Things I miss about the old Google groups

[DrRob]

Hi,

The new forum has some nice features, but there are some things I already miss about the old Google groups version. Is it possible to reproduce these with the new forum?

• Forward new posts to me by email, so that I get notifications on my phone and/or whichever PC I'm using - Update: just bookmark the forum page and poll the Board index page for updates when you've time to catch up
• Lets me apply a GMail "ShapeOko" label to the forwarded emails automatically, so that I can separate them from other emails - Update: don't need this if don't need the above
• Allow me to reply to messages via email, rather than having to use the web interface - Update: don't need this if don't need notifications by email
• Operates a the full speed of Google's servers. Isn't slow when the ShapeOko server instance is slow. - Update: speed seems ok so far
• Remembers which posts I have viewed centrally, so I don't have to read them again when I view from a different device. - Update: If you're logged in and follow the "unread posts" steps below, this works
• Highlights the specific messages that I haven't read yet, not just whole threads with new messages in them (maybe the forum is doing this, but I haven't spotted the formatting?) - Update: look for red icons on the Board index page, then the little red "unread posts" icons inside each forum

Rob.

ps. Sorry to whine... - Update: no longer whining.

[edwardrford]

I'm missing the same feature set! My hope is that the convenience of searching and posting inline pictures, along with some organization of topics will ultimately make up for some of the shortcomings!

There are about 1,000,000 MODs for the forum, which I'm sure a couple of which are actually useful. we'll start looking around for some solutions to your punch list.

-Edward

[Tom Smith]

Hi DrRob - you can do these things!

If you are logged in to the board, your read/unread posts are shown (look for the Red colour on the Forum title, or click on one of the "View unanswered posts • View unread posts • View new posts • View active topic" links along the top of the Forum box.

You can also subscribe to the different forum topics which should notify you of new messages; I am not sure precisely how that notification appears, but I suspect it is email?

You could then apply the "ShapeOko" label to those mails in GMail, based on the address or subject.

Speed, well, yes, not too much can be done about that for free, I think

Hopefully you can get it working to your requirements, I think that all the features you ask for are available.

Tom

[edwardrford]

Good information Tom!

- Would anyone be interested in turning on RSS? It's not something I use, but if others do, then we can enable it.
- Also, I bumped the instance size up a notch, so the "slow" times should be less slow than before. If it continues to be a problem I'll bump it up again.
- You may have noticed the new ads at the top of the page. I'm hoping those generate enough revenue to pay for the instance size change. If not, I'll figure something else out.

Keep the suggestions coming!

-Edward

[Tom Smith]

Edward - I would give a resounding "Yes" vote for RSS - this allows for a great deal of extra notification options in newsreaders that I personally use all the time.

I don't see any ads, but I don't mind them, particularly if the revenue they generate helps to offset the costs of running the board.

Tom

[edwardrford]

Thanks for the support Tom.

- I don't mind ads either. CNCzone is flooded with ads. After a while you don't even notice them. And sometimes you do if they're interesting to you. Seems like a win win to me.
- Regarding not seeing the ads, that might be a cache issue that will resolve itself with time.
- RSS is on now. Verified with reader.google.com and it appears to be working.

-Edward

[Enraged]

Is it possible to make them targeted ads? So primarily cnc-related? I don't need 50% weight loss for women or help finding singles in my age group lol

[edwardrford]

I think there are things I could do to tell the crawlers what content to target and what not to, but the site is full of relevant data, so going through the HTML markup hassle doesn't seem worth it.

I'm assuming in a few days all we'll see are CNC ads.

There is a lot of good adsense information on this page, specifically look at the left column: https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/ ... 07454&rd=1

[jsbannis]

I almost exclusively checked the google group from my phone. From my 5-minute search it looks like there are mods available to enable automatic mobile site viewing. I don't know how stable the mods are, but I'd like to vote that one be turned on if possible

[DrRob]

Hi,

Partially answering my own points:

• I've subscribed to all of the top-level forums on this board, but haven't received any emails. In any case, it seems that all this does is tell you there a new message to read, rather than send the new message by email. The main benefit of having the old groups messages emailed to me was that I could reply to them by email - there's little point in receiving emails if that's not possible.
• I saw that the circular icon on the forums on the main index turns red when there's a new message, but missed that there is also a tiny red icon beside that, and if you click that then it jumps you straight to the next unread message in that forum. Unread messages also have the little icon beside them.
• This record of readness (is that a word?) does appear to be stored centrally, which is good because it means I can read the messages from various different devices. Did that change? I'm sure it wasn't that way at first, but it wouldn't be the first time I've missed something .

Being able to jump straight to unread messages was the main thing I was missing, so this is workable for me now. I can live without the emailed notifications. I'll just poll the forum when I have a spare moment.

One slightly confusing thing - we've called this the "ShapeOko Forum", but phpBB refers to the whole thing as a bulletin board, which contains multiple forums.

It looks like if you want to post an image in a message you have to host the image somewhere and paste its URL. With the old groups I could simply paste a photo into an email (when posting or replying via GMail - not sure about the web interface to the groups).

Rob.