You are reading a single comment by @Velocio and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Velocio
I don't mean "kill it"... I mean, change the software to make it cope with the growth.
2 Big problems as I see them:
1) Diversification of access device (android, iphone, kindle, tablet)... the old design simply does not work well on those things.
2) Growth of the community, gravity of LFGSS as a cycling forum, noise levels and junk.
The devices I can support by changing HTML and CSS as the new style proves. But the growth/noise problem is different. Whilst we all cycle, your specific interests might be different from mine, and certainly amongst some people they really don't want to see or deal with the noise levels associated with the whole forum (when you do a search, you want it to be only amongst the stuff you're interested in and nothing else).
Reddit has things like subreddits and you can divide up the whole of reddit to just the shit that tickles or interests you. It's not really possible to fully block the noise on a hierarchical forum system, which is what vBulletin is (and the same for PHPBB, Vanilla, XenForo, etc).
So I think that LFGSS is getting to the point that unless sub-divided, it will fracture. And that's to the detriment of all, so it's either a case of support it fundamentally or let the place rot because it wasn't supported.
And when thinking of the HTML/CSSdevice diversification... the same problem kinda emerges in which the technology (this piece of software) is at it's limits... the whole templating system was designed to fit together in a certain way (HTML tables) and really fights against being used any other way.
So I'm coming to believe that to solve both of these things, I need to remove the obstacle... vBulletin and traditional forum software. To create something new, something that works to filter the view of the forum to just the shit you're into, that simplifies interacting, that works on all devices as it should.
So I'm kinda thinking, there has to be a thing that could be created which can improve LFGSS so fundamentally that the 2 killer problems mentioned above just aren't problems.