Lose the big warning box and...

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thanks for posting that screenshot, @chimak111. You saved me the effort!

Honestly, I can see how it would scare people away. Someone who's maybe not super-familiar with KFN, but could help new guys, and they go to that board and see that huge, glaring warning...they might run!

@claydoh, thanks for the info about the @username thing. It's certainly not a necessity, it's just that it's such a...normal part of online life now, it feels odd not having it here.

[chimak111]

I can't remember visiting that forum *directly* for quite a while.

In any case, I mostly have my own CSS and so wouldn't have noticed the colors:

[jglen490]

I agree with DoYouKubuntu on the big yellow box with red letters that shows above the "Help the New Guy" forum - when you're an "old guy" with more than 10 posts. I think it could be toned down a bit

[claydoh]

Not sure what you mean by the yellow and red warning, I can't see anything like that while not logged in. I can't recall my 'fake' account for things like this, looking for it now.


as to @user tagging, it is definitely not a standard feature in the version of Vbulletin we use here, though there is a third party addon, that seems to break some forums . It would be nice to have, i am sure.
The latest version of Vbulletin has this iirc, but I am not sure how well upgrading to that version will go, or why we never upgraded to it . We do have a lengthy history to migrate, so maybe it is not worth the risk at the moment?

There are a LOT of forums still using the outdated 4.x version of the forum software, as we are (LQ, iirc, as one example of a major forum), and most I have been to don't seem to have the @user tagging. I know this may be a performance issue for some forums running on less resources, or very busy ones. While we are a dinky forum, we should have enough horsepower for such a feature, I'd venture.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Two things I'd love to see:

1) Lose the big, yellow and red warning on "Help the New Guy." I KNOW I'm not allowed to post new threads there, nor do I want to, but I've seen the warning already! I don't need to see it every time I go there. Although my skills have really declined in the recent past, for reasons I couldn't control, on the rare occasions when I feel I might be able to contribute something useful to a new user, I'm met with that big glaring warning. How about having a user acknowledge it, once, then make it go bye-bye?

2) All other forums I use respect the @username model, i.e., making @username a clickable object, and recognizes members' user names. It looks downright weird to me here, when I type @whatever and no pop-up appears with a list of matching names as I'm typing, and it doesn't become clickable afterward. I know some people don't like this...although I don't really understand that. This ubiquitous part of online life today seems glaringly missing here.

My $0.02 worth, for whatever that's worth!