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Errr.... I actually wasn't suggesting changes to the pasting option.
VB +1 for not having to worry about generic type specifications being stripped as HTML
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but also:
VB -1 for having attributes in <> signs, as in <DllImport("kernel32.dll")>
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
I only read code that is properly indented, and rendered in a non-proportional font; hint: use PRE tags in forum messages
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Chris,
Your post this morning about the last 10 years got me thinking about the future. I've been a member at CP for 3.5 years now and have gone from occasional lurker to apparently a "personality" and even contributed an article.
I've always found CP very useful and have tried to contribute back in some way.
In recent months however I've found myself contributing far less in the serious programming forums, and I think there is a reason for this. I don't know if anyone has brought this up already, or if it's the proverbial and un-noticed elephant in the room. The reason is stackoverflow.com. When compared to the programming forums at CP, SO wins hands down in every way.
When I do visit the CP programming forums I find my self aggravated by some of the things that have been so cleanly fixed at SO.
1) The same questions being asked over and over. at SO you can find the duplicate and close the repeat with a link to the duplicate and it's answers. At CP, you just see a bunch of irritated regulars posting lmgtfy style links. Perhaps this is a failing of the search ability as much as the forums.
2) Bad questions. At SO you can edit questions to clean up the grammer/spelling/formatting, or just totally close questions that make no sense.
3) Misplacement. At SO misplaced questions can be moved to the correct location by the community. (Either re-tagged or moved to alternative sites)
4) Answer ordering. The good answers bubble upwards on SO. The best answer is decided by the community.
Additionally, although I tend to be on the answering side, when I do have questions to ask I get much faster and more detailed responses from questions posted at SO. I suspect this is to do with the rep/badges system at SO which encourages positive behaviour in a far stronger way than CP.
Everyone may not agree with or like everything being done at SO, and they have plenty of their own problems that need tackling (I won't get into that), but the fact is that it seems to be working for them. Right now, if I had a question I would go to SO, and I spend most of my available answering time there (not that it's much these days) because I find it easier, more effective and more rewarding. They also seem to get a much higher quality of question (higher signal to noise ratio as it's often described) because of the ability of the community to filter out the garbage. (And when I do come across garbage, I can actively do something about it). I'm not saying you should just do everything they do, but they do do some stuff better than you.
I like CP for so many of it's features. I like the articles and I like the lounge - I think it connects the users in a way that SO fails to do - but I worry that SO will quickly edge CP out of the market, newer users will head there, and without new users CP will slowly shrink and we'll just be left with a bunch of old timers reminiscing about the good old days. Years ago I remember that most google searches for programming questions frequently resulted in links to CP. Now SO seems to dominate the front page of google search results.
There is no denying that CP's article repository is industry leading, but in just over 1 year it seems that SO has gone from nothing to it's now dominating position in the question/answer domain. Obviously, I don't know what your user/post stats are, maybe my perception is wildly off the mark.
I don't know your priorities, where your incoming users come from, what pages they target or what drives your user base, and perhaps just concentrating on what you are good at (the articles) is better, but I see SO as both a threat and a challenge to CP. I'm sure there is space in the market for both, but it means you need to up your game if you do decide you want to compete on on SOs domain.
I have seen some points in your current work list ("Completing the beta of the new question and answer system", "Testing a new WYSIWYG editor" and "Major changes to the member level / points system") which do sound like they could be exactly the kind of changes that I'm talking about, so maybe you're already several steps ahead of me.
Anyway, sorry for the huge post. I'm going to shut up now.
Thanks again for a great site.
Simon
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Here's a birthday present to you from us.
It's not perfect - a definite work in progress - but it brings together many of the ideas we've had over the last 5 years as to how we can best make our forums more useable.
StackOverflow definitely beat us to the punch and did a fantastic job of tying together the components of WikiAnswers and reptuation systems from various places into a single package. The WikiAnswers / SO way of allowing members to ask and answer is definitely the way things are moving.
So I give to you Quick Answers[^].
I am away at PDC this week so Thiru will be handling suggestions, bugs, improvements for our fledgling service.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: So I give to you Quick Answers[^].
Psst... The code for the Quick Answers link in the menu:
<a href="">Quick Answers</a>
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Not any more .
All fixed. Sorry for inconvenience
Sincerely,
Elina
Life is great!!!
Enjoy every moment of it! 
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Wow - Awesome.
You wrote that whole system in the 4 hours since I posted my suggestion. Now that is some fast coding. 
I'll definitely spend some time checking that out.
Thanks.
Simon
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IF you're impressed by that; you'll love the quality of fake data populated in it simulating several months of testing...
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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Simon Stevens wrote: 4 hours since I posted my suggestion.
More like in the year since I posted my suggestion but whatever...
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
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Now that Quick Answers has been released for a public beta, how about posting a link to it in the lounge? Not everybody reads this forum.
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I am using IE8, and when I hover over the survey panel on the home page, underline appears under all the text in that panel. Moveover, when I go to the survey result page, I can see the underline in the survey result panel.
I think this is due to the malformed "a" element attached to the "List of programming languages" text.
Currently Reading: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Next in Queue: Kill The Messenger by Tami Hoag
- Kirtan
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Yikes. All fixed, sorry about that.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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May i suggest less clutter on the site?!
I find the site Extremely usefull. But the UI is completely out of standard to any forum i've ever seen. It's extremely hard to navigate. And there are no STABLE ads. Sometimes they are UP... then on the left... then at the end of an article.
And colors change everywhere without any reason (not that i can see). There is apparent hierarchy for font sizes.
There is this thing in the upper left corner asking me to subscribe... i've done so but it keeps changing and asking again and again... i keep looking at it every time i look at the menu.
And there is this menu near the top... the green one... it seems quite similar to the one on the left, orange one... but they have some common items and then they go astray.
And that tiny ad in the bottom left, I've never clicked it... it says bullfrogpower... BUT the other font is TOO SMALL. I can't read what it says.
I've counted about 18!!! different colors that get USED... no counting the ads... some for text, some for visited links...
I understand all the ads generate revenue to keep the site up and running.
Is there any way i can change a theme or something or even pay to get rid of the ads?
NOTE: I am not a Dev. I'm actually an Architect trying to learn some C#.
modified on Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:14 PM
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basilmir wrote: May i suggest less clutter on the site?!
I think there are about 6,000,000+ people who actually like it the way it is.
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Thank you for your reply.
I do hope someone takes what i said seriously. There are people who make their living doing interaction design.
Indeed all the information stored here is golden, too bad sometimes you have to look at it through dirty glasses.
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Who are you talking to? You replied to yourself.
Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.
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Clicked in the wrong place... i find this kind of threaded view "confusing"... i'm used to phpBB's threaded view.
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basilmir wrote: i find this kind of threaded view "confusing"... i'm used to phpBB's threaded view.
But someone who's used to the CP view may find the php one confusing! I suspect that most of us who use this site are quite happy with the way it is laid out, including colours and fonts. Any changes would just serve to confuse us and would not necessarily be seen as an improvement.
I guess the only way to find out for sure is to ask Chris to run a survey to get people's opinions.
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I'm no designer, but I certainly don't find the site hard to look at. In fact, I like many of the decisions they've made to make navigating messages easier. For example, they make high voted messages red and low voted messages grey. And you get to control how high or low of a vote puts a message into its respective category. Does it add more visual clutter? Sure, but then it also helps you to focus on the posts that others have found valuable and ignore the ones that others have found worthless. If they had chosen different colors (rather than red and gray), that might make it look more unified, but then could also confuse users. For example, if they used orange for high voted messages, people might think those were header messages of some sort, as the menus on this site use orange.
Anyway, I think the target audience of this website is mostly programmers, and programmers I think can appreciate a functional design, such as the one CodeProject presents. That being said, it does an impressive job of enforcing style across the site. Articles, for example, all use the same CSS, so most every article looks the same. This consistency makes navigating articles much easier for those of us who look through a great deal of articles.
basilmir wrote: There is this thing in the upper left corner asking me to subscribe
Wouldn't be a bad idea to get rid of that for members who are already subscribed... could even be seen as a reward for subscribing.
basilmir wrote: it seems quite similar to the one on the left
Not sure why they did this... maybe they will tell you. Maybe they just want to highlight different things in different areas to help users discover things more easily. The left menu might be targeted toward less savvy users who are not familiar with or interested in navigating popup menus. Or it may be an alternative in case a mobile phone user doesn't have the ability to open menus. Or maybe they wanted a giant orange stripe on the left site to lead to greater recognizability among readers, and they figured they might as well put something in that unused space. Or maybe they log clicks to either the left menu or top menu and are doing statistics to see which menu users prefer. Although, to be honest, I don't see a whole lot of overlap between the left and top menu.
basilmir wrote: Is there any way i can change a theme or something or even pay to get rid of the ads?
Depending on the price, I'd pay for that.
Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.
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Thank you for sharing your opinion.
I'm ALL IN when it comes to functional design. I wouldn't change a thing on the site... structurally; just change some of the font sizes and color.
I have to say i designed very few pc interfaces to date. But i've done tens of projects requiring you to nagivate through somekind of space. And there is a certain component of interface desgin that exists only in the visitors head, and it can only be designed outside visual studio.
This kind of website is similat to navigating a tree of information. It's not that hard to have this map into the visitors heads before they start, through visual cues or the use of similar design patterns in the hierarchy of objects on the site.
The sum of visual elements and their properties(that are visual) should be used to do this.
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basilmir wrote: But i've done tens of projects requiring you to nagivate through somekind of space.
Out of idle curiosity, are we talking about school projects or ones that happened in the real world?
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 Last time i checked it all happened in the real world. As for the age "issue", i guess i passed that point when you stop counting...
I wanted to make some suggestions and substantiate them with some actual know how, you know... in the "real" world, as in NOT "virtual" reality.
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Thanks for the feedback.
Threaded vs flat is a matter of taste. We prefer threaded, but there is no 'correct' choice in this.
I'm not sure what you mean by stable ads. If you mean on different pages the ads are shown in different places, then yes, because our pages are laid out differently depending on the nature of the page. Some sites have every page look absolutely identical but we have chosen not to do this. All articles are the same, all catalog items are the same, and all job postings are the same template, but they each have their own look and feel in order to make it clear that when you're viewing a job your not viewing a catalog item or an article.
We don't offer a paid subsscription to remove ads, nor do we provide themeing.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris, to help you understand what the OP is saying, I'll paraphrase:
- discard the articles
- scrap the Lounge and the Soapbox
- combine all the forums into one
- lose the ads (oh, wait - you won't have to lose the ads, because the advertisers will be MIA when they see what you've done to the site)
HTH!
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