Microcosm Feature Suggestions

What would happen if I register them by email myself?

"Hi [Person],

An account has been created for you at [Forum Name/].

Please click [link]this link[/link] to activate your account, or copy this address into your browser:

[activation url/]

If you didn't request an account and can't be tempted to take a look, we'll delete this account in about a month.

Thanks,
The [Forum name/] Team"

...Except this is going to be complicated by the fact that Microcosm uses Mozilla Persona rather than holding the details itself.

will test.

Good idea but won't work as they won't know the password setup and the message they receive is..

Click this link to confirm access to microcosm.app:
Confirm your address now
If you were NOT attempting this sign-in, please ignore this email.

Even if we provided the ability to create user accounts in advance, new users would still need to set a password. So an invite email would really only serve to inform them about the existence of the forum.

That might still be useful though, especially if users who aren't the forum owner can play a part in inviting new users.

Plus it's relatively accepted that creating some artificial scarcity can be good ("this forum is invite only, here's your invite"). If you want to go that route.

I don't see any implementation problems apart from the obvious rate limiting / spam protection.

ability to delete forums would be useful too
(forgot my github password)

To be honest im really confused by the whole 'create a forum' business.
Can anyone joining my site do that?
When a user creates content it is the most important thing in the world that everyone reads their thoughts.. why would they possibly not want to make a forum?

It means anything they write goes straight to the front page of the site.

If only admins can create forums.. why is it such a prominent button?
I don't need to create forums every five seconds, put the button in settings somewhere

You'll be pleased to know I found my github password.

Population
1People
1Online now
2Events
1Comments

Seems strange to describe events and comments as 'population'

Trending
Nothing is trending right now.

Why is none of my content trending.
Whats the algorithm for measuring content trend?

Why is none of my content trending.

Because you have insufficient traffic to rate any item above the rest.

So its calculated on page views alone?

That's not what he said, but if you haven't got any users then how can your content be trending with them? Content can't be measurably popular with people who don't exist.

If i don't know how it works, I can't test it.

bossman. will the search in mc be better? for example, searching for "meme" doesnt bring up the memes thread because it is plural, same for tattoo, project, etc.. would save me typing a lot of s's

Try adding an * at the end of any word, or portion of a word, and you'll get the results.

And yes, much better.

bossman. will the search in mc be better? for example, searching for "meme" doesnt bring up the memes thread because it is plural, same for tattoo, project, etc.. would save me typing a lot of s's

Yes and no.

Yes because in the example you gave it works much much better. The new search uses natural language techniques.

Let me show you:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=rides
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=riding

Those three searches being back the same results. The system understands that the word is effectively the same. Though things will be re-ordered so that the best match is at the top.

But in some ways it's worse.

For example if you need to precisely match the word "riding" it's going to be much harder to do so.

Hashtags will be able to precisely match, but I can't find an example of people using that yet.

It's also not going to do as good a job on non-English languages. The ability to recognise language requires a language pack and knowledge that a comment is written in a particular language.

It's all complex... but for the vast majority of searches, it will be much better. And for the edge case of highly specific searches, it will be worse.

I should also add that search is more linkable now, and can find anything in the same query:

Everything with "ride" in the title (no comments):
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride+inTitle:true

Only events with "ride" in the title:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride+type:event+inTitle:true

Only conversations with "ride" in the title:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride+type:conversation+inTitle:true

Only conversations and events with "ride" in the title:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride+type:conversation+type:event+inTitle:true

Everything with "saddle" in the title:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=saddle

You can see on that last one that forums are first in the list, then a conversation, then comments.

A more interesting one:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=Shannonball

That's the forum admin as the first result, and then any comment that has mentioned him.

Search is much easier, it's a single search tool, it's faster, it understands English, it is far better at putting the important things at the top.

But yeah... not ideal for exact matches.

Why are your search modifiers part of the search term? Surely &inTitle is easier to handle than having to extract them from the term...

Why are your search modifiers part of the search term? Surely &inTitle is easier to handle than having to extract them from the term...

Extensibility of the search system, and the ability to continue extending it even when third party clients exist that do not keep pace with the featureset of Microcosm.

Besides, text processing is cheap and we'd have to make sense of the query anyway.

Oh, and you can use querystring if you want to, but we'll normalise the query to a single form:

http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride&inTitle=true

is the same as:

http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride+inTitle:true

It also means that clients can get away with having a single search box or an advanced search page with lots of fields. Both will do the same thing.

Interestingly, I've just tried to log in with persona on the Islington.cc website and its got stuck in a loop.
It throws up the 'you've been logged out, please try again' page, but then I think auto-refreshes because persona is saying 'logged in'? Just goes round and round

Yeah, I just got the error alerts whilst walking around Sainsbury's.

It says your profile name is in use, and I suspect you were an original donor and that something between us automatically giving you the username and it trying to apply it has it confused and caused the error loop.

Ha, shit sorry about that

No worries.

Only a few people can trigger that... the investors. And only the first time you ever access a site, so it's just an edge case we don't encounter often.

With your events jobbies would it be possible to mark people as attended and also paid if it costs money and highlight the event afterwards if there are people who have attended but not paid? I guess marking them as paid would be done by the thread starter or someone they've given permission to do so.