead of the existing S2 one. Not a big deal from a technical standpoint.</p> What features are we going to lose? </p> S2's implementation of blogs and Web pages are unique to S2. IP.Boards has its own style of blogging software, so we'll initially be using that (don't worry, we'll not lose anyone's blogs, comments, etc.). We're going to lose Web pages, but they'll be replaced by the WikiMedia functionality. The live members viewing is not built into IP.Boards or WikiMedia, but I see no real problems implementing that feature in reasonable time. IP.Boards doesn't have the concept of "cross posting" so things like game threads as implemented on S2 won't be implemented on the IP.Boards version immediately.</p> </p> </p>
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (mynetsforlife)</div><div class='quotemain'></p> I really don't understand how these boards are inferior to traditional message boards. The only thing that comes to mind are the smilies.</p> It's pretty easy to navigate, and if you were to really want a traditional look, you can just click forums.</p> </div></p> This is typical of people who signed up for S2 (weren't merged in). I don't disagree with you, but I can't ignore the feedback by those who have other ideas for how it should work.</p> In general, I do see that people are finding threads, are posting without much of a problem, etc. I also see in the server logs that guests come to the site, and are not having much of a problem navigating the site to find what they're looking for (and that the sportsticker content is pretty darn popular </p> </p> </p>
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane)</div><div class='quotemain'></p> <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (mynetsforlife)</div><div class='quotemain'></p> I really don't understand how these boards are inferior to traditional message boards. The only thing that comes to mind are the smilies.</p> It's pretty easy to navigate, and if you were to really want a traditional look, you can just click forums.</p> </div></p> This is typical of people who signed up for S2 (weren't merged in). I don't disagree with you, but I can't ignore the feedback by those who have other ideas for how it should work.</p> In general, I do see that people are finding threads, are posting without much of a problem, etc. I also see in the server logs that guests come to the site, and are not having much of a problem navigating the site to find what they're looking for (and that the sportsticker content is pretty darn popular </p> </p> </p> </div></p> </p> I've used other boards, so the layout was very new to me. I mostly used to use invisionfree (which sucked). I was also on BBF, which was, again, pretty different from this site. It just didn't seem to difficult to adapt.</p>
I definitely think all the Web 2.0 features are nifty. Partly because I'm interested in programming and I like to see the evolution of the web. And the the site as a whole looks on par with realgm, which is not saying much in terms of look and design. But that site is pretty active in terms of their forums despite the design.</p> The problem with all the features is that many of them I was not aware of. Like the Webpage, I'm not sure how to utilize that option or why I would want to. Same with the blog. That has a lot to do with many of the users coming from message boards and that's what they've come to expect. I think the inclusion of the webpage and blog features are interesting from a programming conceptual view, but the users need a reason to use them. Doing a webpage seems too time consuming (I know the basics of html and CSS and it takes a me a really long time to make a website). Even though the web is very wide spread, many people don't know how to use HTML, when there's many automated sites out there which makes things much simpler. I checked out the webpage feature here, and it has some automated coding, but it's not much for someone to create something nice looking in a short amount of time. Also I'm not sure what's the difference between the blog and webpage and regular forum post. They all seem to have the same features as a regular thread post. So by having those features, they seem extraneous and add to the clutter, because I don't think many people understand how to use those features, like how does it integrate with the messageboard software here?</p> I'm really interested in seeing the real, finished version of this site and how it will work. You guys appear to have a good vision and have the ability to make it happen with your programming abilities, so it should be pretty cool. And I like innovation. Seems to be built on the concept of facebook and myspace, except for sports fans, but at the same time more of the bastard offspring, and when I say bastard offspring, I mean that in a good way.</p> I'm definitely trying to stick it out and see how things are going. Sometimes people just need time to adjust, but they have to give it a chance. I think once more activity and interesting discussions start filling this board, it will create a viral effect and the activity will increase. Right now it's kind of like everyone's sitting back waiting for someone to make the first move, before they step in.</p> </p>
