Well I’m happy with the 24 hr function which I saved to my favorites and actually I wish I would have checked that earlier because now I can see everything at a glance. I haven’t tried the other ways yet, but I’ll check it out later.. When I first signed onto Train Board I was told it was a great N-Scale site and given a link directly to N scale which I set as my favorite. It was probably 6 months before I discovered the rest of TrainBoard after I posted something that got moved to another forum. Instead of being happy, I was disappointed because I thought now I’m going to have to navigate through a maze of folders trying to find my way around and worst yet try to remember how I got there. As far as the groups went I quit that all together, because it was a pain to have to manually subscribe to each thread I posted which I thought should be automatic. I had a few posts that I thought went unanswered because I wasn’t receiving any notification of any new posts and never navigated back to check.
I'm a site admin for a forum that is completely unrelated to trains. We moved from vB3.x to vB 4.x some time ago. I'm going to tell you right now that Trainboard feels like the Dark ages now. Not the color scheme, the functionality. vBulletin 4.x and it's entire CMS is just great. Trust me, once you learn to use all the changes, you will never ever go back. And I would not under any circumstances suggest going to a different vendor for Forum software. vB is still the best. Nothing else comes close. AS for finding posts. I obviously have no idea how its planned here, but with vB 4.x you can have the main landing page (Home in the default) aggregate post from the forum, the blogs and groups along with articles if you have them. In its default form, vB4.x will be worlds better. I'm sure the Trainboard staff will make that even better. Now, there is one thing I really don't like in the way the current forums work and that's the way The Ready Track works under "Today's Railroads." It appears to be both a "folder" and a forum and that grates on me. Also, because of it's special status, it does not show when there are new posts in it. A couple upgrades ago, it didn't have this problem and it got a lot more posts. Now it's a red headed stepchild that behaves completely differently from the rest of the forum. It is irksome A few other notes, and I've mentioned this before. My preference for mobile support from most desired to least is 1: Tapatalk 2: Auto redirect to mobile friendly version 3: Mobile Skin Tapatalk, especially now that it supports moderation really is better than any other scheme out there.
This is just a matter of comfort level. I've been using forums since 1998 and they've all followed the same basic structure as trainboard. I just assume that I'll navigate through multiple folders, because that's what one does.
I have two requests: (and I don't really care which software is used, although I'm interested in mobile access features) 1. Please either eliminate or shorten the 30 second timeframe between searches. I'm apparently the minority, but I hit up against this at least a dozen times every time I visit the site. Most of the time I just give up and go to another site. I doubt your advertisers would like that. (in general that is, they might like to see me leave...lol) 30 seconds is an eternity when you are trying to find things on the web. 2. Please eliminate the requirement for 3 characters in searches. This makes it impossible to search for BN, NS, MP, NP, etc. I know these are security measures, but I don't have these issues on other sites so there's obviously another way.
I must agree that the 30 second search drives me a bit nuts to. I don't use it much but when I run into that I tend to start looking elsewhere. I cannot imagine why the site would restrict the searches to 3 charactors or more with all the railroad abreviations. I never had tried it. I wonder what SP would show?:tb-wacky:
We are looking at July right now. We are hiring a gentleman to work with us on this that has helped us before on major projects and we are waiting our chance for his time as he is very busy. Charlie
Guys, I understand your thinking but this is a little more complex. The search feature is certainly not perfect, and like everything, will continue to be improved, but let me explain; When you search for something, there is a pre-defined search "index" that is searched for what you are looking for. This index is rebuilt daily by an automated feature. It is designed to look for "words." And, the larger it is, the longer searches will take and the more cumbersome the process. If we were to index two letter words (which would undoubtedly be handy for railroad purposes) it would be something like this. This is a test sentence. Th hi is is a te es st se en nt te en nc ce. That is how it would index that sentence, and every word/sentence on the site. This would make the search index many times larger than it is now. Plus, it would make the results convoluted. There are not a lot of words with the letters BN in them but use UP. How many words have the letters UP in them? That's what you would get. I don't know how else to explain it but I don't think it's possible. Charlie
Charlie, well I understand if the index size is critical to you guys, with finite disk space. But it's certainly possible since every other forum I participate in can accomplish this. It's particulary troublesome since I'm a BN guy. (it wasn't too long ago that you wouldn't allow 3-letter searches and maybe even 4. I know I couldn't search for MKT either, before.)
You can leverage "Google" if you need two character searches by narrowing the search results to TrainBoard only. Here's how: in Google's search bar, type (with quotes) "BN" site:TrainBoard.com You can further sort by date or narrow results by date range if you need. Because the Google results are not real time and relies on their system to search TrainBoard (and everyone else) you won't get every result. But it does do okay in a pinch. I believe the same syntax will work with "BING" if that is your preferred internet search engine - same caveats apply. Regards, -Mike
Everyone, The upgrade is now days away. You will notice a further stripping away of features in advance of the upgrade. Please be patient. The site will be improving. Charlie
Daddy, Daddy, are we there yet? Looking forward to it. The Frisco site looks like a pretty good way to go.
