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McMaster Combined Honours Cultural Studies & Critical Theory and Anthropology: 2008
McMaster Honours English with a minor in Indigenous Studies: 2010
Carleton University Masters of Arts in Canadian Studies: 2012 (expected)
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably into the world we inherit. -- Port Huron Statement
Can we incorporate detailed timestamps into our posts instead of/in addition to the "x seconds/minutes/hours/weeks ago"? I can't think of a context in which it'd be useful now, but I remember needing it at one point.
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The first law of thermodynamics is: you do not talk about thermodynamics.
When you are at the main page and you click General, there should be a way to either: make a new thread, or get to the 'forum display' of the General forum by clicking General a second time.
Add a mini calender of upcoming events around campus.
Make titles that work around how liked your posts are (if liked post/total post >.5 then you are liked, etc.). this would encourage good posting. Or maybe an achievement system with badges.
Maybe remove the right side.. 'Happening today' and all the mess under it. You already have 'Recent'
Is there a way to add videos into posts, the way you can add Youtube videos into posts? Sometimes I have CollegeHumor or Funny or Die videos, but all I can do is post the link.
I forgot to ask in my first post: The Academics tab at the top of the home page used to show the most recent topics from the McMaster-->Academics forum, but it now shows the most recent articles from Articles and Advice-->Academics. Was this intentional?
It doesn't really matter to me either way; the Academics forum is a pretty slow one and I'm sure that if I had to, getting there in two clicks instead of one won't be a problem.
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The first law of thermodynamics is: you do not talk about thermodynamics.
Is there a way to add videos into posts, the way you can add Youtube videos into posts? Sometimes I have CollegeHumor or Funny or Die videos, but all I can do is post the link.
(Unless I'm missing something)
For that feature, I beleive you use the [ yt] and [ /yt] without the spaces of a youtube link. Its also with just the ending part http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AD5b8YfiiY
becomes
[ yt]6AD5b8YfiiY[ /yt] (minus spaces)
EDIT: As for my recommendations, hmm
I agree with Mr. Pink in that I find the right sidebar pretty useless to me. The links to articles and whatever can be added to the gray bar at the top, the students using MI has no effect to me, only thing I would retain would be the new items posting on Marketplace. I personally would like a new theme where the background is black, or a very dark colour. My monitor is very bright, and since all my brightness settings are app-specific, reading MI for more than 30 min hurts a little. Same with other websites like Digg, and most forums.
BUT. Via a plugin called DownloadHelper, I've copied the FLV source link of the collegehumor media player...
edit: I think the way Collegehumor has the access permissions set on their files it makes it so that only a video player located on the local server can play the FLV file, we can still download it I guess..
I don't think it would foster negativity, that's just my opinion though. How would it be different from people typing out negative responses to posts?
It's a lot easier to click "Like this!" than to type out a response, and I've found that people are lazy. Negative responses also usually involve some level of explanation, whereas one can simply run around disliking things to annoy people were there a simple button that allowed them to do so.
It's probably the same reason Facebook will never have a dislike button too.
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The first law of thermodynamics is: you do not talk about thermodynamics.
It's a lot easier to click "Like this!" than to type out a response, and I've found that people are lazy. Negative responses also usually involve some level of explanation, whereas one can simply run around disliking things to annoy people were there a simple button that allowed them to do so.
It's probably the same reason Facebook will never have a dislike button too.
Well, the CBC website has a thumbs-up/thumbs-down thing where you can just click thumbs up/down on people's comments, and it just records the numbers of each... I don't find that to be particularly negative. I think it would just prevent people from going over the same arguments over and over again simply because there's no way to initially "dislike" a post without typing out "I disagree".
I also don't think it's necessary to know who "likes" or "dislikes" posts... just numbers would do I think. I like being able to know who "thanked" me for posts though.
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Ben Taunton
Life Science IV
McMaster University
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