Since setting up the new site a few years back, it has always been my intention to add a forum, with the objective of making us a “one-stop shop” for all things related to Asian women. However, before it closed down there was no getting around the fact that ScanLover was already doing such a good job of it. Although ScanLover has re-opened as version 2.0, many long time users remain unhappy with its present form, including myself I have to say. So after a much longer than expected gestation, we are finally opening the Asian Sirens forum!
I’ve tried to create a forum that is both feature complete and intuitive to use, both for existing Asian Sirens users and ScanLover refugees. To this end, I needed everything to work consistently and seamlessly across the site, which ended up being a much bigger challenge than I expected. I had to develop customised solutions for just about everything, which is one reason why the forum took so bloody long to set up. The other reasons were fixing some serious bugs that really shouldn’t exist in such widely used software, as well as resolving conflicts with the software used for the rest of the site. This occupied about two months—I spent another two working on the social network features that I wanted to launch simultaneously with the forum.
Most of the site’s features should be self explanatory to long term forum and Asian Sirens users (at least I hope so!), but a few may need further explanation (please note that this only applies to registered users—only they can post in the forum):
1) Attachments: I decided on a limit of 4 images per post for uploads, both because it is neat, and because I didn’t want to encourage the mass upload of images (see this post for the reasons why). It also allows me to maintain tighter server timeouts, which maximises the site’s performance for all users.
2) Embedding Videos: You can embed videos from most mainstream video upload sites (like YouTube) simply by copying and pasting the bare video link on its own line (without link tags). Sadly this doesn’t work with porn video sites, however.
3) New Post/Reply/Quote: This will probably be intuitive for long term Asian Sirens users, but perhaps not for long term forum users. To simply add a new reply to a thread, click “New Post”. The “Reply” link works the same way as it does in our comments: it adds a link to the post your replying to, with the author’s name. The “Quote” link adds this as well, in addition to quoting the post you’re replying to.
4) Signature/Your Profile: As our site isn’t just a forum but a blog and social network as well, your personal profile includes all your personalised stuff, including your bookmarks, subscriptions, forum signature and a record of all your forum topics and replies, logically grouped under the “Forum” tab. You can directly access this from the links under “Your Profile” in the lefthand column.
5) Bookmarks vs. Favorites: As there is a self-contained forum section in everyone’s profiles, I thought it made sense to maintain a bookmarking system for people to save their favourite forum topics, separate from the Favorites system our social network uses. You can however still Favorite forum topics from your profile or the site’s activity streams if you wish.
6) BBCode: Long term forum users are probably used to using BBCode to style/format their content, but for consistency and compatibility across the site, I decided not to add this feature. Instead, there’s a much easier way: just use the toolbar buttons at the top of every posting form (including your signature).
