Hi everyone,

One thing that is bothersome about the new version of Kunena is that there are parts where the letters are in gray, instead of black, and it is harder to read. Also the font here in the window for writing posts should be bigger and clearer. For example, it is hard to distinguish commas and periods. Before, it was in Courier.

Another is that emoticons are not there to choose from, in the Quick Reply. (What is the point of Quick Reply? And why is Reply only visible if you open the Action Menu?) One would have to know the key strokes to make them... and so it is impossible to make the new ones that I suggest just for our forum (poop, pee, toilet, wetlands, biodigestor, etc.). These would have the function of livening up posts and helping users who are scanning quickly to find the posts they are most interested in . These could also hopefully be searchable (like in Twitter), thus we could search on the poop emoji, instead of searching on all of the pertinent words (feces, faeces, fecal matter, faecal matter, excrement, poo, poop, crap, sh*t, not to mention other languages) :poo:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_of_Poo_emoji

What happened to the number of posts, the number of likes, karma, etc.? I think these are useful.

Also, as I mentioned in my Featured User, I think it would be great to have options to rate each post, beyond just "like": please back up your statements, I want to do this, interesting if true, this is a great for sustainability, this is too resource intensive or expensive ...

Best wishes,
Chris Canaday

Hi Kris,

Just wanted to let you know that we implemented your suggestion regarding the order of the menu items for the mobile version (please check).
About your other suggestion regarding increasing the safety, Steffen (our IT guy) told me:

Yes you can reply to Kris that that SuSanA secretariat since a while wanted to bring ssl certificates to SuSanA network but that they could not use "let's encrypt" on this fully managed server and they need to pay for it and Anne needs to order it.

So we'll get that done, too.

Regards,
Elisabeth

I like the new look Elisabeth. No complaints so far.

Hi Kris,
Thanks for these very good suggestions. We'll look into them and implement them ASAP!
To start with, we'll swap around the menu items "Basics" and "Search & Navigation" also for the desktop version so that in the mobile version the order is more practical, too.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Great that RSS is working nicely now!

Would it be possible to enable SSL (https://) encryption? Otherwise passwords etc. are transmitted insecure (Firefox is complaining) and in general it is good practice to have it as the default option. See letsencrypt.org/ for an easy way of getting the needed certificate.

Edit: in the mobile view the menu is sorted with "basics" first and you have to scroll down a lot to access the more often used features like search and "recent topics" link etc. I think it would be better to have the most commonly used links at the top of that menu.

Thanks for reporting this bug, Hajo. Steffen has fixed it now. Please try it out again, it works now.

Another option for search is the "site search" which you can access from the top black menu bar (under "Search & navigation"). Site search is based on Google's algorithm for ranking and might be useful when you have a large number of search results.

Next week Steffen will also improve the way the search options are presented, as searching is getting ever more important, the bigger our Forum gets!

.. possible bug?!

1 I searched for 'LaDePa' and got 51 hits on 4 pages (see attachment)
2 after reading the first page, neither 'next' nor '2' takes me to the next page
3 but rather to the 'detailed search' template from where my search started...???

ciao
Hajo

So, we have upgraded the underlying forum software to the latest version of Kunena* and have made a bunch of style changes. The aim was to make this Forum better, easier to understand for novices and more similar to the SuSanA website, the "mother website": www.susana.org .

Thank you to Steffen Eisser from Dotwerkstatt, our IT person, who got this done without any hicc-ups!

Now it is up to you to report back to us anything that is a bug or which you don't like, suggestions for improvements, but also praise or positive feedback?
Just put it all into this thread.

Two things are not yet working properly and Steffen is working hard on getting them fixed by next week hopefully:

• The posting by e-mail function (sending a post by e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
  
• The e-mail digest which you get daily or twice a week or weekly (depending on your selection), containing all forum posts from that time period.

Please also try out the forum by opening up the website (www.forum.susana.org) on your mobile phone or tablet. It should work equally well there!

By the way, in the coming months we are also working on improving the SuSanA website, including how it runs on a mobile phone. That's because accessing the internet with mobile devices is getting more and more popular.

Kind regards,
Elisabeth

* Kunena: www.kunena.org/ (the communication platform for Joomla)

Important announcement to all Forum users:

The SuSanA Forum will be offline for major maintenance this Thursday 27 April for about 24 hours, starting 10:00 CET. The reason is that we are updating the nearly 9-year old software (Kunena) to the latest version and new server requirements.

Note: If you're writing a post at the very moment that the Forum gets taken offline then please copy your post to the clipboard before clicking "submit" to avoid disappointment and lose your post!

If everything goes to plan, the Forum will be back online with a new “look and feel” in about 24 hours.

Thank you for your support, patience and understanding!

Why the Forum update now this month? Well, we had to do it as the old Kunena version which we were using until now is only supported until the end of April. The new Kunena version is anyway better. We used this opportunity to make a whole lot of format style changes. The aim is to make the Forum look more similar to the SuSanA website now.

The new version will be a "responsive design" which means it will resize itself to also work well on a mobile phone and tablet. This is very important as more and more people are using their mobile phones to access the internet and this Forum.

Kind regards,
Elisabeth
on behalf of SuSanA secretariat and IT team


P.S.
One thing you will notice and possibly not like so much at first is a bit of white spaces which might look like “wasted space”. We have learned from our IT colleagues that this is the modern way and that especially new people will like it (experienced forum users might not like it that much at first, but hopefully get used to it). It seems to “scare” new people to have such a dense page of recent topics…
Here are three links for further reading why white empty spaces on websites are so important:
www.seguetech.com/whitespace-web-design/
www.creativebloq.com/design/importance-w...-web-design-11125952
manifesto.co.uk/design-principles-gestal...te-space-perception/

See also the results from a recent user experience study by UXC in Boston which investigated the Forum and SuSanA mother website (we've already tried to incorporate some of their suggestions into this update, although the planning for this software update preceded their report):
forum.susana.org/component/kunena/10-ann...ble-for-your-comment