Reply To: Requesting Your Thoughts On the Latest Tweaks to the Site

[peter]

On joegyork said

Hi Peter – just a very minor suggestion – if possible I’d quite like a ‘Thanks’ button to go with the other responses – I used that at the forum that shall not be named 😉

I also like the thanks reaction that they have over at Cakewalk Forums. We had several requests for it when the site was being built. You would think it might be easy to find. But unfortunately, after extensively researching and testing out several reaction scripts (plugins), there was only one I found that would let me do it, however, when I tested it, it was incompatible with the theme we’re using. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for new plugins, but the reality is, forums are legacy. Most of the development for the open source forums dried up more than a decade ago — they’re legacy, so there aren’t many developers working on the plugins for them. The option I do have is replacing the angry reaction with the thanks one, which, while I don’t love how trolls abuse the angry reaction, it does have uses and I would not want to replace it now that we have thousands of posts.

FTR, I had to buy a completely separate reactions plugin for the social walls and each comes with an annual subscription that covers the developer’s maintenance, updates and customer support. I have used some very well supported, regularly updated open source scripts, but I largely go with very actively developed paid scripts (plugins) and pay for contracts including the reaction scripts for the forum and social walls (two separate plugins, and two separate annual service contracts). Open source plugins for the forum — and really any open source forums — are mostly old and present security and script conflict risks. Beyond leading digital marketing at large brands, I’ve been running my own sites since the mid 90s, and I’ve had enough experience with hackers that I’m pretty careful about ensuring I use actively developed and supported scripts. But the reality is, the legacy forum software market is pretty small these days, so there’s a small amount of active developers and because the market is relatively small, the costs are higher than they were 15 years ago when there was a ton of open source scripts. Anyhow, more than you asked! But  that’s the reason why there’s not a lot of choices for reaction scripts for this (or any) legacy forum platform. They’re a lot more choices for the social wall platform, as that’s far more popular than old school forums, so developers are going where they can make a living.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music.