Forum Rules

[Cordilow]

I know that people of various forums want to place rules specific to their set of forums (including me).  However, after the skin feature is disabled, it seems there won't be a way to make these known to everyone who uses the forums.  Using forum descriptions doesn't work, seeing as they aren't inherited (and I would have to do a lot of work changing them all).

It might be nice if it were an integrated thing; I mean, you define your forum rules in the parent forum, and they're viewable (or linked) from there and all the child forums.  Also, a way to add links to a forum set could also be useful (i.e. for related links, link exchanges and such).

[Will L <Nabble>]

Have you played with our embeddable forum feature? You can create a html page, and have your forum rules in the page, then embed your forum into that page. This will keep the rules on every page of your forum. For more info on the embeddable forum feature, please refer to: http://www.nabble.com/help/Answer.jtp?id=36 Here is an example of an embedded forum: http://sarahjanesmith.cosmic-archer.com/forum.html#nabble-f29682

[Cordilow]

I'm aware of that feature.  I'd rather not go through another website to do it, though (i.e. I would either suffer through cost or non-Nabble advertisements placed on it).  The only one I would maybe want to use it with isn't compatible with that feature, for some odd reason (i.e. Tiddlyspot), but that would just be experimental.

Would users coming to the forum from within Nabble see the rules this way, or would they have to go through the other website?

[Cordilow]

Hmm.

I've been trying this out for a while (using embedded forums to add a link to the forum rules).  It's cool in a lot of respects, but the sizing of the iframe, or whatever it is, seems to be off much of the time (i.e. the bottom or the top of the screen isn't visible; it either looks like only so many posts are there or that there is no option to move the thread or some such).

Anyway, I don't know if it's just my provider or what.  But, all I really want the embedded feature for is to add a forum rules link.  Things run much more smoothly without embedding, it seems.  If we could add some feature like inherited descriptions, this could solve the problem (or some inherited link added to the parent) without the cost of embedding (i.e. having to find a good host, dealing with the sizing of the embedded portion and so forth).  There are a ton of situations where the sizing issue needs to be dealt with differently, it seems.  Also, I've noticed the title of the web browser doesn't always change (i.e. it might be the title of some post viewed long ago).

I'm not saying I think the embedded forum thing should be thrown out.  It would be cool to keep it and improve it.  I just don't think it's working out very well for what I'm trying to use it for (if I wanted to make an entirely new web page around it, or get paid for extra advertising, that would be another story, and I might then be willing to sacrifice a few things pertaining to speed and formatting for that).

Anyway, what do you think of the idea of having inheritable forum descriptions?

[R Morris]

Do you have a link to your embedded page? It may be a simple html issue. Or it may be that we need to fix something. In either case, I'd like to see if I can duplicate the problem.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

[Will L <Nabble>]

I understand your point. Internally we have discussed this, one solution is that Nabble will probably provide some type of html hosting so that you don't have to go to a third-party site for embedding. And the html hosting will work smoothly with an embedded forum. We may get to this in 1 or 2 months time frame.

Another solution is that we will add a feature to allow you to make a thread sticky and have this thread cross-posted to other forums. This way, you don't need to use the embedding, because you can simply have the same "forum rule" thread sticky in all your forums. This will be available also in 1 or 2 month time frame.

[Cordilow]

Here's a link to how it was when it was embedded:
http://forums.my2gig.com/indexBackup.html

Here are a list of things to try:
Just try viewing a lot of posts (especially ones with a lot of replies).
Also maybe try opening in a new tab with the middle mouse click.
Try replying to a couple posts or editing them.

I'm not sure what else to try, though.

[Cordilow]

Ah, both of these things sound pretty cool.  Thanks for putting so much into this!

[R Morris]

Thanks, I see what it's doing.

Regards,
Rod Morris
Nabble.com

[Cordilow]

Cool, that's good to hear.

[Will L <Nabble>]

We found out why this happened. This is caused by a bug in Firefox and Opera. We use an iframe for the embedding, but the height of the iframe is a 2-byte number in Firefox, which ranges from -32768 to 32767 px. So you see the content getting cut off when its height goes over the 32767px limit in iframe. This doesn't occur in IE, and Firefox will fix this bug soon. Meanwhile, we will add some temporary measure in the next release to allow you to scroll when the height limit in iframe is reached.