Getting started

If you're wondering what the "country watch" section (seen at the foot of the page) is about, it's a new feature that I've implement that, among other things, defends the site against attacks from bots and spammers. Apart from being a defence mechanism, it also indicates where our site is visited from.

I've made a change to the way that people view messages our members write in their Spaces .

Although we've very happy for visitors to browse our pages and our discussion forums without the need to login, I felt that it was a bit unfair that some of our members freely give their time and aren't rewarded for the effort they make. I've decided to conduct a trial for the next few weeks, and turn our Spaces into a members-only feature. I've updated the message on the Spaces forum as follows:

Spaces are exclusive to logged-in members

The general spaces board can be viewed by anyone whether they are logged-in or not. However you need to be logged-in to see a member's personal Space (board) and any messages they contain.

The messages are still there but you will now have to login to see them. The latest Spaces messages will not appear on the home page.

For those who think we've got something to hide, we don't. We're simply saying that it's not unreasonable, as a mark of respect, to treat a very small part of this community in this manner. We hope that, in this way, we will encourage more of our members to login when they're browsing our boards and to encourage more visitors to join The Quoroom.

I'd be interested to hear what people think of this approach.

rainbow asked:

... wheres the chat room?

The link to our Chat Room is on the MAIN MENU on the left.

I'm trialling a different forum template. One of the main differences you'll notice is a tabbed list at the top

Recent Discussions | My Discussions | Categories | My Profile | Rules | Help

"My discussions" and "My Profile" tabs only appear if you are logged-in.

It's a litte different, but the new style could make navigating around the boards work better for some people.

I'm gearing up for a change to the forum software. At the moment The Quoroom is using Fireboard but development work has stopped on that product and it's been taken over by Kunena. I'm very interested in the future of Kunena for this site and I'll be testing the new product over the next few days. In the meantime, if anyone has any comments - good or bad - about the changed forum template, I'd be grateful to hear them.

I'm also undecided whether the default view, when you first enter the forum, is to present a list of recent discussions, "my discussions" or the list of categories.

I could make the text really, really, really, microscopically tiny if you'd prefer ...