[Sam]

I would like to suggest revamping the articles section. Ideally articles would bring in visitors and new members to FC, as well as encouraging discussion.

I propose:
- Placing the articles on a Wordpress based blog / blog section. (for SEO purposes)
- Having them linked Articles & Tutorials.
- Have all comments/ discussion through the Articles & Tutorials section i.e. if a visitor wanted to write a comment, they would need to post it in the topic on ForumCoin.
- Promotion of good articles in a newsletter.

[peachpurple]

good ideas, too bad that I wasn't selected to be one of your writers.

It is good to have old articles revamped as some of the tips are outdated.

Linking to Articles & Tutorial is a great way to allow readers to click onto other similar topics

[CyberFreak]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have considered using Wordpress in the past and have played with bridging the two but there is so much that can or will break with phpBB and/or Wordpress updates even when everything is set up. Keeping WP and phpBB separate would be easier technically but will not be a good user experience for users in terms of submitting content. Maybe the available bridges are better (and less buggier) than they were when I last tried about 2-3 years ago?

- Having them linked Articles & Tutorials.
- Have all comments/ discussion through the Articles & Tutorials section i.e. if a visitor wanted to write a comment, they would need to post it in the topic on ForumCoin.

Not too sure what you mean by this. Will the article be submitted to both the blog and in a new topic and users can only comment via the topic? Would Google not view that as duplicate content?

[Sam]

Not too sure what you mean by this. Will the article be submitted to both the blog and in a new topic and users can only comment via the topic? Would Google not view that as duplicate content?

The article would be submitted to the blog only and a topic created on the forum that says something along the lines of:

This is the discussion topic for: <article link>. The author <???> would love to hear your comments, feedback and discussion!

Thanks for the suggestions. I have considered using Wordpress in the past and have played with bridging the two but there is so much that can or will break with phpBB and/or Wordpress updates even when everything is set up. Keeping WP and phpBB separate would be easier technically but will not be a good user experience for users in terms of submitting content. Maybe the available bridges are better (and less buggier) than they were when I last tried about 2-3 years ago?

That's a bit disappointing. :'(

[thisnthat]

These are some interesting ideas. Anything that's helpful for FC, sounds good.

My idea is to categorize that section so articles are easier to locate.

[cmoneyspinner]

@Sam, @CyberFreak, @thisnthat - I agree with your thought process. The main thing is that people write a lot of good articles loaded with good info. But if it's hard to "seek and find" the content, it's almost in vain. Whatever will make it easier to locate information is what will improve the site and likely encourage more good article writing. So any search system you implement - categories, Wordpress blog, whatever - it will probably be welcomed. I don't find this site very easy to search. I have to guess too much and hope I hit what I'm aiming for. Archived content by date (year and month) would be helpful too. A chronology is always useful.

[Sam]

@Sam, @CyberFreak, @thisnthat - I agree with your thought process. The main thing is that people write a lot of good articles loaded with good info. But if it's hard to "seek and find" the content, it's almost in vain. Whatever will make it easier to locate information is what will improve the site and likely encourage more good article writing. So any search system you implement - categories, Wordpress blog, whatever - it will probably be welcomed. I don't find this site very easy to search. I have to guess too much and hope I hit what I'm aiming for. Archived content by date (year and month) would be helpful too. A chronology is always useful.

Another point I would add to this is that sometime's it's difficult to find the "best" articles. There is a search by views but perhaps a search by topic reputation?

[CyberFreak]

It is possible to use the "topic attributes" as a way to categorize the articles and to allow users to list all topics that have that attribute applied to them. Only issue is that same articles may come under multiple categories and the feature only allows 1 attribute to be set per topic

Some sort of sorting by reputation is possible and is a good idea as reputation is usually a good way to determine what posts are most worthwhile.

[Sam]

I would like to bump this up for ForumCoin 2.0!

It seems that there are two actively maintained phpBB - WordPress bridges. A good one is located here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-w3all- ... tegration/

I think WordPress would be a great option for articles. They really should be getting more views than they are now.

In addition to my points above... WordPress based articles would allow for new payment options in the future (e.g. pay per view for articles).

[Netherrealmer]

My suggestion is simple. We need to have "Article of the month" awards where the winner get an article pinned for a whole month,

[cmoneyspinner]

My suggestion is simple. We need to have "Article of the month" awards where the winner get an article pinned for a whole month,

I think HUBPages has something like that. It's either HUB of the Month or HUBBER of the Month. I think they even ask HUBBERs to suggest a fellow HUBBER for the spotlight. If it works for HUBPages I guess it can work here.

[suny]

I suggest the number of comments should be reduced to 10 and number of views increased to 500 for extra 100 FC rewarded per article. That will prompt authors for sharing their work.

[Heatman]

It's a good idea, I completely buy into it but it's all up to the administrator to decide what's going to be done.