Review The Programmer's World Forums

[plcfcode]

Hello everyone,

I would like people to please check out my forum at www.programmersworld.elementfx.com and provide me with some constructive criticism on how I can improve the forum. I am really struggling to create a better looking theme, mostly because I do not know as much PHP as I probably need to know in order do what I want to do for the template. If anyone could provide suggestions, and possibly, code to do it, please feel free to do so.

(Also, if you like the forum, feel free to join!)

Thanks in advance!
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[essellar]

At the moment, your primary style sheet (style.php) is coming up empty, so there's not a lot to review (except plain text content).

 

[bojo]

That bright green that you use for the header and the boarders is really hurtful to the eyes. Try to tone the green down a bit, or go for something that isn't as bright.

 

[essellar]

Yeah, it is a bit on the bright side. You don't have to worry about the PHP, really; you can fix everything and make things really pretty using only CSS without having to dive into the template itself. I'm not a huge fan of typical PHP forum layouts at all—even the best of them look, like, so-o-o-o 2002 to me, and "pop-to-the-top" just encourages content-free spamming (necromancy)—and have little love for signatures and avatars, so I'd probably make a lot of changes that other people wouldn't make.

I'm not going to sign up, but as to your Math.Round() question:
The "sign bias" answer given is nonsense, and Bankers' Rounding is not a mistake. It's a statistically sound means of assuring that rounded numbers, on average, approximate the behaviour of the unrounded numbers. When numbers are closer to one rounded value than another, you simply go to the closest rounded value. When they're exactly halfway between, if you just pick one direction (either up or down) for all cases, you are going to accumulate errors in your totals. When you round to the nearest even number, you'll be rounding up about half of the time and down half of the time, so any totals based on rounded numbers will be closer to the true total. It's called Bankers' Rounding because it was developed in the financial world, where accumulated rounding errors in the totals represent real money that needs to be accounted for.

 

[plcfcode]

Yeah, it is a bit on the bright side. You don't have to worry about the PHP, really; you can fix everything and make things really pretty using only CSS without having to dive into the template itself. I'm not a huge fan of typical PHP forum layouts at all—even the best of them look, like, so-o-o-o 2002 to me, and "pop-to-the-top" just encourages content-free spamming (necromancy)—and have little love for signatures and avatars, so I'd probably make a lot of changes that other people wouldn't make.

I'm not going to sign up, but as to your Math.Round() question:
The "sign bias" answer given is nonsense, and Bankers' Rounding is not a mistake. It's a statistically sound means of assuring that rounded numbers, on average, approximate the behaviour of the unrounded numbers. When numbers are closer to one rounded value than another, you simply go to the closest rounded value. When they're exactly halfway between, if you just pick one direction (either up or down) for all cases, you are going to accumulate errors in your totals. When you round to the nearest even number, you'll be rounding up about half of the time and down half of the time, so any totals based on rounded numbers will be closer to the true total. It's called Bankers' Rounding because it was developed in the financial world, where accumulated rounding errors in the totals represent real money that needs to be accounted for.

It's okay. People see that the forum is dead, and consequently, they do not sign up, leaving the forum deader than it was before. Thanks for looking at it and providing me with some extremely useful information. Also, thanks for answering my question. Would you mind me quoting it in a forum post?

 

[essellar]

Would I mind? Not at all. The reason I wouldn't sign up is that it's more-or-less a beginners' forum at the moment, and that causes a huge demand drag on anyone who has a little more experience, even when that experience has little to do with the question being asked. (I used to get an awful lot of private messages here for help with things I'm far from expert in, like sysadmin, and I'm already heavily involved in forums and mailing lists dealing with things I am expert in.) I'm not young enough or motivated enough to educate everyone everywhere anymore, so I've picked a couple of places to stay active and try to keep away from new venues.

As for the deadness thing, sometimes you need to "seed" a forum. As the admin, you have the opportunity to create a number of fake identities and have some conversations with yourself. Pick a few things that you know well, and a few neat things that you've just recently learned, and create a few high-quality threads where one of "you" is a n00b with a question, another one is a "cargo culter" who thinks he knows the answer but is actually wrong, and a third version of you has the real answer and a good explanation. You can actually grow a thread like that to a couple of pages, with the "n00b" asking follow-on questions and the "cargo culter" trying to defend his position (but keep it as polite as possible while maintaining some flavour of the one-upsmanship that goes on in a lively forum). A couple of dozen good threads like that will pick things up a little bit. And try to make sure that your real answer people feel some sort of thanks or reward. It'll pick up -- and there aren't nearly enough places where it's safe to be a n00b anymore.