TALKING TO STRANGERS. (thedevboard.com)

Member Name: thingywhatsit

Product:	thedevboard.com
Date:	21/11/06 (190 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good easy layout that is user friendly, plus good support.

Disadvantages: Messaging limitations.

NICEBOARDS.

Have you ever thought of creating a forum on the Internet ? Have you wondered how people do just that or what forums are all about ?

Forums are a place for discussion, and can be themed as mine are. I have two with Niceboards, and what Niceboards provide is a free standard website forum, which can be personalised to suit you. One of mine is being developed to give members of the public details of changes in French legislation concerning English residents, whilst the other is for writers. I know of many forums which specialise in books, games, etc., and a forum is a place where people with similar interests can get together to discuss those interests.

Why Niceboards ?

Compared with other forums that I have tried, I like the Niceboard layout. It's pretty professional looking compared for example with my original board which was with Aceboards. Aceboards support forum, or place that you go for help with your forum, was in French, and although my French is adequate to understand what was going on, I found that I could not share this duty with other members of my team of Admin, because I couldn't expect them to plough through French subjects to try and find answers. Although Ace provided an English forum eventually, what happened was that you would pose questions on the English forum and wait weeks before they replied.

As my site has over 300 members and is well populated and used, I needed a site that would give me the back-up that I needed and Niceboards do.

So how do you start ?

There is a basic structure of a forum accessed from http://www.thedevboard.com/. I was surprised that they did not have anything under Niceboards.com although this doesn't really cause me any difficulty. From this page, you are given choices of what kind of forum you want to create, reminded of course that you are legally responsible for your forums content, and that you shouldn't have any illegal things like downloads, pinch anything from anywhere that is copyrighted, or be of a sexually explicit nature, exposed to youngsters, and you are asked to agree to their terms and conditions, which are pretty common sense.

What I like here is that the search engine is very good. You can choose the subject matter of your forum and which category it should appear in. In a matter of a one page registration form which doesn't ask too many details at all, your forum is created in the standard grey/blue layout. Sounds simple doesn't it ? Well, to that extent it is, although there is much more to creating a forum than just signing up. You have to think very carefully about what kind of forum you want, how to make the site a secure place for members to be, and the rules and regulations that govern your forum.

Rules

Something I rather like about Niceboards is that you can add your own rules to the standard ones, because there may be rules of etiquette or more than just the standard rules that you want to add to your particular forum. These rules are displayed to people wanting to become members, and they have to click that they agree before their registration takes effect.

Behind the scenes.

Behind the scenes on forums such as this, there are a wealth of choices. Here, I feel that the choices in places are better than Aceboards in general, although there are weak areas. Let's try and explain how it all works, and what I found in creating my forums.

Setting your forum up.
Style Admin.

It's a good idea to have some kind of logo, and here I centralised mine easily. It gives a professional look to the place, and you also get a choice on which buttons you want to use, which colours, and playing around with the configuration is fun and more simple than one would imagine. Choosing a background is particularly nice, as you can make this seasonal if you wish to, although my experience of this was that if you choose one that is animated, as I did with moving snowflakes, it actually makes the site hard to load. Instead, I chose a standard colour, but admit that I cheated to a certain degree, because in order to chose colours, you need a colour pallet, and Niceboards do not supply you with a very good one, whereas Ace did. You can, however, play around with the colours by changing the numbers shown in the control panel, and creating shades between those given on the colour pallet provided

Avatars.

Avatars are the image that people chose to go next to each of their postings, and the gallery of avatars available on this free forum is adequate, although more specialised ones can be added at any time. On my forum for example, we have competitions for avatars every month, on a particular theme, and what most of the members tend to do is to find their own and upload them to photobucket, and then to the site, and Niceboard gives you as Admin the choice of whether members can do this or not. If anyone places one that stands out as rude, you can always ask them to change it, and I think this approach is pretty much better than restricting members to the choices available in the site package.

Icons, Smilies and Buttons.

There is a good selection here, and for someone wanting to create a buck standard site, I would imagine that the choice available is sufficient. We wanted to create something a little bit unique and found buttons that were pleasing to the eye. Smilies were something we never changed, since the stock supply that is provided is sufficient, and the icons for example topics that you want to stay at the top of each forum, (sticky threads), were adequate as well.

Portal availability.

If you so wish, you can have a portal, or gateway to your site. Personally I don't like portals. People want to access a site without having to click their way through to get there, although the choice is there for people to take.

Site Security.

When you open a forum to the public, you will get members that want to be difficult, or simply forget that what they are posting is in a public place. The world is like that, and not everyone is polite to each other. The site security on Niceboards is pretty neat, and if you are creating a forum for kids, there is the ability to ban certain words that you do not want youngsters to use. Personally, my site is for adults, and if anyone is too rude, we do have moderators, but mostly we ask people to edit their posts if they are offensive. I don't think that imposing a word rule with adults is a good idea, because they should have the common sense to be decent, although it is nice to know that kids can create forums that have this possibility. Another possibility with regards to security is that you can have symbols where other members can report posts that are problematic to admin and moderators. My personal view of this is that it gives members the ability to take responsibility for keeping the site a safe place. I think it is under-used on my site and that the nature of humans is that instead of reporting, people tend to answer with an equally rude message !

For the sake of security, what's good about these sites is that you can create a forum called a staffroom, and if problematic threads appear, you can move them to the staffroom for consideration, rather than having your whole site upset about a foolish and thoughtless posting. This was one of the first areas that I created, and for security, you do have the choice behind the scenes of who you let into which forums. It's hard work keeping up with it all, but once you get into the swing of it, quite simple, and dealt with under user permissions. For example, on one of my sites, I have an over 18 area, and only allow access to those members that are over 18. There are areas also which are private. We have competitions, and I created an area where entries into competitions are posted and the only people with access are the judges.

Creating forums and categories.

Creating forums is easy. Creating sub-forums impossible, so it means that before you start, you need to plan out which titles you want in advance, and what they are to cover. Good planning in advance helps your forum to look tidy and professional and my first attempts with Aceboards looked positively crowded and had too many topics.

Newsletters.

There is a feature on Niceboards that Aceboards didn't have. You can send newsletters to members that want them by creating groups. I found this to be a good way forward, and although I occasionally send out drastic changes to the site to all members, I can be selective in sending the regular ones only to those members that want them. I have known many forums that spam members, and there is nothing more irritating than getting email after email from forums when you really do not want them. Niceboards seem to have addressed this problem.

Calendars.

Niceboards recently introduced calendars which is a good feature. If members choose to put their date of birth on their registration, the calendar shows their birthday to all members which is a friendly aspect to the site. Aceboards didn't have this feature. It is also useful for admin to be able to add end of events etc, and the way I did this was to open a private admin forum where we could list things that we wanted to show on the calendar. Members do not see the forum, but they do see the reminders that show up.

Private Messages.

Here, it's a shame that Niceboards fail, although I am sure that in the future they will change. The limitation of how many private messages you can have is 50 and although this may be enough for members, it certainly isn't for management, because as Admin of a site of this nature, there are many things that members send you messages about. For example, on one of my sites, we have competitions, and if the number of messages is exceeded, instead of telling you, they simply make the old messages disappear. This really is irritating because for example, I need to know who messaged me with which competition entry and I am so irritated by it that I have now created a forum just for me, so that I can keep track in another manner. The private message limitations are a bugbear with me. I also do not like the fact that members are unable to block certain individuals. The only way we had to overcome this was to look at complaints seriously, ask for screenshots, and having had a screenshot produced by a member, warn the member sending the offensive message that all his rights to personal messages will be taken away should they continue. It is good that we have this ability to switch off personal messages, but a huge problem that members cannot block those they do not wish to converse with.

There is actually the choice of letting certain individuals have more messages, though so far, this function hasn't worked, though the fact that it is there makes me think that Niceboards have thought about it, and will eventually increase the number of messages a person can have at one time.

Little by little, Niceboards are adding new things. They have recently added a points system, although we chose not to use it. Having points for posting may increase postings, but may not increase the quality of postings, and seemed a pretty inane addition to the sites, although I can see these being useful for kids sites.

Polls

When we first started the site, it took a while to understand that when you run a vote by poll, you were only allowed 10 different questions. We found this restrictive, though Niceboards have addressed the problem and allow up to 20 now which is good for competitions, since we frequently have more than 15 entries to vote for.

How come they are free ?

These sites are free because Niceboards make their money from advertising, and also from those people that chose to have advertisement free sites. The charge for getting rid of advertisements is minimal though what I found with the adverts was that they are unobtrusive, and usually follow the topic of the forum. For example, on my French site, the adverts are things that would interest people living in France or wanting information. On my writing site, similarly, they are on topics that may interest writers.

Support.

The support forum for these sites is accessed from your main site. This has caused me problems but more because of my own lack of thought than theirs. For example, if your site crashes and will not load (and this only happens when there is a big overhaul of servers), you cannot access your own site, and therefore cannot access the support site. If you start a forum, the best bet is to have the support forum in your favourites as I have now. The support that this forum gives is optimistic and relatively quick. They also tell you about new innovations and ask you if you would like them on your forum. I like the layout of the support forum, and there are usually topics that tell you what is going on.

Would I recommend them ?

From my personal experience, I would say yes. They need to address certain problems. One bug in particular is that you cannot ban spammers. We have found that many use similar email addresses, and we would like to have been able to ban those addresses, though cannot. Overall, the forum gives us, the Administrators good control over what happens. We activate members individually because we want to alleviate the possibility of spam, i.e. Companies trying to sell medicines, porn site advertising etc. and generally, the layout of these forums allows us that luxury, by ticking the box in the control panel that sends an email to all admin to activate new accounts.

I am saddened in a way that one feature that was available on Aceboards is not available on these, and that was pop up messages. You could tap the name of someone online and send them a pop up, but this option is not available on Niceboards, although private message works just as well, and if popups are allowed on a users browser, do send a pop up to tell members they have mail.

Overall, it's a good layout, reasonably easy to use, and lets individuality come into play in that there are so many variables.

Try it. It's fun.

Rachel

Summary: Overall a good experience.