I just remembered another approach I saw at a few different places.

Like "Newbie Monday" or "Newbie Wednesday" or whatever day of week.

A new topic started each week as a periodical inviting people to post their "silly" questions without fear of being mocked.

Usually, such topics end up being overloaded with multiple independent threads of discussion that aren't even relevant to each other. But it does help get the newbies posting.

Such approach is better with threaded forums, not with linear ones like UHH. On UHH, such topics would really be one gigantic mess, if enough newbies actually do post in them. But, as I said, the goal there is to get people to overcome their shyness and realize that they shouldn't take forums too seriously and not worry and just post whenever they have a question.

1) I added a new setting that shows OP's name in the digest.

If you want to enable it, please go to My Profile, scroll down to Custom View Settings, and enable "Show topic authors in the digest" option.

Once enabled, you'll be able to see who submitted a topic in the digest.


2) After testing it for a few months, I'm rolling out Newest Pictures page. Some users already had it enabled in their profiles. But now this becomes part of the standard menu at the top. This page shows a listing of attachments from most recent posts on the forum. All in one place.

If you click on a thumbnail of a picture, you'll be taken to the respective post.

I'm going to keep "new" marker for a bit to make sure everyone sees it.


Please let me know if something isn't working as expected or if you notice any bugs.

That's a real problem. Well, there are two problems actually.

1)

One of the frequent reasons people enter into the comment box after unsubscribing is "this is way too advanced for me". So something like a Newbies Corner section would be a good idea.

I'm just not sure how to make it work without creating a big mess of redundancy between Main and this Newbie section.

If a topic is "too advanced" (by whatever arbitrary standard), then do I move it from the Newbie section to Main?

Or if someone posts a simple question in Main, do I move it to the Newbie section?

And if I don't move topics around, then we'll end up with two sections that do the same thing, because both Main and Newbie sections will over time contain both simple and advanced discussions.

Another option would be to create "Main (safe space)" section. But I'm not a fan of safe spaces in general.

Besides, it would look ridiculous. "Main Photography Discussion" and "Main Photography Discussion (safe space)" on the home page of the forum.

Still, I know of at least one forum I used to frequent around 2001-2002 (not related to photography) that had a Newbie section. Its purpose there was solely to get new users posting, so that they get over their fear of posting and get involved, and then cross over to the other sections of the forum.

It would be nice to have something like that, but as I said, I'm not sure how to make it work with Main.


2)

The second problem is people who are rude to new users. This isn't always related to the skill level. And yes, I agree that it's doesn't present a good first impression of the forum.

But I have a fix for that. If you see someone regularly being rude to new users (especially in the Main section), then please use Report Issue link, select "other", and enter comment "rude to new users", to let me know what the report is about.

The new forum software has an option to block replies in topics of new users. So if someone is rude and condescending towards people who just joined UHH, then I can limit their account. They would still be able to post as before in topics of established users, but they wouldn't be able to post in topics that are created by newly registered users.

I forgot that I implemented such functionality while keeping this exact scenario in mind. Reading this topic reminded me of that.

Of course, that won't solve the first problem of people who are shy about posting or think that this forum is only for advanced photography discussions. But taking care of rudeness towards new users might be the first step.

Please PM me a screenshot of what you see. I'll look into it.

But if it's happening on two different computers, then there might be some kind of proxy/scanner in your router or your internet provider's hardware that doesn't work correctly and messes up file types in transit. Which in turn could result in such dialog asking you what to do.

Also, you mentioned that it happens on UHH, and then that it happens with "any link".

Is it happening on UHH or on all sites you visit?

Please PM me a screenshot of what you see. I'll investigate.

Please let me know if it's still happening tomorrow.

Don't enable it. It could be rogue. And not enabling it won't have any effect on your use of the forum. So best not to enable it.
I'll do some research. Please let me know if you keep seeing it 7 days from now.

Please PM me a screenshot of what you see. I'll look into it.

It used to be title and body. Now it's just the title. I'll upgrade the search in the future. It's on my to-do list.

I'm also considering Tumblr and Google+, but I want to run this for a bit to see if people actually use those buttons.

I added social sharing buttons to topic pages. (Some people already saw them over the past few days as I was rolling it out, but this is the formal announcement.)

You'll see them: "Save", "Share", "Tweet" -- for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter respectively. Buttons are shown near the top-left corner of the page on the first page of every topic. Topics with pictures have a Pinterest save button. Topics without pictures only have Facebook and Twitter buttons.

This new functionality should make it easier for you to save or share your topics with your inner circle outside of our forum. So there is no need to copy/paste the URL anymore when you want to send it to your followers.


If you aren't sure what these are for (the whole pinning, sharing, tweeting thing), then don't worry about it. Forum functionality is not affected by these buttons in any way, and they are not required for the use of the forum. You can just continue using our forum as before.

If you don't use social networks or don't want those buttons to be shown, then click My Profile link at the top, scroll down to Custom View Settings, and enable "Hide social network sharing buttons" option.

I'm still testing things on the back end, so if you notice these buttons not working as expected, then please let me know.

This isn't permanent yet. I want to test it out and see if people actually use those buttons. So we are going to run it as a trial for a couple of months.

I'm going to sticky this announcement until Tuesday to make sure people who receive the digest once per week (on Mondays) see it.

Please PM me a screenshot of the ad that plays audio. I'll try to filter it out. This shouldn't be happening.

You should use Report Issue link of the post in question, if it's political and posted in Main.

My Profile, Custom View Settings, Hide social network sharing buttons

Those are served by Google. And they use historical data, keywords, trends, etc. to tailor the ads. So different people see different ads based individual interests. And the way in which they figure out a person's interests is very sophisticated.

You might search for several different things, and if there are a lot of people who searched for the same things and also searched for some some specific topic, then they might show you ads for that topic, even though you never searched for it directly. Just because you fit the profile of someone who might be interested in it too, based on millions of other people with similar patterns.

And then, selection bias kicks in. You are interested in that topic, and so you notice ads that are about that topic, while you don't notice ads about some other topics which aren't of interest to you, even thought they still match the same patterns.