3 months and no eve updates… what’s going on?

The short answer is a whole bunch of things.

The long answer is a complete reworking of the Eve’s forum module (ubb.x). The overall goal of 1.2 is to change the notion of community to be less forum and topic centric and more content centric. This doesn’t mean we have changed the way forums and topics work, it means from a base level we are changing our software to be more analogous to real communities.

Currently most community software is designed around the notion of categories, forums, topics, replies, and sometimes threaded replies. The top down approach can work well for a standard message board. Unfortunately it leads to very strict categorization and pigeon holing of ideas, and sometimes even members.

Our approach is to be completely content driven. The content (which can be a photo album, a poll, a message, or potentially something else) defines itself and the actions around it. For instance wouldn’t it be nice to have notifications for any message that contains a word or phrase you are interested in? Our how about having a RSS feed of just the content you are watching? Or what about having chat room live in a category next to a photo album? Searching across all and any content in they system? Categorizing Photo albums and polls that live outside of a forum software completely? These are just ideas currently, but the new release is designed to answer what is at the crux of all these questions: The essence of community is the membership and how those members contribute to the system.

In terms of noticeable feature changes in 1.2, here is a short list, although all features are subject to change:

• Private topic indicator in the community
• Faster/more reliable “New Since your Last Visit” and “Today’s Active Topics”
• Topic list sorted alphabetically
• Ability to keep stats historical vs. live (post & reply counts)
• Online now at the forum level
• Feature topics across all forums
• Faster/Simpler interface for Content Islands
• RSS feeds of some Content Islands
• Replace copy topics with linking topics
• Search engine friendly URLS

Barry Kaplan (Infopop Technology)