The ~Fade in~ oooooo...

[allchopin]

Kind of an irritating aspect here, Piano Forum people, the fading in and out deal.  Is this is the top of your to-do list? (crossing fingers for not)

[nilsjohan]

Thanks for the feedback.

Do you have any particular wishes to put on the "to-do list"?

[allchopin]

Well geez, have a look at some of the past 50 threads.  People have thrown out hundreds of ideas, ranging from: (starred* are at the top of MY list)
- changing to php
- personal pictures in profiles
- polls
- mp3 sharing*
- photo galleries
- sheet music sharing*
- a chatroom*
- links to other sites

These would not only greatly improve fun and activity in the forums, but increase efficiency, as we would have less need for the long-term posts (if we had a chatroom).  The file sharing would add life to the whole scene, and bring in more visitors.  

[nilsjohan]

Yes, there are certainly no lack of ideas for development but everything you bring up have already been under serious considerations.
Most of the points on the list could more or less easily be set up but there are several reasons why it is not done (yet).
Generally speaking, even if adding more bells and whistles to the site would "improve the fun an activity" I am not sure this always will be positive.
The main goal of the forum is to encourage serious and high-level discussions by professional and aspiring classical pianists and all decisions are made with this goal in mind.
Sometimes less is more, you know.
Rather than having too many interactive elements that indeed might be interesting I prefer to put focus on the clean and simple text postings.
I am open for discussions regarding this.


It is very good you put together the list so I can comment on all of the issues here and now to clarify the situation a little.

- changing to PHP
The main forum engine is CGI (Pearl) but some things on the site are controlled by PHP. I can see no pressing reason why we should change to PHP. The current scripts are very solid, reliable and flexible and has been running perfectly for two years now.

- personal pictures in profiles
- polls
These features might be added within a couple of months when a major upgrade of the forum scripts will be done.

- mp3 sharing*
Just sharing mp3 files has its legal issues as you know and will not be possible.
However, the ability to upload your own recordings to recieve comments from other members is a truly great thing that I really hope we can add some day. The problem is mainly the economical aspect. Since this will likely be a rather popular feature of the forum it will consume huge amounts of bandwidth, which is expensive (we are talking about several hundred $ per month). Also, publishing recordings of pieces by composers that has not been dead for at least 70 years will require a license which has its cost.
The only solutions for this is either charging for membership or finding a main sponsor for the site.
(At the moment there is nothing that hampers you from linking to your own recordings uploaded to an external server and asking for comments in the forum.)

- photo galleries
This is not really within the limits of our goals.

- sheet music sharing*
There are legal aspects here too but a lot of printed music is in the public domain and can be shared. There might be some work going on...

- a chat room*
This is something many of you are asking for. There are already several different ways to communicate through Piano Forum such as the internal IM, email and three different chat systems and I would like to encourage using them since they already allow you to chat with any member that is logged in.
Adding a chat room might be possible and will certainly add another dimension to the site but again I am not sure if it is perfectly in line with our goals and is therefore not high priority at the moment.

- links to other sites
Just a question of time and priority...

To comment on your initial post where you bring up the fade issue I can just let you know that the work was done between two zips of coffee and required a total of five clicks on the left mouse button and two on the right. The whole job was completed in less than 40 seconds.
Don't you like it?

Comments and further discussions are always welcome!

[bitus]

Yo nilsjohan... you're a wise man... It would, indeed, suck if you'd get all these young kids looking for chat-tes in here... or amateurs trying to meet one another.
I highly respect the high level in this forum, and trust you'll keep it that way. I haven't seen any other forum like this...
Love you guys,
Bitus.