I was one of the people suggesting we move forum discussions off of the main page because of the concern that people we direct to the site might be turned off by all of the political discussion. One issue that comes up still, though, is what about blogs?? Do we need to move those off of the front page too? Or maybe just to people's individual user pages?  But then the problem with this is that I'm so used to seeing new posts right away on the front page, that it seems laborious to have to go searching around to find the new posts (whether they be to blogs or forums).  Anyone have any ideas on what might work best for this?

My other question is how do we get more participation? We know some people recording music now that are planning to post when they are done, but it seems like minus the conversations there isn't a lot of activity. Do you all think that moving the discussions off of the front page will encourage other people to get involved more or do you have any other ideas on how to encourage participation?

And just a minor thing for the forum section--I really like seeing the time that the post was made and what forum it is in (under recent forum comments).

Here are some things that I am planning to do to the NoLessDays.org website.

• Change front page to be more welcoming and informative.
• Improve site navigation, making it easier to find contributed material as well as to become involved with the community.
• Improve the presentation of audio and audio albums.
• Improve the presentation of images/photos and photo albums.
• Make it easier to upload photos.
• Add a new content type for video.
• Enable users to flag their content as personal or general interest.  Personal posts (audio, video, blog, etc.) are targeted for friends and family and those wishing to become acquainted with the poster.  These personal posts would be accessible from a users personal page.
• Create a personal landing spot for each user.  This might be an improvement to the "Personal Sites" (currently being tested) or something new altogether, but essentially, it would be a way for a user to organize his or her own presentation on the website.
• Create subdomains that automatically link to personal pages.  For example, http://christopher.nolessdays.org would link to my personal page, http://adam.nolessdays.org would link to Adam's personal page.
• Improve the presentation of the forum overview
• Add spellcheck and improve the text editor into the site.
• Fix private messaging quotes.
• Create a new theme (the appearance of the site) that is unique, attractive, and better reflects who we are.

Any others?  I think I would be comfortable moving ahead with a formal site launch with these items in place.

 I like your todo list.  Good ideas. 

I'm not convinced about moving all forum posts and comments off the main page.  I had know Idea that anyghing was going on. I think it still needs to be available on the main page.  Blog posts also.  Maybe it could be someing like this:

Recent Forum Posts

Politics
Down with the depublicrats! 

Bible Study
Revelation Ch 45

Other
Ideas for celebrating Issac Asmov's birthday

Recent Blogs

etc etc

You get the idea.  I'm the type that just like to read everything that anybody writes.  Now i am a bit distressed because i need to figure out what posts I have missed :o)

If I have to go through and check in several different sections before I know if there is any new content. . . I don't know if I will keep up. . . donno

Glad you like the ideas.  Do you have any others?  Once we have a list of items, perhaps we should vote on what is most important, so we can prioritize them.

I thought the flames (not necessarily yours) were due to keeping the forum discussions on the front page -- it made it look like we were a political site.  Also "Site changes (please read)," I thought, made it clear that forums were now relegated to their own section.  Do you think it's clear now?

I agree that having a one stop page for all new content/comments is handy, I could provide a link to such a page at the bottom of the home page.  Would this satisfy you, Adam, and the rest of you all that like this feature (including myself)?

 I think we need to reformat the forum posts.  Witht he picture in it's own column on the left there is a lot of space wasted.  After a few replies the text box is so narrow that there is only one word per row.  

I'm not sure about the recent comment stuff.  I'm not convinced that it should be removed from the main page.  I think if we change our mission statement (to include that we discuss religioin, politics etc. and focus more on community and the exchange of thoughts) and maybe exercise a bit of restraint in the way we express our ideas (Not the ideas themselves) that they could stay.  What does everyone else think?  

At the bottom of your forum page, you should have "Comment viewing options."  Set this to "flat" instead of "threaded" if you have a small monitor.  Threaded forum posts makes it easy to see who replied to what, but does waste space.  I have changed the default setting for new users to be flat.  If folks think we should just force everything to be flat (many forums do) I can do that.

I have an idea for how we can better present NoLessDays.org; it is based somewhat on some of salaam's mock-ups of what the site could look like.  In a sense, it will create two different view of NoLessDays.org: one will present content of general interest, the other will present individuals and the community.  They will be closely linked, but the goal is to make a comfortable place for folks that just want the content.  The community side will be closely linked to encourage new participants, but not so blatant that they feel lost or confused.

I need to do some more work to flesh this plan out.  I'll be running it by salaam once it is done, and then I'll present it here for feedback.

What if rather than having the comments/titles listed, we could click a button that said "recent comments"?  And then the comments would list what forum or who's blog they were from. The way it was set up before, you didn't know what you were going to be reading about until you clicked on it.  Maybe people who have concerns about this could chime in...

I'm not sure if anyone else is seeing this conversation - Maybe you could put a big reminder on the main page to view check out the forum section.

Done.  Think it'll do?

This is reply to Somers post #1. Some thoughts. 

quote of the day:"Keeping up with this site is sorta like herding chickens" Anonymous,2009

Do you all think that moving the discussions off of the front page will encourage other people to get involved more or do you have any other ideas on how to encourage participation?

No. I think just telling people about the site (after some of the changes mentioned) is the best way to encourage people to participate. I think that the front page needs to be interesting and easy to navigate, and quick to load and then just let the cards fall where they may. I personally don't think the discussions were a problem. The only difference now is that you have to go looking for them.

Any way we could have a rss feed that you could click on to see if there is new content? I do this for LRC blog and it is real convient.

Experiment with this, http://www.nolessdays.org/posts/rss, it give all the latest posts, but not the latest comments.  Would you want a separate feed for comments?  How would you envision posts and comments appearing in a feed?

Could recent posts and comments appear together in one list by order of date posted. The feed you have works great for me. With one click I can see if any post is new,or if I have already viewed it. In my mind this solves some problems.  but it would help if the comments were included in the list. Not sure how this works but, it would show the latest entry regardless of what or where it was.