I've certainly not seen other communities where the volume and length of discussion about photos comes anywhere near to ours. It's possibly that many communities tend to take their discussion to threads rather than comments on photos - which is what we basically had previously (but fully integrated with the gallery rather than just embedding a gallery photo in a separate thread) and what I'd like to get back to.
Given that a significant percentage of the post traffic on the site actually came from photo comments rather than news threads - and now that photo comments are no longer given the prominence they were on the old site (due to limitations with the software we've moved to), there is a definite drop in posts from this alone. This is pretty much at the top of my priority list to address - and the new version coming soon goes at least part of the way to addressing it. I may have some additional work to do to get the functionality exactly where we need it, so it's certainly not an easy fix.
Just by way of explanation - XenForo v2.0 has been in development for over 3 years now, and has been available for download for beta testing for only about 4 weeks (still lots of bugs to be resolves before it is deemed "stable" enough for use on a real website). We've been waiting a long time for progress with this (and it has at times been quite frustrating how long it is taking). This new release is a complete rewrite from the version we currently run for ZooChat - as in, they pretty much threw out the old code and started from scratch to provide the same functionality, but built on a new and more extensible platform. This means that v2.0 of the forum software won't actually provide that much in the way of new functionality - they are largely aiming for "functional parity" (ie it can do everything that v1.5 currently does, but not much more), and won't start adding new functionality until at least v2.1 Because of the fundamental changes to the software platform, I'm going to need to rebuild ZooChat from scratch to work with v2.0 ... all posts and photos and everything will be migrated across to the new site and it will largely work the same as it does now (with some UI improvements - especially for mobile devices) - but there is a lot of work required to get ZooChat ready for upgrade with all of the customisations I've made to the website. The side effect of this is that I've been reluctant to do any significant development work on the current site because any changes I make now will need to be done a second time before we can move to XenForo v2.0 - and I simply don't have time to build that functionality twice! We're getting quite close to a stable release of v2.0 of the forum software, so now is the time for me to start customising things ready to upgrade ZooChat. This process is likely to take a couple of months - I'd hope to have something ready before Christmas, but I won't make any promises there - it's more likely going to be at least January. I'll be starting some threads discussing some of the changes coming so you can get a feel for what we're going to see in the new version. There's also plenty of scope for tweaking the way things work and doing our own customisations for our needs on ZooChat - so the more suggestions you can make, the better.
Hi Sim, Thank you for openness to input as I really do miss the old Zoochat. I wish I had a screen shot of the old Zoochat but I don't. By memory it was allot less overwhelming with options and the layout and colours were more artistically / creative in layout. The new layout and colours are much more functional and geared towards tech savy individuals.
Is it the home page you miss the most? That was something custom I built for the old site, but didn't have the time to rebuild it when I did the migration to the current software. I do intend to build something similar for the next version of ZooChat - so hopefully that will help somewhat.
I agree, the old page (posted above) was more aesthetically pleasing and easier to navigate. However I must add the fact that I do not own a smartphone or tablet and only view ZooChat on a computer. Others have stated the new format is better when using a phone.
Please look into the possibility of having all media from a certain gallery on the same page, instead of a certain number on each page. With today's fast internet connection I don't see the point of having multiple pages. I for one would like not having to click on "next page" over and over again when looking through a complete gallery.
What I really miss is the Forum/gallery/map link that used to be in every zoo-specific thread. So if I was reading the latest thread about say Frankfurt Zoo I could go to the Frankfurt gallery with one click. (Unless this is already there but I haven't found it)
No, I don't think it is there - I've got it on my todo list to add that functionality back for the next major release.
That's not something I can realistically implement myself - it is something I'll have to wait for the software developers to implement. There are several suggestions already for them to do exactly this, so we'll see what happens in future releases. While I'm not a fan of infinite scroll for threads or thread lists, I do think that this mechanism can work quite well for viewing media.
