Topic Type
Information

Hi folks, I spent a couple of hours doing maintenance and fixing a nasty bug on the Tool profiles that was preventing tools from getting new images and in some case resulting in the Tool not having an image (Fido finally got its new logo!). I've posted this note to a new Tool, the "Online Farm Hack Tools" Tool. It's sandboxed for now. What do you think of making this Tool official?

Here are a couple of ideas as for goals related to this tool:

  • I could move all of the questions and problems reported in the other website related forums to this new Tool Forum. This would be "eating our own dog food".
  • A place for people to find how-to's related to the website
  • A place for other developers and designers to get involved in making the website better.

Completed

  • security updates pushed
  • disappearing node form fixed when upload a new image on Tool profiles
  • Online Farm Hack Tools page created

Possible next items to do

  • Polish the "Online Farm Hack Tools" Tool wiki
  • consolidate the forums talking about the website and community
  • fix the www. issue
  • expose subscriptions metrics in UI
  • Call a Tool a wiki+forum, disable creating loose wiki pages, it's a tool if it's tagged as a Tool?
  • disable the Tool forums from showing up in Forums list?
  • implement Star for Wiki pages and forums
  • blog: sub guide
  • blog: advanced wiki guide
Forums
Online Farm Hack Tools
Forum comment

Hi RJ, I wanted to suggest what i think is one other quick/easy edit - having forums sort themselves by Date Modified. I think we talked about this before but wanted to make sure it was on your radar. I also support your question marked ideas to make the tools pages a wiki + forum and remove the separate tool forums, and also support the new streamlined suggestions/troubleshooting under this new tool page. Thanks for doing this!
Forum comment

@Kristen Loria - Check out the http://farmhack.org/activity page I made. It consists of a 3 descending chronological lists of Comments, Wiki edits, and Forum Topics. I would like to merge all 3 of these lists into one big list, perhaps formatted like the Timeline you often see on Facebook. (see attached image) 1. Posts are grouped by time frame depending on what "makes sense". For example, if there was a bunch of posts in two separate weeks then each week will get their own grouping. If there was only a few posts in those two weeks, they would be grouped together as something like "Early November". 2. Similar posts with little amounts of information are often grouped together to save space. The the strength of the current /forum page over the /activity page is that it might be easier to remember how to get back to where you were and how to get to your area of interest. The answer here might be to just have both. Let the user decide which one they want to see.
Forum comment

Yes, I think the "both" conclusion is probably the way to go - let people view it all merged, or sort into the three streams. Depending on whether you are just browsing or searching for a specific update, both formats would be highly useful.