Right now, I feel, the boards' scripts are lacking. Looking at things over the past while, we've got some things that need addressing. Many of our viewers don't see the pages how they should. Things are not very efficient, or constructed to work easily with each other. I'm now calling on the help of 4-ch'ers to help try to make a board script that meets our demands; both yours as you view and use them, and mine and the moderators so that we can efficiently moderate and operate the boards.

The list so far of things that need to be done:

• Smaller, more efficient HTML/CSS. So far this is the only thing I personally have worked on.
• Much better browser compatibility - WAHa built Kareha on firstly looks, and to work best with Firefox. I want the pages to be small and efficient whilst still remaining functionality, and looking 90% the same on every major browser. That includes Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari.
• Moving the moderation/admin tools away from public view - these just clutter up the boards, and by moving them elsewhere, moderators can have more "tools" at their disposal.
• imode/mobile phone browsing support - If we do support, people will use it, no doubt. We do get quite a lot of page views attempted by these users both from Japan and other countries.
• BBS reader support - designing the code to either work with existing bbs readers, or future-proofing it to work with tools of our own in the future.
• Faster processing. Faster, more efficient board scripts - Through using better coding, and other CGI options like FastCGI, SpeedyCGI or even mod_perl.
• Statistic collection - All but error logging is going to be turned off, so no longer will I have someway of getting a view on stats, and I would like to make a more publically viewable setup.
• Retain a lot of the things we already use - Secure trips, RSS, multiple board styles etc.

I've also come to the conclusion that taking some of Kareha's code and then building our own might be the best approach. I can't do this all myself : I'm a lousy programmer, and without your contribution I don't know what to add. Many hands also make light work. In terms of getting it all done, I personally would like a replacement for Kareha inplace before our 1st birthday (November 1st).

If you can help in anyway, Perl, HTML, CSS, ideas, criticism, thoughts, anything else I may have missed, then feel free to contribute to this thread. I am willing to provide whatever services are required to get the job done. Asking our resident technician to put inplace a CVS/SVN server is not a problem and if we need it, I'll have it in.

A little CSS bug I just noticed: (only affects Pseud0ch) futher down this board there's a permasaged thread, but its "■ ▲ ▼" icons are floating in the top-right corner, near Admin/Manage.

The table of contents near the top of each board could use some improvement. I see 4 main problems with the way it's presented right now:

1. Pretty much the whole thing is crammed onto one line, which makes it hard to pick apart threads at a glance.
2. The everything-on-one-line approach looks weird in Opera when a long thread title must wrap onto the next line.
3. It's not obvious that clicking on the numeric portion of a topic (that is, the "1. " in "1. [REQUEST] - Project 4-ch: Building a better website. (2)") produces a different result than clicking on the text portion of the same title, but only for the first THREADS_DISPLAYED threads.
4. The only possible action when clicking on a thread title is to read it starting from the top. There's no way to quickly skip down to the Reply box. Maybe that's a good thing since it makes people read before posting something irreverent; I don't know.

> Pretty much the whole thing is crammed onto one line, which makes it hard to pick apart threads at a glance.

Actually, I like that the way it is. The way Shiichan does this, with one line for each thread listed makes the list longer but not really more useful.

> The everything-on-one-line approach looks weird in Opera when a long thread title must wrap onto the next line.

How does it look weird?

> It's not obvious that clicking on the numeric portion of a topic (that is, the "1. " in "1. [REQUEST] - Project 4-ch: Building a better website. (2)") produces a different result than clicking on the text portion of the same title, but only for the first THREADS_DISPLAYED threads.

Well, you could either learn that just by experience (it's also the same way at 2channel (more or less)) or we could add it to the wiki.

> There's no way to quickly skip down to the Reply box.

Well, you could skim to the beginning of the next thread and then just scroll up a bit....

And personally, I think all "look and feel" questions that aim at optimal results should be subject for special browsers or firefox extensions. The default design by the board itself should just simply go for the best possible result that can be had by regarding the major browsers in use while not cramming everything full with stuff that could easily break.

>>4

> Actually, I like that the way it is. The way Shiichan does this, with one line for each thread listed makes the list longer but not really more useful.

I wasn't asking for each thread title to be placed on its own line. I was asking for general opinions about clearer thread separation. Thanks for pointing out that Shiichan does it differently, though.

> How does it look weird?

Like this: http://paracelsus.hollosite.com/src/1122929217998.jpg

> Well, you could skim to the beginning of the next thread and then just scroll up a bit....

True, but that's a learned habit, and one that I certainly haven't learned. Although no user interface is intrinsically intuitive, we could try to make ours less intrinsically hostile.