[imc-scotland-discussion] Some recent suggestions for site enhancement

[Tom]

Hello chris & people,

Firstly, the site has been slow recently because the greek server has
been being hammered. I'm not sure if this is related to whatever is
going on in greece but no doubt *THE ENEMY* have reasons to be targeting
indymedia servers.

I've done a site security upgrade to drupal 6.9 (and in the process
ballsed the site up for a period, among other things causing all events
and comments to disappear -- but it is fixed now).

One of the things I upgraded was the captcha module (the thing that asks
you to 'type these letters' to prevent spam submissions). Since that
module has been such a buggy pile of rubbish in the past I've made it
appear for admins and editors, so that we actually notice if it is
broken and preventing valid submissions. We can disable this in the
future for logged-in users.

I also changed the article text editor thing so that when you paste it
pastes as plain text, avoiding all the problems of weird formatting
cruft being inserted by word processors.

chris wrote:
> Hi
> 
> A couple of things have been suggested to me as improvements of the 
> website. I'm forwarding them here for discussion. One is a slight
> usability enhancement, the other is a bit bigger.
> 
> 
> *A suggestion for the Publish Article form* When it comes to
> Attachments, some confusion was found. A desire to make publishing
> multiple photos easier was expressed.
> 
> Suggested solution was the ability to add extra "Upload file"
> entries, so these could be uploaded as a group instead of waiting as
> currently. For example having a "Select number of items to upload"
> drop-down menu, or an "Add another item" button (though this 2nd has
> potential to confuse with "upload", IMO)

Yes the publish article form is a bit complex.

London indymedia's software does things a way which is perhaps less
powerful but at the same time easier to use: It doesn't let you insert
images into your article in specific places. It just plonks them all at
the end of the article.

On our site I think people don't always realise you must click on
'insert image' or 'insert thumbnail', so they attach images and never
put them into the body text.

Probably on submission images that are not contained in the article text
should be automatically inserted by the site software.

I am a bit resistant to implementing what you described above because it
would require a lot more coding whereas the current thing is done with
minimal changes on top of the basic drupal functionality. I'm also not
sure if it would merit the work since most articles have 5 or 6
attachments at most. (It is hard to make group decisions about technical
aspects of the site when it depends on technocrats like me who are
inclined to drag their feet if the work doesn't  appeal to them).

> *Add Forum functionality*

I have no strong feelings on the issue of forums. Perhaps it would allow
more of a community to develop around indymedia scotland, or perhaps it
would be a lot of bitching and flaming. In any case I'm sure technically
it is very easy because some other people are sure to have written a
decent Drupal forum module (the core one can't be used because it
conflicts with our special comments module that allows images and file
attachments on comments.)

-- 
Tom