Actually, you can never see the first post of a thread, just scroll down and you can see that it continues past what is shown. Just saying.

Forumbuildr is going to have a thing where we create the posts, it hasn’t even been a week since it came out and you’re already complaining about wanting a feature that will be here in a few days.

Evil Trout Posted:

Dec 19th: Update

I demoed the work-in-progress version of the forum building application to the team on Monday and they loved it. A lot of the hard work is done, but there’s still some small problems to solve before I’ll throw it out for you guys to use.

Here’s a screenshot of the current version:

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What you’re looking at is the main page of the app, which we’re currently calling ForumBuildr v2.0 BETA.

In the right column, you can see ideas for next week’s build. The numbers in blue are those that you’ve already voted on. The yellow one has controls for you to vote it up or down.

At the end of the week, the highest voted idea will automatically be chosen, then it appears in the left column as shown as the one everyone works on for the week. As you can see, there are three bumons which lead to sub pages, where you can vote on those elements and add your own.

When you’re submitting material to make up the forum you’re encouraged to “Madlib” it. In other words, replace certain words with variables that are later replaced with a random word. The editor looks like this:

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You are given a big text area to add content. If you put a code to insert a random word (example: @species) the site will do a random replacement before it’s shown.

There’s a lot of text explaining this, a search for words and a set of inspirations on the right. There are other fun codes you can use for generating random numbers and emoticons and stuff too.

We’ll be launching with about 100 random word types for you to use and will be adding more as time goes on.

As for the release date, I wanted to put it out this week, but I’ve got some XMAS parties and stuff coming up. The weekend or early next week is seeming more likely to me now for the first version Log in to see images! Hamelin edited this message on 12/27/2007 11:33AM

It’s a valid point, and one that we knew about very early in development of Forumwarz. It came down to an issue of the effort required to build a forum.

We just didn’t have the resources to come up with thread titles and then populate them with an entire discussion, so we made the choice to have generic types of discussions underneath a thread.

The ForumBuildr works the same way as the Forumwarz engine so it has the same limitation for now. However, if we find that people are using it a lot and creating a lot of content (the ideas have exceeded my expectations already), then we could make it so that the typical posts belong to a thread title.

The coding required for that wouldn’t be hard, so it’s really an issue of how many people are using it. I think we’ll know in the first couple of forums we build how much effort people are willing to put into it. If it’s high, mark my words, we will make it more comprehensive in the future.