When is GBA going to upgrade this site?????
walta100
| Posted in General Questions on
The current software is pathetically it is outdated and the spam bots have a field day
Walta
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Search and download construction details
Replies
Agreed. So much great knowledge and community here, but the site isn't working. I think they should shift this to the stackexchange platform: https://stackexchange.com/. A building science focused stackexchange would be a wonderful resource.
Heck, I'd take a 20 year old version of vBulletin over this...
The new spam bots are an annoyance, but this community could provide SO much more value with some better infrastructure, my wish list is:
Organization of Q&A (more categories, sorting methods, regionality, etc.)
Add a paywall for non-GBAPrime comments in non-prime articles and Q&A (with a specific free section)
A usable search function
My understanding is they can't use a package like vBulletin because they want the forum to be linked to the articles and comments. Visibility to the articles is determined by subscription status so it all has to be linked to the subscription database.
The problem is that the demands on forum software get higher and higher, it's hard for a bespoke solution to keep up.
I don't mind the website. It's rudimentary but functional. I just want to see a commitment to maintaining what's here before advocating for changes.
Taunton's Breaktime forum, associated with FHB Magazine, did a revamp a few years ago that effectively killed it.
I remember that "upgrade", it was awful, totally unusable.
Seems like everyone gets to see the link to every article regardless of subscription status. Once someone clicks on the link then that user’s status decides how much of that content they can view.
Most forums do not allow newly registered accounts to post directly to the forums. New users posting first go to a moderator for approval.
Walta
Agree with all the comments above. Right now I'm not referring people who ask me questions to this site (I used to quite often), because I'm afraid the first time they come here will be one of those times there are 20 pages of spam...
I’m new here. I have been on a few forums and I have to say the forum portion of this site needs improvement.
I’d like to see posts categorized a bit. It would be cool to have regional online meet and greet
@Nik+PIHC : You may want to check out BS & Beer (where BS stands for Building Science) to see if they have a local group in your area.
https://www.thebsandbeershow.com/ then click the local groups at the top.
But I totally agree we need better categorization...
Agreed, the current forum is quite bad. And, realistically, they obviously don't have the technical capability to create their own modern, full-featured forum site.
My suggestion to GBA would be to instead use a service like Discourse. They can just pay a monthly fee and in return be able to offer a high-quality, hosted forum service.
Hey everyone,
Just here to say that I hear you, agree, and that I always share these threads with the folks at the company who could decide to put resources behind improving things like the functionality of our websites.
As I said in another thread recently, the editorial staff, those of us who interact with you here on the site have full time jobs making content, and frankly, that's our expertise. We'll keep doing our best at that, and hopefully at some point the company will get to the also important work of making our websites better.
And just so it doesn't sound like I am throwing them under the bus, we do have a great development team. It's just a small one that manages a lot of websites and other has other responsibilities too.
I appreciate your patience and more importantly, your contributions to the site and the topics we cover here.
Brian,
I hope the editorial staff and contributors know how much we appreciate the content they produce. A big part of why we are expressing our discontent at the state of the website is that we recognize how valuable a resource it is, and are invested in its continued good health.
Times like this I wish there was an upvote button!
DC, there was one in the early years. If they can get the site functional again, maybe we could get one back?! The big debate then was whether there should also be a downvote. They decided to switch to the "expert member" tag instead.
Brian, if there is anything we can do to *encourage* the IT department to spend some time and money on GBA, please let us know!