Right now, I feel, the boards' scripts are lacking. Looking at things over the past while, we've got some things that need addressing. Many of our viewers don't see the pages how they should. Things are not very efficient, or constructed to work easily with each other. I'm now calling on the help of 4-ch'ers to help try to make a board script that meets our demands; both yours as you view and use them, and mine and the moderators so that we can efficiently moderate and operate the boards.
The list so far of things that need to be done:
I've also come to the conclusion that taking some of Kareha's code and then building our own might be the best approach. I can't do this all myself : I'm a lousy programmer, and without your contribution I don't know what to add. Many hands also make light work. In terms of getting it all done, I personally would like a replacement for Kareha inplace before our 1st birthday (November 1st).
If you can help in anyway, Perl, HTML, CSS, ideas, criticism, thoughts, anything else I may have missed, then feel free to contribute to this thread. I am willing to provide whatever services are required to get the job done. Asking our resident technician to put inplace a CVS/SVN server is not a problem and if we need it, I'll have it in.
Minor aesthetic suggestion that might be worth looking into to make the site appear more streamlined:
I always found that the sections,
Rules - 規則
Requests
Donate
2ch Portal
Team 4-ch F@H
4-ch wiki
in the Navbar were a little awkward; unlike all the others, they don't fit under their own heading.
Requests board should certainly go under "General" heading, and it even has the Pseud0ch look and board functionality to boot. Maybe you'd want to put Rules under "General" heading as well.
As for the others (like 2ch Portal and 4-ch Wiki, etc), you might want to create a new heading such as "Other Sites" a la your 2ch portal's style.
You've got this nice compact look, then you go to double-spaced links with no relevant headings attached; I didn't even bother looking at them for a few days after I started visiting the site
>Maybe you'd want to put Rules under "General" heading as well.
Don't mix static pages with the bbs'es pls.
I agree with >>26 but I also agree that there's room for improvement.
Here's my take:
I agree that Requests/Feedback could use a little more exposure.
I think it would fit better under General, maybe later it can be put into
some sort of "Self-Moderation/Moderation" category.
Rules - 規則 should also be put more in the beginning. I dunno...
Team 4-ch F@H, 4-ch wiki, 2ch Portal and #4-ch@ZiRC could probably
be grouped together in a "4-ch Projects" category, also more at the top.
Two categories I don't really understand are "Lifestyle" & "News":
I think the only board that really fits under "News" is "News"... (ノ∀｀)
There's some threads in "Tech" that could be called news, but I dunno...
Maybe rename "News" into "General News" and create a new board
called "Tech News"? I wouldn't really know where to put "Politics", though.
I feel it doesn't really fit in "News"... "General" -> "General Discussion",
then put it there, maybe?
I think a better name for the "Lifestyle" category would be "Culture",
put "Net Culture" and "AA Bar" also in there and throw "Programming" out.
Maybe also put "Music" and "Film & TV" in there and rename "Entertainment"
(with "Anime", "Manga" & "Games" remaining) into "Hobbies" or "Otaku Hobbies"?
"Programming", "Tech" and "Science" somehow seem to go together,
but I wouldn't know a fitting category title. Maybe "Study"? 日本語 could
also be filed under "Study", perhaps.
Well, that's all from me. Have been enough words anyway, ne?
>>26
Good point
>>27
There are good ideas! I think the distinction should be made that while 日本語 = "Japanese Language", it isn't so much for getting help / studying Japanese (aka Study) but rather discussion in/about Japanese. It's almost like the Japanese version of the General board. World seems to be a good heading for any other language discussion.
General=
-General (General Chat? or just Chat?)
-News
-Politics
-DQN
-Requests
Entertainment=
-Film & TV
-Anime
-Manga
-Games
-Music
Lifestyle=
-Food
-Love and Romance (:P)
Sciences=
-Science (maybe separate boards for chem/phys/bio eventually, but as of right now there aren't enough users)
-Technology
-Programming
-Net Culture (that is, if you don't make a separate "Culture" heading and include Net Culture and AA Art inside)
World=
-Japanese/日本語 (other languages depending on popularity)
4-ch Projects=
-all that stuff I didn't mention
I took into consideration >>27 suggestions and tried to organize the ideas, how does it look? Or, we could simply emulate the set-up of 2ch as accurately as possible (a mini version, of course). Rules could possibly be centered at the top underneath the text "4-ch".
What do you think of this suggestion? Any things to refine? Feel free to change/discard it!
I agree that Japanese/日本語 isn't primarily used for study - but that's okay.
I still think it would fit better in "Studies" (should there be such a category,
which I am still proposing, since there are some boards who would fit better in
that category than they do in any of the existing or other proposed ones).
Also, there aren't any other language boards and it's not likely that they are
going to be introduced anytime soon.
So instead of pregrouping boards into categories that don't make much sense yet,
I believe it makes more sense to organize the boards as they exist now.
Rehash of my "vision":
Rules
General
News
Politics
DQN
Requests/Feedback
#4-ch@ZiRC
4-ch wiki
Team 4-ch F@H
2ch Portal
Donate
Anime
Manga
Games
Food
Film & TV
Music
Net Culture
AA Bar
Science
Technology
Programming
Japanese/日本語
These are some good suggestions, and I am reading them but I'm not going to re-arrange things in the navigation just yet. There are new boards and other things coming soon.
DQN and all other future gimmick boards (like IAA, LOL, WTF and/or OTL) should probably have their own seperate category.
"Wild West Chat", "Isolated Idleness", "4-ch v2.0" are my suggestions.
How about the same name 2ch gives them-- "Free Chat" or "Idle Chat"
Turned 1 year old last week, eh?
Nope! November 1st is the date. Also, whilst I'm waiting for WAHa to finish updates etc with Kareha and whatnot, I know I am stubborn, but when those are done, up go more boards, and also the menu gets changed. Boards will be released slowly, the most demanding come first and the menu will be updated to something a little more suitable, follow what you people have requested.
I know I haven't been around a lot, for which I am sorry but not only am I at the end-of-year exams for college, but I also now have 2 very heavy part time jobs which are making me do 50-60 hours a week, so I've got at least enough cash to keep us afloat. Please bear with me.
adding message/thread searching will be nice too... so things don't get lost/burried ;)
Oh yeah... "11" is for November, not October. My mistake.
Plz to be regrouping the boards more sensible now
Please enable mod_gzip on the server. This would make all the index.html files load much faster, and save you bandwidth as well.
Depending on the plan, that could kill him. In some places CPU usage is becoming the bottleneck now. Who knows why.
How is it that you are privy to this information, >>48?
Anyway, it shouldn't be a big problem, because the server can cache the gzipped version of the page, meaning it only has to compress the page once per update. At least this is how lighttpd's mod_compress works, so I would expect Apache's mod_gzip to do likewise.
I've been nagging our sysadmin guy to do this for a while. Hopefully he'll have compression setup in the coming days. I also hate to be pedantic, but we're running Apache 2, so it's not mod_gzip, it's mod_deflate.
Are you on a dedicated server? Then you're fine.
Most shared hosting plans are offering ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and disk space these days. What they don't tell you (explicitly) is that they have anywhere from 10-100 accounts per server, and if you don't play nicely with the CPU, you'll get kicked off. That is, if your host isn't dumb.
I doubt you're in any need of bandwidth or disk space with this site, so the first thing you should run into will be CPU usage. I suggest you never run captcha.
>>52
Well yeah, it's a dedicated box. This domain is shared with a couple of others sites of mine. No, bandwidth, nor disk space, no CPU utilisation are an issue at this point in time.
>>1 this thread just shocks me. I wouldn't have thought Squeeks is this clueless...
>>54
See the August 1, 2005 date?
That post was obviously written for August Fool's Day.
:)