Over the last month, I’ve been tinkering with a new user forum for the Spark. I’ve been trying out different software, fiddling around with options and plug-ins, taking a few stabs at the HTML and CSS templates I’ve found and generally spending a lot more time on it than is probably justified.
Some of you are probably thinking, “What was wrong with the old forum? It worked, didn’t it?”
Yes, it did. But it was glitchy, almost impossible to customize, offered almost no user-moderation, slow and offered almost no flexibility on the design side. I knew this when I installed it, and it was always intended to be a placeholder for a better forum to come.
And that forum — or at least a primitive version of it — is finally here. It’s online right now at SpartanburgSpark.com/forums, or you can navigate there from the menu.
As you’ll see, I’ve opted for bbPress, a newish forum software designed by the same people who created WordPress, the software that runs the Spark. It’s fast, extremely customizable, noted for its stability and, not surprisingly, quite compatible with WordPress.
The merits of the new forum software are many. Like WordPress, the development is open source, so there’s plenty of cool plug-ins and new features being developed all the time, all using an opt-in method preventing the whole thing from becoming slow. The user moderation is quite strong, giving us tools to keep trolling to a minimum. And since it’s designed to work with WordPress, it’s a lot less glitchy than some of the alternatives.
Of course, the Spark is running a very stripped-down version of the forum software. It’s quite rough, in fact, with visibly empty links and no sidebar widgets cluttering up the content. This is intentional. The idea is that, just like the development of the Spark itself, users will be able to make suggestions about the form and the function of the forum. Want to suggest a specific feature? We have a thread for that.
Another idea I’m hoping will prove useful — and originally a suggestion from a user — are specific sub-forums for the local colleges. Each of the six local institutions of higher learning now have their own place to discuss news, events, student issues and more. Other specific sub-forum suggestions are welcome.
There is one drawback to all this development: If you have a user account on the old Spark forums, you’ll have to re-register on the new ones. It only takes a moment, of course.
And for those of you who loved the old forum, I have good news. The content will stay up — for a few months, at least — at SpartanburgSpark.com/oldforums.
So, if you have a moment, take a look around the new forum and give me some feedback on what you like and what you’d like to see change. It’s supposed to be your forum, after all.
Steve Shanafelt
