Re: Hi there - is my free Nabble forum going to have advertising on it?

Posted by GregChapman on May 26, 2015; 7:46pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Hi-there-is-my-free-Nabble-forum-going-to-have-advertising-on-it-tp7594848p7594882.html

Hi Deanna,

Deanna Freedom wrote

No there's no confusion about what to expect and I understand why it happens.

Fair enough. When posting here I never know at what level to pitch a response. Check responses to some of my posts and you see I frequently get it wrong and offend.

the same problem would occur if you navigate away from the thread you're on and then go Back.

I don't understand what you mean by "the same problem"?

Similarly to refreshing, if you go forward, follow a link, and then go back using the browser's Back function,

Ah! I avoid "Back" buttons like the plague. I am unusual in that I always wheel-click links on any site to open links in new tabs, so I never encounter your back button problem.

If you're on p15 of a deeply nested discussion, this would be inconvenient. That's what I was thinking. I don't know whether Nabble opens links in the same tab or not, BTW - just thinking of possible issues.

I think you'll find the solution to that is "Threaded View", rather than classic, though depending on the complexity of the topic, some might prefer the simpler "List" view.

Actually, replying now I've just realised how this is somewhat like writing a piece of HTML text, since it inserts HTML code for smileys and formatting, etc.  I've just thought how important reply composition is for newbies.

Others have raised this issue. You'll find topics and potential solutions for it by editing the NAML code to introduce an external editor, but from what I've read of those topics the results are not ideal. They include:
http://support.nabble.com/Images-being-stored-on-Froala-instead-of-my-site-tp7592421.html
http://support.nabble.com/Foala-editor-implementation-questions-tp7592373.html

I have found that newbies don't bother with any formatting at all, other than inserting pictures and I always have to provide FAQs to help people out. e.g.
http://seahawk-forum.968426.n3.nabble.com/Inserting-Images-in-the-Forum-tp1599211.html 

I think what I'm doing now - editing this without deliberately making it HTML Format - would be hard for them. It's pretty hard for me. But it's probably not that much worse than most. I'm trying to remember if Proboards have a wisiwig editor.

Apart from those I see in this forum who are clearly used to coding HTML I don't think I have ever seen a user ever attempt inserted quoting as you (and I) are doing.

I find that in 99% of forums, topic posts are a brief and don't require more than a one paragraph answer. Where someone makes a long post with a number of points and people choose to reply to all the points in the original message, they reply with a number of paragraphs in similar style to the original author with no quoting at all. The original text appears immediately above in the Classic view forum, so there is no problem with this for new forum users who comes to the topic later. The whole thing is simple to read straight down the page.

The only issue comes when the administrator decides that topic-drift has set in and it requires splitting, but there are menu options for this in Nabble for a user with administrator status that are relatively straight forward to use.

[re mixed topic and sub-forums]

I navigated to a number of examples of Nabble forums and they were almost all like that. I did try to get my head round pinning forums, and then tried the feature out. I'm still confused by what my forum did, but would probably get it with more sub-forums and longer use. I would probably not post topics in the top level - that's the way I like a forum organised -if you have sub-forums, make the index page just a list of them (or at least just a few admin-type announcement posts).

I think I encountered the problem you describe. I confess I do not use Nabble's "Forum" application for the top level on any of my sites. I abandoned it long ago in favour of "Mixed" and "Category", though I can see that "Board" might work for some. Category and Board remove posting at the top level automatically. With Mixed, you need to adjust the User Permissions, to avoid posts at the top level, but once done a user who used the "New Topic" link at the top of the page is presented with a list of sub-forums in which they are permitted to post and they must select one before they reach the composition screen. It's a system that works very well for even newbie users.

Website Toolbox (WT).

I'll take a look!

To me it looks superior in several ways. The WT embedded forum was very nicely formatted on my tiny smartphone. The Nabble one was unreadable without pinching and scrolling about. Maybe something else fixable with NAML code.

There are the "Responsiveness" options which improve things on a small screen, but they are not perfect yet. Much can depend on the site in which the forum is embedded. I have not yet optimised my SeaHawk site, and the forum suffers accordingly. However, my Muddy Broad Blues Band site is Google classified "Mobile Friendly" and works well enough (Unfortunately, as a casual visitor you won't see much of the forum and can only read what's there, not post.)
[Re: Nabble]

I've noticed something interesting about the navigation. If you jump straight to a sub-forum or topic from an email notification or whatever, you can browse from there and the address bar shows the non-embedded version of the forum, so it refreshes correctly. But the breadcrumb links at the top start with your main site's page title, like "Site Forum >> News >> Announcement of Something". As soon as you go to the main site link, the browser address shows that address, and any further navigation through the forum doesn't change that, so you lose the normal Refresh.

You have not discovered the "Redirect to:" option on the "Embedding options" page. Use that to keep your forum permanently embedded, otherwise, you can easily jump out of embedding (especially if you wheel-click all links like me) and, as you have discovered you, from an subscription email, you won't get sent to the forum in its embedded state.  Whether you see redirection  as a benefit or disadvantage depends greatly on how your audience interacts with the forum and whether you promote your forum as a mail list archive or forum.

I'm really starting to wonder if "the same look and feel" is really worth the downside of embedding.

Keep experimenting. You haven't explored or come to terms with all the possibilities yet.

I confess I think your emphasis on reloading a page unusual. My belief is that most people never use it in their day to day browsing any more than they use the browser's "Back" button. Since the mid-1990s, when menus became the norm for navigation around sites, most people don't even use the back button, except in highly specialist cases.

I'm not saying Nabble is the ultimate answer to all possible users. In the end you may decide it is not for you. It depends on your audience. It's true that as an ordinary user, you do have to be a bit techie to take advantage of some of its options , but in my experience, 99.9% of forum users and 50% of forum administrators are not techies and in day to day use use their forum at only the most basic level, not even using bold or italic text and doing nothing more than insert pictures when posting.