I see that bboard package is being rewritten, and a lot of old functionality seems to be gone. Can somebody give a rationale why it was bad to

• categorize threads (well I haven't checked if it's still an option in the package but at least you dropped it in this forum)
• have a list of recently answered questions / answered since last visit (when was this feature dropped, long ago?)
• being able to search the forum (now it finds only separate postings and not threads; not very usable)
How is the forum supposed to be a useful resource if you are dropping features making it an archive rather than an ephemeral chat?

I'll look into the display of the subject in replies. It is only supposed to display if it is different.

We are moving forward, and while we are gaining easier integration of packages, some features have been left out.

Thanks for pointing out features that you would like to see added to the system. Please be sure to read the forums to see if the issue you are asking about has alrady been discussed.

I really would like to see people submitting these requests to the bugtracker for the web site. You can check to see if an item has already been requested. This makes it much easier for volunteers who want to help out to pick one item and fix it.

This is an open source community, and as such anyone who has something to contribute can submit bug reports, feature requests and patches to the bugtrack at http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs.org/ for features or bugs that relate directly to this web site or http://openacs.org/bugtracker/opeancs/ for the OpenACS toolkit.

All the code that runs this web site is available for download from the CVS repository and browsable at http://openacs.org/cvs/

We know that this web site needs work, but we felt it was very important to have OpenACS.org running on the latest version of the code. I think it is great that we now have the code that runs the site available for developers to learn from. So while we have issues to deal with in migrating the site, everyone in the community will benefit. Very soon we will post the scripts and procedures we used to  migrate from OpenACS 3.2 to OpenACS 4.6. This will be very useful also.

So thanks again for commenting on the site, but please be patient with us while we work through this together.

if you want bboards features (categorization, list of recently answered questions, etec.) use the bboard package on 4.6 - it hasn't gone anywhere and works great. If you want forums features (integration with notifications, better graphical customization, threaded views) use forums on 4.6. If you want the features of bboard to be present in forums please feel free to contribute the code needed to do this... your first and second points shouldn't be hard to implement (especially the second one that would be trivially easy), the third one may be a bit trickier.

I learn right now that there is a package called "bboard" and a package called "forums". I am curious to learn what they are, and so go to the documentation section. I find two columns; on the right of the page there is a list of packages: installed packages and uninstalled packages.
Some of the packages are in blue, and others are in black.
What is the difference? Also, I cannot find a link to the documentation of "forums"; is the documentation not available or, as always, am I too new to this world not to be able and find it?

The column that gives the date and time for "Last Post" doesn't work as advertized... It shows the date and time of the FIRST post in the thread, not the last post. The Last Post time is more useful.

Should this be reported elsewhere?

-Bob

I think we have address all the original concerns on the first message in this thread except the "new since last visit" feature.

Like categorization, this would be better as a sitewide service, rathar than being forums specific. This new site will be containing much more dynamic content than the 3.x based site, so this will become more important.

I understand that many of you are very skilled and busy. Thus I refrain a little from disturbing. Nevertheless I need to understand some basic things, in order to eventually make some further little steps. In case somebody read these lines, and is willing to help me with the unanswered questions I posted earlier on this thread, I would be happy.

In addition to what Jeff said, if you have already seached these forums without finding answers to your questions, please do post them.  Everyone is busy, but I'm sure someone will try to help you.  You can use the API documentation web interface (at http://openacs.org/api-doc/ or your installation) if you are comfortable reading source code comments and the package you are interested in is installed and enabled.