LES, what could be better, what do you like, what would you like to say, what do I need to hear?
Hello!
It has now been around 10 months since this place launched, and I am very interested to hear your thoughts.
There are no wrong answers, what you think is what you think, this is not so much a feature request post but if that is what you are thinking like "Why has he not done this yet" then fine say it and I will read it.
Happy to hear the positive and the negative, please don't hold back I won't take it personally, I might be completely missing the mark on somethings and hitting it well on others but I don't get a huge amount of feedback so it would be good to hear from you.
If you want to make a burner account to reply to this that is also fine.
I am trying my best to be as light touch as possible, the amount of moderation is actually incredibly low and consists of removing spam (thanks for the reports of spam profiles @Rahul
Just saying "it's fine don't worry about it" is also perfectly good feedback but I really would genuinely like to hear from people.
I hope to plan something a bit special for Black Friday time allowing which will happen a little after this place has been live for a year.
I know there is a small list of fixes needed I have started talks with a few people about taking on some of the dev work here as @Solaire really does not have enough time and I don't want to put on him paid or unpaid, those that reached out I know I have been slow in getting back to you but it is not forgotten.
One of the things I keep thinking is that i should probably have at least 1 mod on a different time zone but I am wary about doing that especially while so little modderation is needed.
Anyway, I am rambling now, please give me your thoughs, warts and all.
Ant.
https://inceptionhosting.com
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Comments
Honestly, I've not much (or anything) to say about the inner workings of the forum. Place is neat, trustworthy and full of reputable people. Question is, how are you going to get more people involved? Community outreach via Twitter and little giveaways across social platforms help spread the word and seem to work for brands like HetrixTools in increasing engagement.
MichaelCee
I know that it takes lot of time but it would be interesting option to create tutorials from 0 .so LES could be something like wpbeginner for servers for example. It would gain more users for basic usage which are going to need a vps hosting eventually. I guess it would be a win win win option. ( win for the beginners win for les win for the hosting companies) i could be wrong
Everything is improving so i do not feel anything bad at this moment.
Dentistry is my passion
Honestly, I am not sure, I am more of an "if you build it they will come" sort of guy, the traffic hitting the forum and main site right now is 30.1% google driven for the main site and 24.2% google driven for the forum.
Happy to hear any suggestions on how to do better outreach.
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So more "from scratch tutorials" I suppose I am guilty of thinking a little bit above that, I have plenty of ideas and dismiss them as "naa to basic" but I can certainly try more base-level ones, I do need to expand the easy mode series a bit.
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Maybe reduce the sticky count a bit? Takes up most of the "above-the-fold" screenspace on new discussion page
In that case, I'd suggest leveraging the Google traffic and seeing if any work can be done. There are more qualified SEO experts around like @vyas
The Twitter has quite a few followers and it's always nice to see a new post. I read somewhere that posts without a link seem to get more engagement so things like your question/answer, polls and such sprinkled in between will reach more people (allegedly) and you can possibly use the pinned tweet feature to highlight the latest LES post or TLES offer etc. Just quick thoughts.
MichaelCee
Exactly i guess for you it would look even stupid somethings or too basic but for non tech people there are not too many options. I mean tutorials done for basic level but from a quality place .Wpbeginner is great for just doing that. It is starting from 0 and after reading during lot of hours and trying you are improving and achieving something.
Dentistry is my passion
ummm...... CTRL+Click issue annoys me every day.
https://phpbackend.com/
At this very moment i think its all good. I am glad i found a new home. Thank you @AnthonySmith and to all keeping this place warm.
Remind me?
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When clicking the inbox icon(using desktop), message list is long, 'All Messages' option is not visible, have to zoom out to access 'All Messages'
https://webhorizon.net
Honestly, this place is far better than said predecessor site, and for that, I am forever thankful
For moderation, I don't see trolls or spam accounts, so that is handled very well.
Not much work is needed in my opinion.
This, I believe.
I only see the last 5 when I click that, what resolution are you running?
Still valid feedback though, appreciated
Ah ook link targets, yeah that annoys the crap out of me too, will move that up the priority list.
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@AnthonySmith yes I get 5 messages too, its only when I use my RDP (which I often do) at 720p.
Possiblity to move the All Messages option at top, don't know it may be hard to implement.
I just realized I can increase my resolution a bit to fix that!
https://webhorizon.net
It is fairly chunky now I look at it, I will look into it, maybe removing the preview text or only showing 50% of it will help.
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More noob friendly tutorials + How to guides on the main blog . I am not a big content writer but if sweet simple how to instructions works, will be happy to contribute.
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Quite happy with current state of LES
Still miss/look forward to seeing this feature:
Selectively hide/mute threads - Plugin
(The ability as a user to hide certain threads with the option to reset hidden threads.)
+1 for noob friendly tutorials. There are a lot of outdated tutorials online, so it would be good to find a source of curated up-to-date tutorials where outdated versions are periodically removed.
Since the blog is running on Grav I was wondering if we could leverage its integration with Github and users could contribute submitting improvement or corrections to the tutorials.
Besides that, discussions have been civil so far and moderation has been working well when needed.
Everything seems fine you're doing a great job
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I want you to view all my spam thread. Down voted.
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Hey, I return here more than 5 times a day; must be doing something right/wrong. :-D
My Firefox "Top Sites" puts you #3, after Outlook and PayPal. :-o
Generally and particularly recently, I find the mix of sanity/insanity/topics much more balanced than "the other side".
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
I wouldn't classify your threads as spam ... Corned beef, maybe ...
(I'll have it with eggs over easy, please.)
Not sure of the value of the feedback, but here since the first day I do appreciate all the differences with some others places
Less fight, less shit stuff, more friendly, more interesting!
I do really hope all that is not because less crowded!
Hopes/Features
But Thanks at least!
just continue being awesome.
and the insert image function on mobile still doesnt work on android mobile chrome
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
It does.
Work around : you gotta edit the last word of the extension, delete and add back.
I.e
.jpg
Remove g
Add g
Boom.
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Not sure how I can describe this, but I have a UI bug on mobile since I joined. The same bug isn't present on the other Vanilla forum.
When I scroll down/up the main page, unread threads scroll down normally, while the threads with no unread posts lag back, and jump into place after ~500-1000 ms or after I let go of the swipe. I also cannot scroll if I start the swipe from a read thread. I need to start swiping from an unread thread to actually scroll.
This is mostly fine, unless I have too much time and read all threads on the screen, in which case I can't scroll easily and try to use the very edges of the screen, with mixed results because of my phone case.
I wanted to find some safe and free way to record my phone screen including some visual cue about taps/gestures somehow for some time but never got around reading stuff about it. I guess this is the time I let you know.
Platform: Firefox for Android 79.0.5 (Build #2015758619) on Android 9
Sorry for holding out on that for so long. Keep up the good work, I know you work hard. Thanks, both for IH and LES.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
On a second note, now I realised I can scroll by swiping the read threads. I guess this one fixed itself with a Firefox update or something. Usability is better now. The lagging behind part is still the same though.
If you ask me, the most logical way to expand the reach of LES is to target the noob base because that's where the numbers are. However, targeting the noob base is a catch-22 situation because to participate meaningfully in discussions on LES, you need to know some technical stuff, but at the same time, because you are so noob, you don't know how to gain sufficient information to meaningfully participate.
I am currently cooking my doctoral dissertation (I have another 50 to 60k words to go at least), so I can't contribute much until early next year, but I would say that producing content that a complete noob can understand is the best way forward to increase the user base. The big problem from my experience teaching technical stuff to complete noobs (I have been doing this for years before doing my PhD full-time) is that their starting point is so low, it is almost impossible for most technically competent people to imagine their difficulties and obstacles. I have a lot of experience in this regard, turning people who know only basic Microsoft Office into print and web designers, so I should be able to produce stuff that will go down well with a noob audience.
That said, I can't do much until next year (and even then, I have a whole bunch of non-native English speaking academic collaborators waiting on me to work on papers so that they can get published in top English journals), but I will do my best to contribute small pieces here and there if needed.
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