All new forums!
We just launched Highrise and tried out some new software for the Highrise Forums. We were so happy with it we decided to start running it on the Basecamp Forums too.

Usernames and Passwords are the same
Everyone’s username and password for the old forums was carried over to the new forums so you’ll be able to log in with the same information you used before.

Old content is archived
The content from the old forums couldn’t be imported into the new forums so we’ve kept the old forums around as a historical archive. You can read, but you can’t comment there anymore. All future posts will be here in the new forums.

New features
We hope you like the new forums. They’re cleaner, more functional, easier to follow, support Gravatars, have RSS support and a few other nice things.

Thanks again for your support.

Couldn’t import post counts?

grumble grumble….

Slapshot, let the post race begin! ;)

Andrew’s got an early lead… Who will take out the line honours? Will there be a prize?

OMG THE SUSPENSE

Couldn’t import post counts?

Why not just change your display name to “Windbag”, I mean “Almost a 1000”?

/in fun

I really miss being able to see who started a thread—that often influenced whether I read a it or not (or more correctly caused me to read some I otherwise might not have)

Other than that, I love the Beast. So fresh and so clean!

Miss the “subscribe to the topic” option as well.

Ooops—I spoke too soon. I now see the “Watch Topic” checkbox.

I miss the “go to new post” functionality.

Any reason you guys wouldn’t consolidate all of your forums into one? I guess Beast doesn’t do sub-forums or categories like PunBB, so it might be a bit strange looking.

will this ever end up integrating with basecamp? so that tasks can cross over from basecamp to highrise? i may be a moron and it may be able to do that, just excited and trying to figure this out.

Integration is going to be key for us. We’re using both Highrise and Basecamp now, and I could us using it more if the two apps worked together more seamlessly… but that’s a topic for another forum post :)

I’ve got to say, that this forum is absolutely great compared to the ones that I’ve gotten used to over the years. The designers certainly made it fast & easy to use. Good job, 37s!

Call me weird, but I enjoyed the other forum where I could see users with their # of posts descending. It was a fun way of seeing who was most active in the forum… and where I stacked up. :D

That’s not a bad idea, Benjamin. Hopefully we can get the Beast guys to implement something like that.

Well, I’d say it’s more of a fun added feature than anything else, and certainly not critical. Now, I’m just trying to figure out if I should try to make the switch into Ruby because this forum is far superior to some that I’ve tried out there.

With great respect to the Beast developers, I actually like punbb better.

Not sarcasm: With great respect to the Punbb developers, I actually like the cleanliness of Beast better as well as the ‘Recent Posts’ serial view.

I wish Basecamp utilized Beast for it’s post / forum engine.

Pretty.

Michael: Thanks for the compliment.

slapshotw: What do you like better? Just curious… I think punbb is a great PHP forum… Beast might have never been written if there was a punbb on Rails, but alas there was none. :-)

Josh,

it’s all about the goals of the system. You have a stated goal of around 500 lines of code, and I think what you’ve done is pretty amazing—code limits or not. The system is obviously functional and beautiful.

That said, there are some things about more fully featured systems (again, your goal isn’t to have all these features, which I understand) that I enjoy using. Things like reply buttons on posts that auto-quote the message, tracking of exactly what I’ve read and not read (as opposed to what I think is done here, which is just a show of “recent activity”), better granular email settings, more advanced search, etc…

Beast has some great things than punbb doesn’t too. Reply-in-topic, search without leaving the page, rss feeds, and obviously a cleaner look.

I hope you didn’t take offense to my post, -Matt

No offense taken, just was curious.

Yeah, the 500 limit has passed, but we still want to keep it small and not turn it into the next PHPBB (which does like everything)... so the small size necessitated some of the compromises such as recent activity.

It’s pretty smart though… it tracks the last time it saw you… and shows you new posts since you were there last… and then tracks which topics you view in the session… so it hides those indicators… so if (like me) you read a lot of topics straight thru you can easily track your progress as the indicators stop turning green once you’ve read the messages… the top-most ones are just “have i viewed this forum lately” and aren’t a “sum up” in any way of the topics in a forum, as that would really be pretty hard with our existing way of managing this.

Of course you could do this with some type of table that maps users to topics, but that would be a lot more overhead than we wanted.

Of course if you read all the topics in one forum then move to the next the forum level ones work perfectly…

I really like the speed, functionality, and look of the new forums. However, I’m stumped as to how (or IF) I can search for more than one word at a time. I’ve tried “word AND word2” “word, word2” “word word2” and nothing seems to work. ?? Is this a limitation of Beast or there something I’m just missing.

thanks!

conditions = params[:q].blank? ? nil : Post.send(:sanitize_sql, ['LOWER(posts.body) LIKE ?', "%#{params[:q]}%"])

Phrase search only.