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

Posted by Deanna Freedom on May 27, 2015; 9:24am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Hi-there-is-my-free-Nabble-forum-going-to-have-advertising-on-it-tp7594848p7594898.html

Hi Greg - no offence taken. Since I thought I was on my way out of nabble very soon after asking the original question, I thought further discussion would be pointless, but I have to say it has been very useful describing my thought process to you and getting your feedback. I'm responding more as an average Joe today, hit Reply and type. :) This has reminded me that I am a 'power user' when it comes to the client end of things, and my programming background skews my approach as well, even though I'm still struggling with Web protocols and stopped trying to keep up with HTML once everything went dynamic. I tried writing a website using CSS and hated it and still hate it. OTOH, I've done so much discussion on the major forum platforms, I've got an AutoHotkey script running all the time that I use to insert things like "[/quote]...some carriage returns and....[quote]" which in php boards is great for splitting a quoted post, ending a quoted paragraph and starting another, so you can type a reply in between. I've never seen a button for that, and I'm amazed nobody has programmed one - there you go, Nabble, a free gift from me! The usual quote button, putting them the other way round, is intuitive, but actually less useful, unless you copy and paste the original text, then start quoting passages, or remove the overall quoting from a quoted post.

Long story short, yes, these forum choices are horses for courses, and I'm pretty sold on Website Toolbox. Not only do they invest a minimum effort into keeping up with docs, they responded to my email query about the "Refresh" problem and the URL in the address bar. They're working on a fix in the next 30 days, meanwhile offered to do it manually for me and posted a link to a help page on creating a CNAME record for a subdomain so that you can tweak your forum's address (more homework!). Not only that, every time I open the help pages, now that I'm an admin of a forum, a chat invitation pops up at the bottom of the browser, and someone has answered a question for me there - all this while I'm on the free trial version. I'm not sure what the advertising will be like if/when it arrives, but the allotments association can probably afford $4 a month to avoid them if we don't like them. I'm also tempted by Proboards from earlier familiarity, but they used to serve unobtrusive text ads, which were also related to the content of the forum (in fact, when I suggested clubbing in to remove them, my users said they were helpful and to keep them!) - I don't know what they've got now to select subjects, but they're horrible banner ads (again, I've got AdBlocker running in my Firefox, but most people don't).

Besides, now it seems the embedding issues are fixable, I can't see much wrong with WT, but of course they won't suit everyone's needs or tastes. One thing missing, for instance, as far as I can see, is being able to reply to any post in a topic - you just reply to the whole thing (although you can quote any post). So there might be some of those "Sorry, I was talking to Steve" moments when people are posting at the same time. I don't see any seamless logins yet for social media, but who knows what's in the pipeline, and I kind of dislike Fartbook and Twatter and Gaggle owning the Web anyway. You can send people invites to a WT forum, so all they have to do is click on a link and think of a password.

Threaded views, mixed views, etc. are probably less likely to be used and more confusing to non-techies than quoting or posting pictures, but savvie audiences might like them. If I was starting with an email list, Nabble would probably be a no-brainer.

Thanks again
D