Feedback: those forums are very good! :)

As the first post here, it would be appropriate to begin with the good things!

I have come to these forums four months ago and was impressed from the beginning with the variety of people here, from all over the world, with knowledge in all aspects of programming - and not only programming as I've found out pretty soon.

The graphic design here is very good in my opinion, and is very simple to use. I was used to more "primitive" forums like asp101 so those who know that forum can understand the huge difference.

Another great advantage of those forums is that we have admins who constantly adding new cool stuff, recently they have added Reputation System and Karate Belts - and there would be more soon. Being part of even bigger community (DevShed) those forums also have strong basis thus don't need to worry about stability or hosting costs like private forums.

And last but not least, all the regular member around here make this forum nice and cozy place apart of very helpful for newbies or people with all kinds of programming problems.

Of course, any further comments are welcome!

I agree, this forums is just full of knowledgeable members, in all different areas of programming and concepts.
Where else could you get sound advice and some constructive criticism on coding practices. Not to mention all sorts of characters.
I don't think I would be wrong in saying that this forum has one the highest percentage of questions answered.
Before I settled for being member of a forum, I looked around and found this forum to be the most helpful.
Boy have I not been dissappointed.
I've learned a great deal more about coding practices than I thought I knew.
All I can say is that I am happy to be a member of all this.
Keep up the excellent work.

Cheers

p.s. What's up with the shoutbox section?

what do you mean? they installed this box yesterday, along with those two new Forum Information forums - the Shout Box let any member (maybe guests as well, not sure) to write short, free text for everyone to see...

Hear Her

However, I would appreciate a redesign of the forum's layout and all that. Whilst the JavaScript powered menus are snazzy and all that, it does make the site rather sluggish (especilly the table-based layout)

Seems ironic how DevShed recently designed.... but using tables

hey Dude,

i was just wondering... are you ever happy with the way a website is designed?

I must say, I like the design and extra features of the forum.

ditto - but on the other hand, I don't care so much for standards!

Dude, the request for different design is 100% valid, you better post new thread about it - we have great admins over here and I'm sure they would listen to any new suggestion and remarks.

For one....

No more Macromedia Flash or Animated GIF adverts!!!!

well, that's one thing the admins here can't do as they're part of the global DevShed community... and after all this is business and they need money coming from somewhere. if those banners are what's needed to maintain those forums, I don't care seeing them. it's better to have big and thriving forum with banners rather than small or dead forum without banners.....

dittos on the title of this thread! Overall this is a great place. While I agree with Web Standards Man that some of the shell could use improvement, I think that a community is really about it's people, and that is definitely a strength for this forum. There is not shortage of creativity, commitment, or good will around here! Way to go!

PS :: I can't figure out how to use the SHOUTBOX. I can't find where you actually type in your SHOUT!?!?!

there shoud be text box... see the atached file. maybe the page was not yet fully loaded?

That's really weird, cause this is what I see:

ok... what browser is that? surely not Firefox or IE. nothing is perfect, not even this forum, probably it's not designed for the browser you're using. you can use Firefox, it's free and those forums are working just great with that browser.
you can also post new thread here with details about your browser (type, version) and maybe the admins would fix that, but it may take a while.

ShadowWizard: I'm surprised you didn't recognise it.

The browser is Safari, its standard-issue on MacOS X since Microsoft pulled the plug on the Tasman engine and the IE-Mac platform.

Its based on the KHTML engine, the one by KDE (thus, Konquerer), and best of all

....It's standards compliant!

so for some reason the Shout Box is not for Safari... I'll put it as new thread here and see how the admins would respond.