Nabble - Nabble Feature Requests

Re: private forum

2008-12-02T06:28:29Z

Will, any progress on this? Thanks

David

Will L <Nabble> wrote:

Thanks for the offer, but I don't think it will make much difference. We have a very limited resource so we have to stick to our priorities. 99% of our existing users are public forum/archive users, so we are working on several important features to make them happy. As for private forum users, we had a few requests, and we know we will do them, but it's just timing. We would do them now if we have more programmers, but at the current speed, I think we may get to them in 3 to 4 months - that's the best we can do.

Fixed width font option

2008-11-29T02:08:06Z

First, thanks for a great site!

Most of the forums I read often include code snippets and/or data that are best viewed in a fixed with font. It would be great to have some option available to switch all or some forums to a fixed width font from the account settings.

Thanks,

Cameron Bracken

Re: problem in data storage

2008-10-08T21:44:57Z

This forum is for Nabble support only. Please post your question to the correct forum.

problem in data storage

2008-10-01T20:10:56Z

Hi,

I have 7 rows and columns of data and the first thing would be string and other would be numbers, but these are available in a single text file, how to read these data's and store them seperately.

Thanks before hand

Graphical Limitation Options

2008-08-22T04:26:24Z

The main aspect of a forum is the posts people make. The text is the selling point of a forum.
However, people sometimes feel the need to "decorate" their posts with colours, smileys, pictures or unresonable fonts and font sizes, which serve no purpose but to make the post harder to decipher. I would propose a number of optional limitations that an owner or admin can put in place to ensure that the post is always readable.

The first option that would be nice would be to disallow HTML formatting in posts. The bold and italics buttons that are by default on the create a post interface are enough to make a point, in my opinion.

Secondly, having the option to disallow smileys, I would like. If this seems too tyrannical, it might be nice to at least have the option to change the smileys, to fit better with a customised forum theme.

Thirdly, and lastly, I would like the option to place similar limitations pn signatures. Ideally, I would like to entirely disallow images in signatures, as all that is really needed in signatures is a name, perhaps a tagline and a link to a website, at the most. Anything more is unnecessary and gets in the way of the post text.

Thank you, and sorry if my proposals seem too tyrannical, I just hope to achieve a more formal looking forum.

Simplify SF.net list addition.

2008-08-21T09:41:52Z

Hi,

There are many SF.net projects that are not present on Nabble. In many cases the users don't know how to setup the fields on Nabble.
Since so many projects are present on SF.net, and since all are the same (use the same SF.net infrastructure for mailing lists), why not totally automate the process and ask from the user only the project name?

I think this would open Nabble to many new projects.

Thank you,

Demetrios.

Put an Advanced Search link on every page

2008-08-13T06:53:05Z

Nabble's Advanced Search is excellent! However, it's very hard to find. In fact, I need it right now, but am unable to find the link.

So even if my request isn't granted, could someone post the link here?

Re: Private Nabble installation

2008-05-01T06:18:46Z

This would be awesome to have as the current embedding is unfortunately quite awkward.

Re: Archive Statistics -

2008-05-01T06:15:40Z

I'd like to add my vote to this one too - even if it's just in the form of being able to include our Google Analytics tracking JavaScript.

Re: Permalinks that can be computed on client side

2008-03-24T18:12:09Z

This is something I've posted about before. Haven't they added this to the mail subject or something? It seems like there is a permalink now (it's been a small while since I've had Thunderbird set up for my feeds; I'll have to do that soon), however, the link might not be obvious; look around your subject and such; I think it's there (or at least the forum link; I'm not sure which it is). Tell me if I'm wrong. Maybe I misunderstood your issue.

Private posts/forums

2008-03-24T18:08:44Z

I'm certainly not requesting for all posts/forums to be private, but I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to allow the functionality. By private, I mean you have to be logged in to see it (and it also won't be indexed by search engines).

Also, the ability to make a forum only visible to users upon invitation would be cool (i.e. for a private book club, writer's group, or such).

One plus to private forums for Nabble specifically is that mailing lists might not complain about being on Nabble as much if people had to log in, or be invited.

Don't get me wrong, I love public forums. I'm mostly suggesting this because it could be useful at times for some people (including me once in a while, though I mostly prefer the public sort).

A private book club is something I want to do, though. This could also be good for something like a family forum (just for the family/relatives).

To make it easy on people, though, I highly recommend the ability for users to request entrance into private forums (that way the creator doesn't have to keep track of who all they've invited and such).

Re: Issue - Message is Pending in the Flexcoders forum

2008-03-13T21:54:57Z

thanks, now i am able to post, it takes some time (as you said a around two days).

Re: Issue - Message is Pending in the Flexcoders forum

2008-03-13T15:02:18Z

I just checked and it seems to have gone through without a problem. In general, mailing list post make a take some time to go through. So if you see the pending status, give it a day or two to go through.

Permalinks that can be computed on client side

2008-03-13T09:39:44Z

First of all, thank you for this great service. Nabble has been invaluable to me.

Now, here's my feature request.

One of the things I like about Nabble is the easy-to-discover permalinks to messages. I use this all the time, so that I can refer to an e-mail discussion in other contexts. For example, I often put a nabble URL in my Subversion commit message so that I can later come back to a particular change and see the relevant discussion. I often put a nabble URL in an issue tracker to cross-link bugs and discussions. Or when I'm writing to someone else about a discussion happened elsewhere, I often put a nabble URL instead of forwarding messages, so that the recipients can see follow-ups.

Now, the thing about these use cases is that I need to figure out Nabble permalink URLs, and I need do so from my primary mail user agent programs (which is in my case, Thunderbird), not from nabble web site. Ideally what I'd like to see is that Thunderbird has a "Nabble permalink" hyperlink, just like it has a hyperlink for sender and recipients for each e-mail, so that I can quickly copy it from Thunderbird and paste it elsewhere. In contrast, today, for me to figure out a permalink URL, I have to come to nabble website and perform a search to find the e-mail,which I've already opened in my Thunderbird right in front of me. This wastes my time.

So to this end, I'd like to propose that Nabble offers permalink URLs based on a few key properties of e-mail that any MUA can get without talking to Nabble. Sender, Subject, Date, Message-Id, and Mailing-List headers would do. So the permalink could look something like:

http://www.nabble.com/permalink?sender=...&subject=...&date=...&message-id=...

Or if this URL feels too long, it could be a reasonable hash of those combined values, in which case the URL could be something like:

http://www.nabble.com/permalink?abcdedBase64EncodedSha1HashCode1234567

I think the key is not to require talking to the server when computing a permalink, or else my MUA would end up sending too much information to Nabble. That is, I'd like to see "Nabble permalink" hyperlink on every e-mail, but I don't want my MUA to eagerly send this much information to the server every time I open a message.

I suppose alternatively you can design UI so that you compute the permalink only after I request a link, in which case the action will have to be a button or a menu item. And I'd have to wait for an HTTP request round-trip, and for the browser-based MUA like GMail, this means a page transition.

Now, once Nabble offers something like this, the community could pitch in about writing MUA connectivity. For example, I'd imagine writing Thunderbird extension to show such a permalink should be straight-forward (modulo hashing.) For GMail one might write a greasemonkey script to do it.

In conclusion, the whole point of having permalinks is to be used in other contexts, so it's essential that permalinks are easy to discover. I think this enhancement will be a significant improvement in this direction.

---
Kohsuke Kawaguchi

Issue - Message is Pending in the Flexcoders forum

2008-03-13T03:01:56Z

I tired to post the message in Nabble Flexcoders forum (
Software » Flex » FlexCoders), which is affliated to flexcoders yahoogroups, i am subscribed and have join the grouped and i have also got a welcome message from the group as well after confirmation. But my message with topic

fetching Component by their id by ganesh s and
Flex - customization of the components by ganesh s still in pending state, what could be the problem, should send it to the groups directly, not using nabble?

Ganesh

Re: Private Nabble installation

2008-03-08T15:50:50Z

Yes, eventually, but it won't be anytime soon. We will allow private forums soon. Does that satisfy your need?

Private Nabble installation

2008-03-08T15:25:22Z

Will Nabble ever be licensable (open source or otherwise) for private installation, say for instance in a private intranet?

Thanks in advance

ste

Re: Mobile version of Nabble

2008-02-21T10:07:53Z

Thanks for the suggestion. You are the first user to ask for this feature, so we probably won't look into this unless we have more users asking for it.

But just curious, how does Nabble look on those mobile devices? I'd appreciate if you can post a screenshot.

Mobile version of Nabble

2008-02-21T00:21:25Z

Hello.

I've been searching for mobile mailing list archive site. I've found none. It would be great if you create mobile version of Nabble :) It should fit small screens (e.g. 320 x 240) and simple web browsers (e.g. S60 Web Browser based on WebKit) on mobile phones (e.g. Nokia E61).

Re: Multiple email addresses

2008-02-20T05:29:44Z

I'm sure you smart guys can figure this out without degrading performance. For example, why not simply cache the last email used per account per mailing-list on your servers so that you don't have to do any lengthy searching?

As for your suggestions... I would either prefer to be forced to choose an option... or I'd prefer Nabble would default to the email associated with the account I logged in on. My preference is the latter 'cause I generally don't mix work & personal (my 2 accounts).

~ David

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-19T23:41:26Z

We found out why this happened. This is caused by a bug in Firefox and Opera. We use an iframe for the embedding, but the height of the iframe is a 2-byte number in Firefox, which ranges from -32768 to 32767 px. So you see the content getting cut off when its height goes over the 32767px limit in iframe. This doesn't occur in IE, and Firefox will fix this bug soon. Meanwhile, we will add some temporary measure in the next release to allow you to scroll when the height limit in iframe is reached.

Re: Multiple email addresses

2008-02-19T23:31:33Z

I see your point. The problem with using a picker list is that it tends to be overlooked, until after you have already made the post. But defaulting to the last email address isn't a good solution either, because it will force us to do a search to find what you used in the last post, which may take time to return. I would not like it if I have to wait for a few seconds whenever I need to post something.

Would it be ok if we use a radio button to lay out the options? This will make it more obvious that you need to select the right email address for posting. Also, we can default to select none, thus forcing you to make a conscious choice at the time of posting?

Re: Multiple email addresses

2008-02-19T12:58:20Z

The drop-down box is nice but I think nabble should take one small step further which is to default the email used to the one I last used for that list, and if none then default to the email for the logged in account. I've accidentally forgotten to use the picker list before.

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-18T22:12:24Z

Cool, that's good to hear.

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-18T17:42:47Z

Yes, thank you very much. I spoke to our engineering head today about this and we will move it up on the development list. I think you are right in that vBulletin seems to use the date and time as a key which works alright for forums that you visit often, but obviously isn't a perfectly accurate solution. To do it correctly requires keeping a stash of actual read messages by user and he thinks that when we add the feature, we should do it properly. Since we're in the middle of a major performance/architecture upgrade, it may take a little while, but you should see it before too long.

Thanks for the input.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-17T22:31:22Z

R Morris wrote:

Thanks, now I recall and see what they are doing. Unfortunately, it's not tracking read posts at all as I got a number of threads that were marked as new because they had new posts. Clicking on the last new post should have shown me the whole thread as I'd never read it. Instead, it brought me to the first new post since my last visit.

That's ok and it's surely easier. You right, we could just set a cookie to do a similar thing. Would that be sufficient for you even though it's not truly correct?

Rod, thanks for your attention. Well, the AVS forum does not work perfectly if you don't visit it in a long while (definition of long while is like greater than a few weeks), but if I visit it daily, I am assured that the bold threads contain unread posts, and that the little icon to the left of the bold thread title takes me to the first unread post. 'First unread post' works out to be the first new post since my last visit FOR threads that I have previously opened AND (I'm not 100% sure of this next part) ALSO gotten to the last page of that thread. But if I have not opened a thread, log out, log back in next week, then that thread's 'Go to first unread post' will take me to the correct unread post for me. I think they might be using anchors not sure, as I seem to recall getting taken to the correct page of the thread, with the new post near the top of the window. So perhaps there is a cookie that they read showing which threads I have read in the last week and calculating the right anchor to take me on the right page.

I probably have rambled on with some errors above. If you were able to bold threads with unread new posts, and then somehow mark the unread posts with some icon, that would be the optimal solution. Any reply later in time than your cookie indicates would bold up the parent thread title, and add an icon to that reply + all replies later in time. Does that sound correct-ish?

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-17T12:31:32Z

Thanks, now I recall and see what they are doing. Unfortunately, it's not tracking read posts at all as I got a number of threads that were marked as new because they had new posts. Clicking on the last new post should have shown me the whole thread as I'd never read it. Instead, it brought me to the first new post since my last visit.

That's ok and it's surely easier. You right, we could just set a cookie to do a similar thing. Would that be sufficient for you even though it's not truly correct?

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-16T17:07:23Z

Hi Rod, yes, what I am interested is going to the first unread post and then everything from that point on down is unread as well. Just to the left of the thread title.. mouse over it, it will say 'go to first new post'.
Set a cookie? Note that this forum has also total replies and total views... nice. You know immediately which thread is broadly interesting or niche.

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-16T12:49:13Z

Our intent is to try to keep things as simple, yet powerful, as possible, so we've avoided putting in features for the sake of features. However, I completely agree that relying on the browser to track read messages doesn't work if you're using multiple computers and our policy has been to add features that are requested multiple times by users.

I noticed you mentions avsforum.com which I do visit once in a while, but I don't see a link to go to the first new post except in the thread. Is that the one you're talking about? I want to figure out how they're doing it and how well it works because actually tracking every user's read posts is quite a task.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-16T12:23:59Z

Thanks, I see what it's doing.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-15T22:08:51Z

Ah, both of these things sound pretty cool. Thanks for putting so much into this!

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-15T22:06:56Z

Here's a link to how it was when it was embedded:
http://forums.my2gig.com/indexBackup.html

Here are a list of things to try:
Just try viewing a lot of posts (especially ones with a lot of replies).
Also maybe try opening in a new tab with the middle mouse click.
Try replying to a couple posts or editing them.

I'm not sure what else to try, though.

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-15T13:54:51Z

R Morris wrote:

Rating were a core part of the system from the beginning and were designed to deal with the issues of uneven moderation that exist in many forums.

We felt that post views are largely a vanity feature; however, they are a good traffic indicator for forum owners and we'll try to get this up on the priority list. Marking posts as read is a bit tricker to do correctly and I do see the value and will push to get this into the development cycle.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

I don't see much value in ratings, but I wouldn't take them out now that they are there.
I am surprised that no one else sees going to first unread post of a thread or marking unread posts as not just useful, but required esp for busy forums. I just don't understand how you know what you've looked at and what you haven't???? Pls don't tell me looking at what the browser changing color of previously visited links. That just doesn't work for me... does not impress as reliable either.

Otherwise I love the stark simplicity and text nature of the nabble... always have since the start.

Re: is there a way to mark posts as unseen yet by the user?

2008-02-15T12:28:34Z

The forums at avsforum.com (maybe it's avsforums.com) shows you all threads in bold that have unread posts with respect to you as the user, and then a button on that line takes you to your first unread post in the thread. Perfect, required, expected.

Other forums I attend to have exactly the same feature, they seem to use the same bbs/forum software, whatever it is. I can't imagine regularly visiting a forum and having no clue what is read and unread and having to browse through it all and try to remember?? Forget about it. I just would not go back due to the volume of implied work.

Re: Forum Rules

2008-02-15T12:09:17Z

I understand your point. Internally we have discussed this, one solution is that Nabble will probably provide some type of html hosting so that you don't have to go to a third-party site for embedding. And the html hosting will work smoothly with an embedded forum. We may get to this in 1 or 2 months time frame.

Another solution is that we will add a feature to allow you to make a thread sticky and have this thread cross-posted to other forums. This way, you don't need to use the embedding, because you can simply have the same "forum rule" thread sticky in all your forums. This will be available also in 1 or 2 month time frame.