wab said:
Yeah, I'm with you on making it self-maintaining somehow. Some boards have the ability to let users assign critical rankings to posts and threads. Ideally, you'd be able to make an automated list sorted on those rankings.
It's been a while, but I looked into this before. The board software has a karma feature, but if I recall correctly it's to rate users, not posts. It's currently disabled.
(Warning: if you think tech talk is painful or otherwise boring, skip the next two paragraphs, then I start talking like a human again.)
(going a bit techie here) SMF, the board software, is written in PHP and extensible through user-contributed modules or end-user recoding, but aside from the initial effort to make changes there are potential problems during future upgrades, template changes and disaster recovery that are much more complex than if you stick with the basic software package.
(going off on a techie tangent) I've been giving a fair bit of thought lately to this and similar (e.g. adding new function to a site while maintaining the same user authentication data) problems--for dynamic website building in general, not necessarily for this board. These packaged tools such the various forum software I reviewed in April are relatively easy to install, set up and maintain for a particular purpose, but are difficult to customize and maintain the customizations...customizations are basically forking the project and updating involves backporting the projects' updates. For the tech-savvy web builder I'm thinking the answer is a more generalized toolset with a stable API (I'm looking at Zope and Plone now and will check out Tomcat/J2EE/jboss/Struts/etc. soon) so you can customize and have much less worry about updating software affecting the customization. It's more difficult to set up and takes more knowledge, but it should be much more extendable, scalable and--with respect to customizations--maintainable.
(back to normal talk) In short, I'm reluctant to take it upon myself to go far outside the bounds of the current board software partially due to laziness and partially with an eye towards ongoing maintenance. But my word isn't the only word or even the last word. It's dory36's board, server and domain name. I'm just helping out because I think it's a great site and dory36 was stupid enough to let me help
.
I was going to pooh-pooh post rankings because they tend to get used for political and other polarized debates, but even so I recall a number of useful posts getting "rec'ed" to the top at TMF, so it may be a useful feature still. I don't recall seeing an available mod for that, but maybe I'll check again. If the mods appear to be "bolt-on", then I'm not too afraid of them. If they involve much integration I get scared off real quick.
